Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

5. “What’s De Use Talking ’Bout Dem ’Mendments?”: Trade Cards and Consumer Citizenship at the End of the Nineteenth Century

145 5 “What’s De Use Talking ’Bout Dem ’Mendments?” Trade Cards and Consumer Citizenship at the End of the Nineteenth Century The food reform movements that emerged during the antebellum period and that evolved to haunt the novels of post–Civil War writers such as Louisa May Alcott contained a remarkably prescient fear of the food culture that was to succeed them. By the Gilded Age, at the close of the nineteenth century, the bourgeois household seemed unable to resist the “rich, savory” foods to which Graham so objected. The tempted but generally abstemious approach to consumption of antebellum Anglo-America disappeared underneath an almost orgiastic flood of commodities. I argued in the introduction that a truly materialist approach to the American culture of food would have to detach itself from the habit of fetishizing the consumer object that so often is found in cooking history, food studies, and “foodie literature” and, rather, understand the frameworks in which those objects are produced and eaten. In this chapter I take in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. In this period there was no transformation of the middle-class kitchen as radical as the change from hearth to stove, although the working-class tenement kitchen, with its lack of distinction between cooking and eating spaces, became of increased interest to bourgeois progressives. More broadly, however, during this era all aspects of food production in the United States experienced the most radical changes since the beginning of agriculture in the Middle East, some ten thousand years earlier.1 By the turn of the twentieth century both demographics and technology were reshaping the way food was grown, consumed, and thought about. America’s population 146 “What’s De Use Talking ’Bout Dem ’Mendments?” was increasingly heterogeneous, and more and more people lived in cities, booming multicultural spaces that fostered the means to sell, buy, and eat products from around the world. Further, the invention of the McCormick threshing machine in 1831, which enabled the faster harvesting of wheat and an explosion in industrial production in general, meant that the growing of food was no longer the provenance of small farms and local markets but rather an industrialized agricultural system. These myriad evolutions created a public consumer discourse that shifted attention away from domestic production and toward public commodity consumption. Although popular images of the white woman in the kitchen continued to bear an important cultural valence, as did the black cook, the source of the food these women were cooking came from the grocery store, which increasingly supplanted the homegrown foodstuffs of the farm. The technological sophistication of the logistical system by which food came from the farm to the market—the increase in the mileage of railroads and the new means of storage and temperature control, to name just two innovations—contributed to the massive change in food consumption . The first refrigerated railroad car, using block ice, appeared in the United States in 1851.2 In the period from the 1870s to the 1910s the complex of railroads and preservation techniques made it possible to create a mass meat culture that expanded across the nation from slaughterhouse hubs such as Chicago, to ship seafood from the East Coast to interior cities and to diminish the dependence of the meal on the season.3 Eating, in other words, became an industrial experience. Immigrant and workingclass spaces such as the saloon, the restaurant, and the oyster house also flourished and were important spaces of public food consumption and social performance, as were the lunch counter and cafeteria, both of which were invented in the 1890s.4 For the upper classes the immense wealth made through speculation and industry created a whole new ethos of consumption. Harvey Levenstein recounts a banquet held at Delmonico’s in 1880 to honor General Winfield Scott Hancock, the Democratic Party presidential nominee: The meal began, as most did, with raw oysters, whose abundance and popularity at that time made them perhaps the closest thing to a classless food. A choice of two soups was followed by an hor d’oeuvre and then a fish course. The preliminaries thus dispensed with, the Relevés, saddle of lamb and filet of beef, were then carved and served. These were followed by the Entrées, chicken wings with green peas and lamb chops garnished “What’s De Use Talking ’Bout Dem ’Mendments?” 147 with beans and mushroom stuffed...