Thoreau's "Grossest Groceries": Dietary Reform in Walden and Wild Fruits

The Strawberry Bed. Wood engraving after Winslow Homer, 9.3 cm x 15 cm.

From Our Young Folks (July 1868): 389.

Courtesy of Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

Talk about tariffs and protection of home industry, so as to be prepared for hard times and wars! Here we are deriving our bread stuffs from the west, our butter stuffs from Vermont, and our tea and coffee and sugar stuffs (and much more that we stuff ourselves with) from the other side of the globe.

—Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits

In this passage from posthumously published notes for a project on wild fruits, Thoreau underscores the drastic changes in United States agriculture and consumption at a time of aggressive expansionism.¹ He alludes to the unsustainable nature of such a dietary system: the food that the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. consumed was coming from farther away than ever before, some of it—western "bread stuffs," for example—from lands messily acquired over a relatively short period of time, often exploiting the cheap labor of native and immigrant populations. In a food system directly related to expansionism, as distinct from modern globalization yet eerily predictive of it, Thoreau finds pressing need of reform. As contemporary environmentalism turns strongly toward the reform of international food systems, Thoreau's critiques of this nineteenth-century "expansionist diet" take on new relevance. In both Walden (1854) and the later sketches now compiled in Wild Fruits (1999),² Thoreau contemplates eating locally and well, basing his food reform in a diet of primarily vegetable foods like beans, grains, and wild fruits—supplemented by fish caught in local ponds. Within these experiments in what we might now call sustainable eating practices,³ Thoreau highlights two forms of local agriculture, the planting of an individually maintained bean field and the communal gathering of huckleberries. Here, he navigates between the culture of small planted fields and the relative wildness of the huckleberry fields, combining both into a new definition of local agriculture. In order to do so, Thoreau looks to a cross between the Concord village and the natural world in the woodchuck. This creature—long treated as a comic symbol of Thoreau's baser appetites—comes to act as a figure of sustainable food gathering, both Thoreau's model of vegetarianism and his one-time experiment in meat eating.

Linking diet with expansionism, Thoreau aims to reform food systems and at the same time elevate himself above the violent acquisition of territory and the nascent culture of consumerism that marked the nineteenth-century United States.

There is significant work to be done on Thoreau and dietary praxis in light of the contemporary field of food studies, which looks at the culture behind consumption on the individual and the national scale. Food studies has become a critical field for dealing with antebellum U.S. culture, given that the economic, technological, and social change driven by the rapacious incorporation of territory made itself strongly felt in the national diet—pushing U.S. writers and philosophers to redefine themselves based on shifts in this fundamental cultural signifier. The history of food studies can be traced from the foundational work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, to the regional environmentalism of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, to the contemporary environmental journalism of Michael Pollan.⁴ But the theorist whose work most usefully applies to the nineteenth-century United States is Pierre Bourdieu, who understands the social construction of diet, its habitus, as fundamental to defining culture. For Bourdieu, a culture's diet must balance the "taste of necessity" against the "taste of liberty—or luxury,"⁵ a balance that was being challenged in the antebellum U.S. as luxurious and exotic foods became available to a larger population of consumers. Bourdieu takes the concept of the cultural basis of diet studies even further in his discussion of the influence of "cultural capital" on such writers as Thoreau. His writings show that the newly developed dietary habits and "gross" appetites of the...