The Culinary Colonization of the American West

Journalist Stephen Fried's Appetite for America is an epic tome about a man, the company he built, and the growth of the service industry in America. Fried's thoroughly researched and eloquently written book chronicles the rise and fall of the Fred Harvey Corporation, a hospitality empire that, at its height in the 1920s, managed the dining cars on several railroads, ran more than 100 restaurants and lunchrooms from Chicago to California, and operated two dozen renowned hotels in the Southwest and on the Great Plains. Within this business context, the company fostered new gender and labor relationships by popularizing the use of white waitresses in all its restaurants, encouraged new architectural and aesthetic forms in the Southwest, and facilitated a new culinary landscape that rested upon one of the largest food supply chains in the country. Fried folds this much larger story into an intimate family drama that covers four generations of Harveys and spans two continents. If anything, this work is ambitious.

But Fried's work is also timely. Despite the fact that hundreds of monographs and articles on the American West briefly mention Fred Harvey, the book represents the first full-length study of the corporation and the social, architectural, cultural, and economic landscapes the company helped to create. In fact, a company whose lasting legacy in the American West is unquestioned by scholars of that region has generated a surprising lack of scholarship. No serious synthetic work on the company has ever been published. Scholars now have that work, although not without flaws, and it is a thorough one at that: Fried scoured private and public archives and interviewed Harvey heirs. He accessed seven previously unseen private collections from family members and associates, an astounding feat that makes much of the research in the book new. Simultaneously, the profession's new interest in food history—a burgeoning field at an intellectual crossroads similar to where the histories of gender, race, class, and the environment were thirty years ago—will certainly engender interest in this work. For these readers, the book's focus on the experimental foodways and food systems devised and perfected by Fred Harvey will undoubtedly be welcomed as a significant contribution to the understanding of food distribution, marketing, and consumption during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The book begins with the arrival of seventeen-year-old Fred Harvey to New York from London in the spring of 1853, an event triggered by his father's embarrassing bankruptcy, which tore the Harvey family apart. Young Fred quickly found employment as a dishwasher at a New York eatery on Fulton and Washington, washing, polishing, chopping, and kneading his way from dishwasher to waiter, then on to line-cook. After brief stints in New Orleans and Saint Louis, where he also sought opportunities in food service, Harvey landed in Leavenworth and went into business with Jasper Rice; together, they managed the Kansas Pacific Railroad's three eating houses in Lawrence and Wallace, Kansas, and in Hugo, Colorado, before mutual distrust ended their partnership.

Appetite for America offers these stories as gastronomic prologue to the day in 1875 when Fred Harvey apocryphally approached the superintendent of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe—an aggressively expanding railroad headquartered in Topeka—about running the railroad's restaurants. In January 1876, Fred Harvey reopened the unpretentious twenty-seat lunchroom at the Topeka terminal, commencing a near century-long business partnership between the Fred Harvey Corporation and that railroad. Fried draws on his exhaustive research to recount the tremendous expansion of this partnership during the following quarter century. Almost immediately after Topeka, Harvey refurbished the restaurant and hotel in Florence, Kansas, and then the restaurants in Lakin, Kansas, and La Junta, Colorado. By the late 1880s, Harvey had extended his restaurant and hotel chain from Chicago to Los Angeles. Fried largely ascribes this growth to Fred Harvey's business...