How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture by Jennifer Jensen Wallach (review)

In this book, food and social historian Jennifer Jensen Wallach offers an overview of the complex culinary history of the United States. This is no small task, as the author reminds us, for the U.S. has not developed a “singular cohesive culinary tradition” (xiii). Instead, this nation’s food history has been shaped by regionalism and a strong multicultural character marked by waves of immigration and industrialization.

In her introduction, Wallach summarizes previous writings on the study of U.S. food history, from the colonial period to the present. She encourages scholars and students to examine research on food consumption in the U.S., particularly how it touches upon issues of race, class, and gender.

She cites the seminal work of food critic John L. Hess and food historian Karen Hess in The Taste of America (1972), stating that: “good food in America is little more than a memory, and a hope” (xi), and she makes reference to more recent studies, such as Hasia Diner’s Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (2002), and Psyche Williams-Forson’s Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006),¹ books that demonstrate a synthesis of the history of food and cooking in the U.S. Such books address “how Americans have filled their stomachs as a nonverbal way of articulating ideas about what it means to be an American or outsider” (xi).

Wallach chronicles the ways people in the U.S. “have cooked and consumed, fasted and gorged, and accepted and rejected certain foods as a way to tell a story about their identities” (xiii).

Her narrative is divided into eight chapters, beginning with “The Cuisine of Contact,” to explore the ways in which early colonists adapted Native American food ingredients and traditions to English cooking. Wallach takes us on a culinary journey through slavery and American expansion, accompanied by European immigration. Chapters pursue the role of technology, gender, religion and patriotism in the shaping of the “American” diet. In an especially interesting section, she mentions the establishment of “Home Economics” as a discipline in U.S. schools, highlighting the work of Melusina Fay Pierce (1836-1923), an early American feminist who fostered the “cooperative housekeeping movement” which sought economical compensation for cooking and housework. According to Wallach, “Pierce viewed the changes that had been made to women’s daily working lives with dismay, believing that in the past women had served more important economic roles in the household as producers of a variety of goods, while in the modern [early 20^th century] era, they were now merely customers of a burgeoning marketplace controlled by men.” (113). Pierce’s work espoused a radical education of home economics for women, and mandated pay for housework.

Wallach’s final chapter, titled “The Politics of Food,” makes connections between food history and what she calls “racial thinking” (169). In an earlier chapter, “Food Habits and Racial Thinking,” she focuses on the appropriation of Mexican products and cooking practices and the historical impact it has had on U.S. cuisine (178-195). This chapter will be particularly enlightening for those unaware of how Mexican food was popularized in the U.S. and how it has been altered to suit American tastes.

This reviewer found Wallach’s main and opening arguments to be particularly strong and fascinating, including her argument that in general Americans are more likely to consume U.S.-style “Mexican food” than to acknowledge the Mexican-American people for their “American” history. She points out that the relationship Americans have had with Mexican food has been a constant cycle of both rejection and appropriation. Her succinct historical narrative in this section is rooted in the beliefs of the Progressive Era, when a movement or tendency began to portray Mexican people and their...