The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South

PART 3 SPACES AND TECHNOLOGIES

science, technology, geography, and social constructions frame this section. When humanities scholars of food studies first looked to kindred disciplines for methodological inspiration, we learned from our colleagues in the fields of nutrition and family and consumer sciences.Historians such as Harvey Levenstein,Laura Shapiro,and Mary Hoffeschelle traced Progressive Era cooking school curricula. They examined the standardization of measurements, nutritional guidelines, and taste in home economics programs. And they explored the gendered and racialized expectations re- flected in medical language of daintiness, pungency, and healthiness. Such efforts helped clarify the social construction of medicine and science that resulted in recommended daily vitamin allowances, as well as various pyramids, pie charts, and other oddly shaped diagrams of healthy eating.They helped tease out the hierarchies of race,class,and gender latent in our definitions of values and demeaned foodstuffs, whether those definitions came from early epidemiology or government extension efforts. They helped us understand twentieth-century fascinations with purity, efficiency, transparency, and whiteness in both our food and our eating spaces. However, early efforts to study overarching national themes in medicine, nutrition, and social activism sometimes sacrificed the particular. Carolyn de la Peña,Katie Rawson,and Angela Jill Cooley move forward the methods learned from our more technologically and scientifically minded colleagues. They return us to clearly outlined technological rhetoric,specific places,and sharply defined (even if virtual) spaces. Part 3 Spaces and Technologies 186 Part 3 In“Eating Technology at Krispy Kreme,”Carolyn de la Peña studies business plans, architectural blueprints, and machinery patents to understand consumer loyalty to Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Situating the company in its Piedmont mill-town home, de la Peña broadens our view beyond the fried round of yeasted dough to encompass a midcentury faith in technology and efficiency, wrapped in a nostalgic scrim of comfort, family, and southern mornings. She explains how a processed food that advertises assembly-line standardization came to be considered an authentic southern food. Continuing the theme of business and technology in southern food studies,Katie Rawson offers“‘America’s Place for Inclusion’: Stories of Food, Labor, and Equality at the Waffle House.” Rawson moves the investigation to cyberspace as she catalogs the relationship between physical spaces in Waffle House restaurants and the language of nostalgia employed in the virtual spaces of discussion boards and corporate websites. Rawson reinvigorates the analysis of class through the material and social geographies of restaurant layouts. “‘The Customer Is Always White’: Food, Race, and Contested Eating Space in the South,” by Angela Jill Cooley, demonstrates intersections of race and class in public eating spaces. Her searches of legal documents, especially court records and food and liquor licenses, appear at first glance to have little in common with the technologies and geographies employed by de la Peña and Rawson.Yet Cooley shows how the rhetorics of technology, cleanliness, purity, and sanitation illuminate underlying Jim Crow racial structures. By pairing geographical analysis with close textual readings of citations, inspections, and licenses, Cooley shows the slow incorporation of nonwhite restaurateurs into the white-black racial order of the midtwentieth -century South. Read together, these scholars dismantle some of the most cherished tropes of southern food. They argue that comfort can be the antithesis of handmade. They help us see that loyalty can be unmoored from direct, intimate physical interaction. They make clear how the common table can be the most racially policed location in a given city or town. They replace the shorthand of nostalgia with careful insights into the social constructions that buttress ideas of comfort, loyalty, and invitation. Spaces and Technologies 187 note 1. Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Harvey Levenstein, The Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1986); Mary Hoffeschelle,“‘Better Homes on Better Farms’: Domestic Reform in Rural Tennessee,” Frontiers : A Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 1 (2001): 51–73. ...