Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias (review)

The field of food studies, once primarily the purview of gourmands, self-styled "foodies," cookbook collectors, viniculturists, and travel writers, has within the last two decades generated a great deal of interest in the academy. Early Americanists, already often engaged in interdisciplinary scholarship, have been among those to make important contributions to this field of inquiry and to translate the significance of food studies, its methodologies, and its innovations, into their own disciplines. Food studies has garnered the attention particularly of scholars of material and cultural history, history of manners, and body studies. James E. McWilliams's A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (2005), reviewed in EAL 41.3, reshaped the way we think about the relationship between food, politics, and national identity in the early republic. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's America's Founding Food (2004), Sharon Salinger's and Peter Thompson's studies of early American taverns and drinking (2002, 1999), and some of the food-related essays in Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter's A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (2001) inform us of the role of individuals' hunger and thirst in early America and its relationship to the larger social body. More regionalist works, such as Katharine Harbury's Colonial Virginia's Cooking Dynasty (2004), and commodity histories, from chocolate to corn, have developed our understanding of early American foodways and cooking methods. Trudy Eden's Cooking in America, 1590–1840 (2006), Linda Murray Berzok's American Indian Food (2005), and Sandra L. Oliver's Food in Colonial and Federal America (2005), all published as part of Greenwood Press's "Cooking Up History" or "Food Through History" textbook series, bring the study of early American gastronomy and cooking culture to the classroom.

New in the "At Table" series, Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias, edited by Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch, now offers a thought-provoking, finely wrought collection of 13 scholarly essays from the fields of anthropology, history, religion, art history, and literature to explore "the role played by food and foodways within communities that hold utopian aspirations for bettering themselves or the world at large" (3). The chronological scope of the book is long, spanning from seventeenth-century Puritan feasts and fasts to 1970s radicalism in the Minneapolis Co-op Wars and the sensorial utopias of contemporary cooking shows on public television. The articles attend to the various meanings assigned to food among diverse ethnic and religious populations, including Protestant, Jewish, and Hindu, as well as the gender roles perpetuated or challenged by foodways, as revealed in the chafing dishes of northern women's colleges from 1870 to 1910. For those scholars not familiar with the ways in which food is theorized, this collection will serve as a useful introduction to the interdisciplinary archive of food theory. The works of cultural theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, semiotician Roland Barthes, philosopher Deane W. Curtin, anthropologists Mary Douglas, Sidney Mintz, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Anna Meigs, and historians Stephen Mennell and Hasia Diner, among others, repeatedly recur throughout the book.

While not all of the essays in this collection fall into the chronological range of interest of the readers of Early American Literature, Madden and Finch's introduction and four of the essays should be of particular use to early Americanists. In their lengthy introductory article, Madden and Finch point out the contradictory depictions of America as both "a utopian land of abundant resources and possibilities" and, at the same time, a fallen world of corrupt consumerism in need of reform (4). Providing a brief history of the concept of American abundance, typically expressed through descriptions of food, Madden and Finch cite names, texts, and genres familiar to early Americanists—travel accounts, diaries, journals, and colonial propaganda from Columbus, Captain John Smith, William Bradford, and Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, for example. They note that the utopian...