Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century

5. A Corn-Fed Nation: Race, Diet, and the Eugenics of Nutrition

101 5 A CORN-FED NATION Race, Diet, and the Eugenics of Nutrition In the interest of the race, of its mental as well as physical development, there is no subject which should occupy the attention of educators comparable with that of food. —Ellen Richards and John Norton, 1917 In 1917, the cuisine of the Old South arrived in New England. Southern food was already there, of course, in the recipes and products and techniques carried north by generations of migrants and travelers. And of course most “southern” foods themselves had been carried south in the first place. It was Native Americans and colonial New Englanders who had first experimented with the cornmeal recipes at the heart of the earlytwentieth -century version of southern cooking. Yet from 1917 to 1919, in front of packed crowds at dozens of venues around New England, an African American woman named Portia Smiley demonstrated how to cook southern foods.1 A college graduate, a published scholar, and a teacher, Smiley gave these southern food exhibitions dressed up in the kerchief and full skirt of a mid-nineteenth-century slave woman. As her audiences saw it, she was instructing them in the cuisine of the antebellum South, cheerfully showing them how to make foods from “Befo’ the War.”2 The ostensible purpose of these southern food demonstrations was to increase the use of cornmeal, which most of Smiley’s recipes contained. During World War I, the U.S. government strenuously promoted corn as a substitute for wheat, needed for food aid shipments to Europe. For white audience members, however, it was Smiley’s own southern blackness—as 102 / Race, Diet, and the Eugenics of Nutrition much as the foods she cooked—that was on display. The wartime context of the food demonstrations only lent patriotic prestige to a kind of voluntary minstrelsy. The problem was that the thousands of people for whom Smiley performed did not recognize her clothes as the costume they were. Rather, they saw the “genuine bandanna turban” and the “voluminous white apron” of an authentic “Southern mammy.”3 In the midst of the Great Migration, as hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved permanently from the South to the North, journalists emphasized Smiley’s essential and unwavering southernness. She was “a genuine southern cook,” a “typical southern cook,” a “paragon of Southern cooks.”4 And lest anyone question what such a confirmed southerner was doing north of the Mason-Dixon line in the first place, they stressed she had come “north solely and only to disclose the secrets of just how to turn corn meal into the ‘eatins’ that have made southern hospitality and the southern table the envy of every cook in the land.”5 Writers described Smiley’s southern accent and imitated—or invented—her speech in print: audiences could learn to make “the mos’ appetizing things” with corn, “the kind of eats that just naturally slip down and might nigh carry your tongue along with them. Um yum, you all jus’ watch Aunt Portia mix these dodgers!”6 Her white sponsors and the northern journalists who reported on her food demonstrations did not refer to her as “Miss Smiley” or even simply as “Portia Smiley.” Rather, they called her “Aunt Portia,” using the falsely familial and presumptively familiar title that elite white southerners had favored for older black women.7 The fact that white northern food conservationists hired a southern black woman to instruct them in corn cookery was not an accident. Race and regionalism were integral to their understanding of corn, as well as other foods. For many Americans in the Progressive Era, race and food were intimately connected, even mutually constitutive. For decades, various Americans had expressed the idea that people of certain races ate certain foods, while people of other races ate other foods. Yet these assumptions about food and race were starting to come under greater scrutiny in the era of the Great War. Portia Smiley’s wartime cornmeal demonstrations took place amid changing ideas both about nutrition science and about diet’s implications for racial identity. Progressive zeal for social control assumed its most extreme form through eugenics, whose practitioners attempted to manage the “evolution” of national populations . By the early twentieth century, however, a new science called euthenics was complicating eugenicists’ claims that sexual reproduction was the all-powerful instrument of racial change. Even as they maintained Race, Diet...