| Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine by Andrew F. Smith was the third of three books I recently read that trace American food and agricultural history (the other two are The War on Bugs by Will Allen and Kitchen Literacy by Ann Vileisis). As I said before, the three books provided complementary information to give readers a full picture of how our food and agriculture came to be as they are today. That said, if you have to skip one of the three books, skip this one.
The 30 turning points chosen traced several different plotlines - manufacturing, packaging, and transportation advances; war; the making and defining of gourmet food in America; the roles of nutrition reformers; and the role of marketing. Surely those broad categories leave out many of the 30 chapters in the book, but they also encompass quite a few of them. In some parts, the book reads like the TV show "Unwrapped," and it's written from an impartial point of view (thus not criticizing a number of developments that play roles in making food less healthy). In most cases, I feel that it was probably just fine to provide an unbiased view (as the book is intended as a history book, not a call to action), but in the section on genetically modified foods, "unbiased" turns into "overly favorable" and in fact, wrong. |
| In the very beginning, transportation was quite costly. This theme runs through all three books. With the opening of the Erie Canal, and later, the transcontinental railroad, non-local food could compete with local food on price. I found the first chapter particularly interesting, as it describes Oliver Evan's automated mill. The first mills in the U.S. required a lot of manpower, and when a man named Oliver Evans invented a more efficient mill, nobody wanted it. The workers didn't want to lose their jobs, and the mill owners didn't want to cough up the money required for the initial capital investment. The new mill was not only more efficient; it was also better at making refined white flour (which people then preferred, not knowing it was less healthy).
Chapter two builds on chapter one, telling the story of the Erie Canal. Prior to the opening of the canal, upstate New York could not sell flour to New York City and beyond due to the prohibitive cost of transportation. With the canal reducing transport costs, many cities along the mill built the new style of mill and the savings from the more efficient mill more than offset the cost of transporting flour. Thus, Americans learned (for the first time) to buy the cheapest product instead of buying locally produced food.
War plays a major role in shaping American food as well. First, when the South seceded from the United States, Congress could finally pass through bills that Southern Congressmen had opposed, including four related to food: the transcontinental railroad, the creation of land grant universities, the creation of the USDA, and the homestead act. Just like the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad lowered transportation costs and made non-local food a cost effective reality for more Americans.
The war also gave some of the first canners enough business (by selling canned foods to the government to feed soldiers) to become profitable. Along the same lines, the war exposed soldiers to canned foods, perhaps speeding up their introduction and acceptance. The Civil War also homogenized American cuisine (which differed regionally before the start of the war), as men from around the U.S. came together and tried foods they'd never tried before.
The invention and refinement of canning opened up a whole new possibility of prepared foods, reducing the amount of growing, storing, and cooking that Americans had to do themselves. Other advances in packaging, freezing, and microwaving continued this trend throughout the 19th and 20th centuries (and no doubt still today). Changes in marketing tracked the changes in packaging and transportation, and they also get a mention in the book. Perhaps most significant were the insane marketing gimmicks of the early 20th century (when marketing food was brand new and television did not exist yet) and the invention of the supermarket. Both supermarkets and marketing changed the way we buy food and thus the way we eat. (The book doesn't say it but in recent years we've seen an enormous shift in food shopping from supermarkets to supercenters like Wal-Mart, Sams, or Costco. Perhaps a future edition of this book would include that as a trend.)
A track of the book that somewhat surprised me was the making and defining of gourmet food. This began with the French restaurant Delmonico's in New York City, which first opened in 1835. Other French restaurants followed, taking advantage of the upper class American love affair with French food. Over 100 years later, Gourmet magazine started during a time of war, when Americans (who still loved French food) couldn't go to France to get the real thing. Obviously the magazine was a tremendous success. The book also tells about early influential cookbooks, and the two themes join up in the form of Julia Child, who taught French cooking in a way that average people could understand it, both in her cookbook and on TV. I suppose the modern day heirs to these two historical tracks are Alice Waters with her restaurant Chez Panisse and the very popular Food Network (both are included in the book).
As the book describes the industrialization of food and agriculture, it also tells of those who advocated for organic and healthy foods. One chapter is devoted to Jerome Rodale's Organic Gardening, also mentioning Sir Albert Howard and Frances Moore Lappe. It's good that we're enough of a blip in history that a food historian sees fit to include us in this book.
The book picked out some things I would have expected (like corn flakes, TV dinners, the founding of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, and McDonalds), and others that I had never heard of, or had heard of but would not have considered as so influential on history. I was quite surprised that some of the unhealthy parts of our diet were initially invented by people intending to create health foods. J.H. Kellogg invented corn flakes as an easy way for people at his sanitarium (who may not have had all of their teeth) to eat corn instead of less healthy breakfast foods like sausage or bacon. He opposed marketing, and he would certainly roll over in his grave if he knew how much sugar went into cereals that bear his name these days. (His brother, W.K. Kellogg, was less principled and he's the one who made Kellogg's Corn Flakes a household name. As you may imagine, doing so required quite a bit of marketing.)
If you are reading this book as part of my trio of books on food and ag history, this book provides a lot of details on technology that explain why things happened as they did, whereas Vileisis focuses more on how marketing and demographic changes affected the American people and their diets. Often an invention will show up in this book, but the American public will not accept it en masse for several decades, as described in the Vileisis book. Certainly many themes come up in both books, with only one of the two providing complementary bits of information. For example, Eating History tells of the invention of a calorimeter, which can measure the number of calories in food. Kitchen Literacy skips this, but tells about the beginnings of the Home Economics movement (which Eating History skips), when home economists urged women to feed their families scientifically, based on the number of calories or other nutrients in the food.
All in all, this is a great book, and I'm glad I read it. |
