How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture (American Ways)

How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture, by food and social historian Jennifer Wallach, sheds a new and interesting light on American history by way of the dinner table. It is, at once, a study of America’s diverse culinary history and a look at the country’s unique and unprecedented journey to the present day. While undeniably a “melting pot” of different cultures and cuisines, America’s food habits have been shaped as much by technological innovations and industrial progress as by the intermingling and mixture of ethnic cultures. By studying what Americans have been eating since the colonial era, we are further enlightened to the conflicting ways in which Americans have chosen to define themselves, their culture, their beliefs, and the changes those definitions have undergone over time. Understanding the American diet is the first step toward grasping the larger truths, the complex American narratives that have long been swept under the table, and the evolving answers to the question: What does it mean to be American? This work, written by a food and social historian sheds a new and interesting light on American history by way of the dinner table. It is, at once, a study of America's diverse culinary history and a look at the country's unique and unprecedented journey to the present day. While undeniably a "melting pot" of different cultures and cuisines, America's food habits have been shaped as much by technological innovations and industrial progress as by the intermingling and mixture of ethnic cultures. By studying what Americans have been eating since the colonial era, we are further enlightened to the conflicting ways in which Americans have chosen to define themselves, their culture, their beliefs, and the changes those definitions have undergone over time. Understanding the American diet is the first step toward grasping the larger truths, the complex American narratives that have long been swept under the table, and the evolving answers to the question: What does it mean to be American? In How America Eats, Food historian Jennifer Wallach examines how Americans have produced food, cooked, and filled their stomachs from the colonial era to the present. Due to the complex history of conquest, enslavement, and immigration, the United States has never developed a singular cohesive culinary tradition. U.S. food practices have been shaped by the various groups that have called a certain geographical space home. However, more than fusion and friction between different racial and ethnic groups went into creating American foodways. Wallach demonstrates that technological innovations and ideas about industrialism and progress have also impacted what and how Americans eat. Moreover, the American diet is the product of more amorphous factors, the outgrowth of both shared and competing values. The history of food in America reveals changing and contradictory ideas about subjects including nationality, race, technological innovation, gender, politics, religion, and patriotism. How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture tells the story of America by examining American eating habits, and illustrates the many ways in which competing cultures, conquests and cuisines have helped form America’s identity, and have helped define what it means to be American. The cuisine of contact Food and the founding Foodways in an era of expansion and immigration Technology and taste Gender and the American appetite The pious or patriotic stomach Food habits and racial thinking The politics of food. How America Eats traces American history through its collective stomach, demonstrating that changing ideas about what it means to be American can be seen through food choices and attitudes about eating.