The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World (review)

With the exception of a handful of recent books like James E. McWilliams's A Revolution in Eating (2005) and Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch's coedited Eating in Eden (2006), reviewed in EAL 41.3 and 42.3 respectively, scholarly monographs focusing on the foods and foodways of early modern England are still far more common than those specifically addressing colonial American foods and culture. Just in the last five years, for example, Joan Thirsk's Food in Early Modern England (2009), Timothy J. Tomasik's and Juliann M. Vitullo's essay collection At the Table (2007), and Robert Appelbaum's Aguecheek's Beef, Belch's Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections (2006) have expanded our knowledge of what early modern English men and women ate and why. Taking a transatlantic approach to her work, historian Trudy Eden's The Early American Table now brings to early American studies the depth of research produced by scholars of early modern England to provide new, insightful ways of reading colonial Anglo-American texts. Eden's engaging, accessible, and expansive study of the significance of food in seventeenth-through eighteenth-century Anglo-American conceptions of health and the body significantly contributes to the subfields of food studies, body studies, and consumption studies. As Eden explains, early Americans believed that all "non-naturals," such as sleep, exercise, air, repletion (or fullness), emotions, and, of particular importance to Eden, food, affected not only their bodies, but their very identities, and they therefore believed the manipulation of these nonnaturals to be of the utmost importance (12). Thus, like Conevery Bolton Valencius's The Health of the Country (2002), Eden's study has important implications for those studying environmental literatures because it addresses early Americans' understanding of their bodies and health in relation to the New World climate and land. Human geography, too, factors large in Eden's study, as she addresses how colonists interacted with and thought of Amerindians and Africans, their food, and their foodways. Hence, literary scholars engaging in scholarship on contact literatures, slavery, or the development of race in early America may similarly find this text useful.

In part 1, "The Individual Golden Mean," Eden explains the intellectual and cultural background through which early Americans understood their health. She begins her introduction, as she does many subsequent chapters, with a puzzling story from history and provocative question that it raises. In this case, she asks why the colonists of the Virginia Company of London at one point informed John Smith that they would not eat maize from local Indians, "savage trash" they called this maize, thereby turning down the opportunity to provide food for their starving bellies. She goes on to detail how food security for early colonists was always a matter of "quality," not just "quantity." Because the colonists so strongly believed that the quality of their food was linked to their personal virtue and their personal virtue to their status in society, they were not willing to risk regularly eating foods that they believed could transform their bodies into something or someone not English. In this instance, that meant for the colonists that they could not eat maize. In Eden's next chapter, it meant that a population of shipwrecked English men and women, even when starving, could not eat the dead bodies of members of the opposite sex, lest they be sexually transformed by their cross-sex eating. Eden points out that these seemingly self-destructive dietary regulations were consistent with early moderns' understanding of the humoral theory of Hippocrates, Galen, and the other early Greek and Roman thinkers upon whose dietary philosophy the colonists relied. Early Americans believed that they could and must very carefully regulate as attentively as possible their environment, and particularly the foods they ingested, because these foods, in their qualities of moisture and heat, would determine eaters' temperaments, ability to work, and very nature as English men or women...