We Are What We Eat

Roger Horowitz. Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 192 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $19.00 (paper).

James E. McWilliams. A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 400 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95.

Never before has food been so hot. From foodies to dieters to vegans to home chefs, Americans in the year 2006 are fascinated with cooking and eating—and more than ever, reading about it. The last few years have seen an extraordinary upsurge of publishing in culinary studies and food history, with popular and academic works addressing subjects ranging from the history of wine to cookbooks, coffee, and salt.

Two new scholarly books add to this body of literature, shedding important light not only on what Americans ate in different eras, but also how and why they ate what they did. In A Revolution in Eating, historian James McWilliams takes us on a sweeping, visceral and intellectually illuminating tour of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American food traditions, from the savory to gut-wrenching. In Putting Meat on the American Table, Roger Horowitz examines in five thematic chapters—on beef, pork, hot dogs, chicken, and modern-day "convenient meats"—the production and consumption of one of our most beloved and controversial staples. Both authors illustrate deftly the intense negotiations—between different ethnic traditions, producers and consumers, nature and culture—behind our national and regional food ways. In so doing, they produce works of value not only to food historians but also to scholars of commerce, the environment, and culture.

As Horowitz illustrates, putting meat on the American table has never been easy. In modern times, Americans have come to crave foods that are speedy, accessible, plentiful, and tasty. By nature, meat is bulky, smelly, and slow to process; it comes in irregular sizes and varying tastes and qualities, and it begins deteriorating as soon as the animal is killed. Not surprisingly, producers have faced serious challenges—to package and preserve meat, render it safe and appetizing, and market it to a hungry public. In his industrial history, Horowitz delineates the saga of producers' efforts to compete with each other, best nature, and respond effectively and profitably to changing consumer demand.

According to Horowitz, it is America's favorite meat that has been in many ways the toughest to process and market. Unlike pork, which can be cured, beef's particular material properties—its longer muscles and lean composition—make curing difficult if not unpalatable. In the early nineteenth century, beef consumption was thus limited to rural areas, towns, and cities that had ready access to cattle. Only with the centralization of beef slaughtering operations in the Midwest and the development of refrigerated railroad cars in the late 1800s was beef consumption nationalized. By the early twentieth century, Horowitz writes, America had become a "beef-eating nation" (p. 32). In the nineteenth century, pork—smaller than cattle and relatively easy to feed and manage—had been America's most widely consumed meat, but by 1910, thanks to the rise of beef, it had fallen from its preeminent position. Pork took another big hit after World War II, as a result of the growing popularity of chicken. By the 1980s, pork companies were advertising their product as "America's other white meat."

But chicken wasn't always a meat. In perhaps one of the most interesting chapters of the book, Horowitz explains how chicken—once classified as "poultry" and seen by most Americans as an expensive, "special occasion" food—came to be seen not only as a meat, but also as a mealtime staple. This transformation was largely the result of postwar innovations in chicken raising and processing, an effort spearheaded by major poultry firms and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Through its Cooperative Extension Service, the USDA worked diligently to persuade farmers that they could turn hearty profits...