Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America's Food

Studies in Sensory History

by Camille Begin

During the Depression, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) dispatched scribes to sample the fare at group eating events like church dinners, political barbecues, and clambakes. Its America Eats project sought nothing less than to sample, and report upon, the tremendous range of foods eaten across the United States.

Camille Bégin shapes a cultural and sensory history of New Deal-era eating from the FWP archives, describing in mouth-watering detail how Americans tasted their food. Bégin explores how likes and dislikes, cravings and disgust operated within local sensory economies that she culls from the FWP's vivid descriptions, visual cues, culinary expectations, recipes and accounts of restaurant meals. She also illustrates how nostalgia, prescriptive gender ideals, and racial stereotypes shaped how the FWP was able to frame regional food cultures as "American."

Genres: Food, Food History

240 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 15, 2016

Reviews

[Mel Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The analysis of individual chapters were interesting, but Bégin did not always connect this evidence to her overall argument and framework of “sensory economies.” Although good historical context is provided, it sometimes distracted from her analysis as she moved from topic to topic.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating look at the WPA's America Eats project, its genesis as an anthropological project to champion American foodways and put unemployed writers and scholars to work, and the perhaps unintended but unmistakable ways it reinforced racialized dimensions of power and negated the presence of immigrant foodways in American culture. In particular in Chapters 3--where she traces the ways in which Southern food was treated as an invocation of the antebellum South without giving credence to black chefs--and Chapter 4, where she interrogates the portrayal of Southwestern/Mexican food as living in a liminal space between modernity and antiquity, a grey zone of potential racial coexistence--Begin is drawing our attention to the selectivity of what was meant to be an anthropological overview of regional food culture in the US during the Great Depression. Indeed, because these texts were commissioned by the government and for a particular kind of audience--most notably, white Americans suffering from poverty, displacement, and a general frustration at the state of the world. That these essays were meant to be without political content, or even overtly analytical mentions of race, class, or gender, speaks volumes about the kind of narrative they were meant to provide, and as such, the limitations on the kind of documentation that they could be deployed to serve. It's rare to see someone build a historical case on a singular archive that is as critical about it as it is loving--there is much extraordinary writing in the WPA papers, but not without its major problems. 

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Making a significant contribution to the histories of food, the senses, and race-making, Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America’s Food examines the America Eats project, which deployed writers across the country to public eating events like community suppers, food festivals, and barbecues from the mid-1930s until 1942. Editors tasked writers with capturing a distinctly nostalgic American foodways—one that had not yet been influenced by (what project editors perceived to be) the standardization of taste instigated by industrial food and the rationality of nutrition science. While the project endeavored to resist the prescriptive aspects of industry and science, Bégin demonstrates how it instead did much to prescribe limited gender roles. Furthermore, in its quest for American cuisine, the America Eats project also upheld racial stereotypes, endorsed segregation, and policed the ethnic boundaries of “America.”

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read! I learned quite a bit, was both challenged and confirmed in perceptions, and walked away with more additions to my teaching and reading lists!