The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World (review)

The central argument of The Early American Table is that a comprehensive "philosophy of food security" linked understandings of diet, health, individual temperament, and social status. In the book's early chapters, Eden discusses Tudor England: "Because a properly fed person—one who had food security—was virtuous and because the presence or absence of virtue determined one's social status, food played a significant role in the maintenance of the English social hierarchy" (p. 4). Eden argues that the consequence of the humoral view of human bodies was a malleable social order in which "anyone who eats the right foods in the proper quantities and qualities will attain virtue" (p. 39), and rise in status, a state Eden defines as the "individual golden mean."

Through the lens of "food security," Eden next examines the efforts of English elites at Jamestown and Plymouth to assert authority in familiar ways, with unpredictable results. English travelers, according to Eden, feared the effects of New World foods on English bodies, believing that their character as Englishmen would change along with their diet.

In the second half of the book she proposes an important shift, evident by the early to mid-eighteenth century, from the humoral body to a "mechanical" one. The importance of the "philosophy of food security" did not change, meaning that the new "mechanical" understanding of the human body implied broad changes in Anglo-American notions of social hierarchy, individual character, and health. For one thing, since all bodies were essentially similar, elite status was not determined by diet, as Eden claims was true in Tudor England. Instead, the "social golden mean," characterized by moderation and yeoman status, was considered the ideal. The book closes with discussions of Dr. Alexander Hamilton and the Tuesday Club, examinations of the dietary regimens of Cotton Mather and William Byrd, and a reading of Charles Carroll's efforts to assert status through the eighteenth-century "world of goods." In each of these cases, Eden suggests that the new "social golden mean" had to be embraced even by aspirants to elite status.

One of the book's limitations has to do with Eden's slippery terminology, which is in part a consequence of her effort to make such a broad argument in so few pages. When, for example, Eden argues that "Virtue, in the early modern period, meant excellent health in every sense" (p. 4) and that "Virtue was, quite literally for early modern Europeans, the balance of heat and moisture within the body" (p. 15), she overlooks the fact that virtue had quite a different meaning to early modern humanists. Like medical writers, humanists looked to the ancient world but read different authors with a different end in mind. When, in the book's second half, we read that "virtue in the mechanical age could be acquired by living a moderate lifestyle. Virtue led to health but was not health itself. This concept differed greatly from the humoral understanding of virtue, which equated it with health and perfection" (p. 93), the influence of early modern humanism on eighteenth-century republican ideology is plain, and yet Eden does not draw out this connection. Virtue was also a highly gendered term, and yet gender plays little or no role in the book except when Eden claims that English men worried that diet could transform them into women (pp. 11, 21–22.)

The argument is also unclear regarding when food and diet played a primary role and when these factors should be relegated to a secondary position. Many early modern writers, for example, stressed the primacy of climate, not diet, on individual temperament, suggesting that both English bodies and the foods they ate were shaped by environmental factors. Similarly, cooking was not always medicinal in intention: the tables of English elites reflected more than a desire for humoral balance. Elite meals embodied control of land, the labor of those...