A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (review)

In the last 20 years, anthropologists, sociologists, theologians, art historians, literary scholars, and historians have helped to make the interdisciplinary field of food studies essential to the burgeoning academic interest in material culture, consumption and economic studies, and cultural studies. Historians, in particular, have been at the forefront of this innovative new realm of scholarship. Commodity histories on potatoes (Larry Zuckerman), caffeine (Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer), cod (Mark Kurlansky), and corn (Arturo Warman) earned wide readership as popular nonfiction, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto's Food: A History appeared not only on the shelves of chain bookstores but also on undergraduate and graduate reading lists. While thoroughly researched and interesting microhistories of colonial cookery, particularly as associated with Williamsburg, have long been available, Alfred Crosby's groundbreaking The Columbian Exchange (1972) was among the first texts to underscore the important contributions that historians of early America might have to offer the larger field of colonial American scholarship. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's America's Founding Food, Trudy Eden's work on food in early Virginia, and Peter Thompson's and then Sharon Salinger's studies of early American taverns and drinking later helped to secure the place of food studies in early American historiography. Historian James E. McWilliams's A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America takes its place among these gastronomical histories as a thoroughly researched, well-written, and fascinating study of not only what early Americans ate but why they ate it, how they ate it, in what settings, and with what utensils. McWilliams's text evidences a careful sensitivity to regional differences in colonial American cuisine, while still successfully providing readers with a broader understanding of how these regional foodways eventually developed into a national American cuisine and gastronomical ideology that, McWilliams argues, was intricately tied to an emerging national political identity.

McWilliams simultaneously arranges his chapters chronologically, topically, and geographically. Chapters 1 through 5 address the thematically described Colonial New England (traditionalism), Chesapeake Bay Region (negotiation), Middle Colonies (diversity), Carolina (wilderness), and English West Indies (adaptability) from the seventeenth through the early eighteenth century. He asserts that New Englanders, intending to create in the New World a permanent settlement that closely imitated the world they had left, worked hard to replicate an English diet. They impressively managed to do so, he explains, without importing many crops, and they ate a traditional English diet of meat, vegetables, herbs, and fruit. New England colonists generally resisted Native American foodways and had little contact with slave cuisine. Diners in the Chesapeake region and Middle Colonies, in contrast, experienced a much greater intermingling of English, African, and Native American culinary ways. While their slave culture fostered a class system that ensured the best cuts of meat for whites, black slaves and white masters generally ate of the same animals and crops. White, black, and Native American populations living in close proximity to one another forced whites and blacks to "negotiate" with one another's food cultures. Their respective food cultures vied for dominance, but, in the end, reflected something of a balance and wide diversity of foodways. Further south, writes McWilliams, the Carolina region evidenced more dependence on slave foods, particularly those derived from Barbadian and West Indian culinary culture, and relied on wild game and fish, free-range grazing of cattle, and even foraging. Finally, at the opposite end of his geographic spectrum, the West Indies, McWilliams finds a population's foodways that are the polar opposite of New England's. Whereas New Englanders adamantly and intentionally retained British foodways, the English in the West Indies embraced a foreign diet, primarily dominated by the influence of slave and Native American gastronomy. These colonists intended to return home to England as soon as possible, and they saw this foreign diet as a temporary necessity that would ensure their survival and success.

By the middle of the eighteenth...