We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (review)

The centrality of food in any society is hard to deny. Availability of food resources, types of grains consumed, and specific preparation methods are at the core of every culture. Yet until very recently, the importance of food in history was overlooked by most scholars, even by social historians who carefully scrutinized so many other aspects of daily life. Gradually, a few serious studies of food in society began to appear. Harvey Levenstein was one of the early pioneers of “food history,” demonstrating in Revolution at the the Table and Paradox of Plenty that America’s food ideas and practices are inherently linked to other trends and issues. Four years ago, John K. Walton contributed to this new focus by looking at the role of fish and chips in British society, identifying the importance of that fare in both British ethnicity and working-class culture. In the past few years, a growing number of scholars have begun examining different aspects of American eating, even including analyses of obesity and eating disorders. The importance of foods and eating has finally emerged as a valid area of study. Most recent among these food studies is Donna R. Gabaccia’s sweeping analysis, We Are What We Eat, in which she boldly redefines virtually all imported immigrant fare as American food. In keeping with the current trend in food studies, Gabaccia sees food as more than just sustenance; in We Are What We Eat, imported and assimilated foods directly represent the immigration and assimilation of diverse peoples.

Gabaccia begins her study in early America, examining how newly-arrived colonists adapted Old World foodways to the available foodstuffs in their new land. She stresses that American eating was complicated since the earliest years of colonization: already a hybrid of Native, English, continental, African, and other cuisines. Before sailing to America, Europeans had already borrowed and modified foods from Asia and the Near East. Upon their arrival, English settlers introduced foods and alcohol to Native Americans, who, in turn, taught the newcomers uses for corn, squash, fish, and game. Leeks, skunk cabbage, and wild garlic soon seasoned the beans, bear, rabbit, and venison on colonists’ plates. In addition to the English rum and beer, Natives also soon acquired Old World tastes for chocolate, apples, cheese, churned butter, and pork. Often competing immigrant groups also shared or stole food ideas. French settlers adopted the foods of the English, their sworn enemy, and the English adopted those of the French. German Quakers introduced stoves to the English, who previously cooked over open fires, and shared their traditional recipes for cakes and cookies. Africans enslaved to the Americas brought their indigenious foods and cooking skills, fostering the rice industry in the Carolinas and greatly influencing colonial foodways up and down the Atlantic coast. American fare became increasingly complex as more and more immigrants arrived from around the globe, each group bringing new foods, spices and preparation techniques to the collective table.

Following her overview of early food influences, Gabaccia quickly moves her discussion to the late nineteenth-century, as the trickle of immigration became a flood. This new wave of immigrants, arriving from southern and eastern Europe, brought with them foodways that would further complicate and enrich American eating. At the collective dinner table, however, not all was harmonious. Earlier northern European immigrant groups, who now self-defined as the true Americans, fought to exclude these new arrivals, and limit their influence in society. Such rabid Nativism kept the newly-arrived immigrants largely impoverished and devoid of political influence, but it could not contain immigrant foodways from spilling over into Anglo American culture. In the end, however, the new immigrants won the “food fights” which became symptomatic of deeper, underlying conflicts. What Gabaccia terms “crossing the boundaries of taste” became a norm in the early twentieth century. Old World foods first thrived in their own urban ethnic ghettoes, but soon crossed neighborhood boundaries. Jews in...