America Eats

"This book came about on account of the New Deal’s public works administration. Nelson Algren is best known for a very different sort of writing: The Man with the Golden Arm, and other novels of that kind. Algren was an interesting character. He was under FBI surveillance for a time, and he was involved in all sorts of interesting things. For instance, he was the lover of Simone de Beauvoir, whom he desperately wanted to marry, and he wrote a number of extremely interesting books. Never Come Morning , for example, is a Chicago book that is still very powerful – and of course The Man with the Golden Arm won the National Book Award. In the early part of his life, Algren ran this operation that had been sponsored by the American government, the purpose of which was to try to find out about how Americans ate. This is fascinating, because we don’t have a good inventory of regional cuisine in America the way the French now do, for example – indeed, we have tended, until the recent upsurge of foodie-ism in the last 20 years, to be extremely cavalier about food. We’ve regarded it as being a form of fuel, and we haven’t seen it as being either fundamentally about pleasure or fundamentally about culture, as something that needs to be decrypted, decoded, made sense of, and so on. We’ve seen it basically as simply energy and calories. Algren coordinated an effort in which a lot of very good writers (and some lesser talents) went around to various places – the Ozarks, New Mexico, parts of California, the Dakotas – and tried to understand what was specific about what we might call today the ecosystems, the terroirs, the locavore practices that were common in those particular areas in the 1930s and the early 1940s. From where did people get food, what did they eat every day, what were the festive foods, what were the foods that were part of segmented markets that were only accessible to people of certain means, as opposed to the foods that were accessible to ordinary people? Algren himself did one of these studies. It’s a small book, maybe 70-80 pages (I haven’t seen it in quite a while) and he focused on Illinois in particular – it was really a remarkable piece of amateur anthropology and sociology. It was not governed by specific methodologies or a reflexive way of trying to attack the subject but, in Algren’s case, it was wonderfully evocative and powerfully written – really reportage or journalism of the highest order. There were many, many studies like this. A great deal of them have never been published, but they are presumably still in the national archives, and I think they ought to be published in their entirety. In fact, I think they ought to be redone today. We ought to assign a person to look at the same issues that Nelson Algren looked at, for example, and that many of the people of Margaret Mead’s generation looked at. It would be interesting to go back today and see the extent to which practices that were codified in the 1930s still survive, or have completely disappeared or are making a comeback as the result of culinary nostalgia or wistfulness – or as a result of a search by certain chefs for culinary roots, in the Alice Waters sense of doing a local archaeology of things. What’s good about Nelson Algren is that he has class consciousness, so he’s aware of the fact that everyone is not equal before one’s plate – that there are people who are eating well and people who are eating not well, people who are eating steak and people who are eating macaroni. Algren understands food as being the sort of totalistic kind of factor that I see it as, and that’s one of the reasons why I put Algren on the list. I also put him on the list because he’s a novelist and famous for lots of things – and I probably also have him on here because I envy his having slept with Simone de Beauvoir. But that’s another issue. Oh, that goes back a long way – and we can assimilate it to a couple of different trends. On the one hand, we can find precursors in travel literature that goes back as far as the 16th century, when we see travellers all over the European world visiting both Europe and, a little bit later, savage America. These people report on what they see and write a good bit about food, because food is part of what they see most in looking at the cultures and societies that they’re visiting. So that all is one stream that feeds into this. Another is the cookbook stream. The writing of cookbooks was, I think, early on less a narrowly technical matter of the transmission of recipes than a more broadly cultural act of commenting upon the way in which people lived through the expression of different meal choices and selection of foods. I think that’s a trend that also goes back a long way in the European experience. The more recent writings draw on those two strains, as well as on a journalistic strain or current that goes back into the 19th century, and that is a kind of hybrid between travelogue and amateur sociological anthologising. Some of it’s really quite nice, and I think for the historian what’s interesting is that, of course, it becomes a primary source. We don’t use it because it’s ‘“true”, we use it because it’s revealing of the way in which certain people are seeing their own world. I think just as a matter of national heritage it would be a damn shame if we didn’t really chronicle all these traditions, in every country. I’m an American – I spend most of my time in France, but I’m an American – and I’m the son of immigrant parents. I have vivid memories of seeing my grandmother buying fresh carp, watching them swim around in the bathtub, and then beating them to death in order to make gefilte fish. I’d like to know about the history of grits. I’d like to know more about soul food. We’ve had some books written on soul food recently – each has certain strengths, but none is sufficiently probing. I’d like to see more done on the way in which black and white culinary practices in the South both nurtured each other and resisted each other. I’d like to know about Indian cuisine and its vestiges and its resurgence. I was always fascinated with the story of corn-eating Mexicans who were terrorised and brutalised and slaughtered by conquering Spaniards, who tried to force them to eat wheat – and the tension between white wheat bread and corn tortillas still is part of the story of the cultural landscape of Mexico, and was sort of the main theme for much of the 20th century experience of so-called modernisation. If we don’t start creating a cultural inventory, all this is going to be outside the realm of what’s recoverable, which is why I like the idea of taking the Nelson Algren/Margaret Mead methods and using them as a kind of device to go back and take stock of things. We need to ask, how would Nelson Algren approach modern “foodways”? I think that approach would produce fascinating material."