Abstract
This chapter examines the Federal Writers' Project's (FWP) sensory nostalgia for regional food as a cathartic reaction to the standardization of taste triggered by the industrialization of the U.S. food system since the late nineteenth century. Categories of race and gender interplayed in the New Deal sensory economy both to buffer sensory change and to allow its critique. Women often took the blame for the decreased sensory quality of American food, making the 1930s a significant moment in the elaboration of conservative gender roles that dominated the war and postwar period. To counter this feminine threat, New Deal food writing held “virile” and uncorrupted tastes as the pinnacle of American cuisine, which, as the analysis of racial interaction in public cooking events shows, often meant tapping into the raw sensory power of racial others.
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