Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America's Food by Camille Bégin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America's Food by Camille Bégin Holly Allen Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America's Food. By Camille Bégin. Studies in Sensory History. ( Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 223. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08170-5; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04025-2.) Each year sees the publication of multiple New Deal monographs, yet few promise to be as expansive in their appeal as Camille Bégin's Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America's Food. At its narrowest, Bégin's subject is America Eats, a project launched by the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) in the late 1930s and revived in 1941. Though the onset of World War II prevented the publication of a volume of regional food essays, workers on the America Eats project documented the nation's culinary traditions at a time when American foodways—like so many folk practices—were being displaced by modern industrial processes. Food scholars will be fascinated by Bégin's account of the "expansive body of culinary knowledge, sensory information, and cultural attitudes woven around food" that the FWP staff compiled (p. 3). Writers who locate the origins of American food writing in the 1990s will be pleasantly surprised to learn that such a vast collection of New Deal–era food writing exists. Scholars of the New Deal, regionalism, and U.S. social and cultural history will also find much to admire in this book's pages. Certainly, food deprivation was central to American politics and culture during the Great Depression—images of breadlines and hungry migrant families populated the Depression-era cultural landscape. Bégin argues that New Deal food writers constructed a "counter-narrative … aimed at boosting morale and nationalist sentiment" that was "filled with reassuring images of traditional regional food" prepared at community picnics, festivals, and suppers (pp. 4–5). Bégin's project also adds a rich, sensory perspective to our understanding of the Depression and New Deal policies. While other scholars have addressed the revival of regionalism in this period, the author frames that revival as a dialectic "between regional and national cuisines" (p. 5). Historians of gender and race will also find much to appreciate in Bégin's sensory approach to the New Deal. She emphasizes that in embracing traditional foods, New Deal food writers also embraced women's traditional domestic roles, scorning convenient processed foods that wage-earning women relied on. According to Bégin, New Deal food writers coded gustatory preferences in gendered and racial terms. For example, some writers depicted white women as timid eaters but celebrated the virility of white men who courageously sampled strongly flavored ethnic foods. Throughout Taste of the Nation, Bégin explores how New Deal food writers advanced ideologies of racism and settler colonialism, even as they celebrated authentic racial cuisines. Chapters on southern and southwestern cuisine are particularly valuable; each chapter shows how racial differences were reified in New Deal food writing. Bégin notes that traditional African American cuisine, [End Page 1007] while generally celebrated, carried different and unequal meanings for black people, poor white people, and elite white people in the South as well as for black southerners who migrated to northern cities. While African American foods were celebrated, black people suffered disproportionately from hunger, unemployment, and other forms of racial discrimination. Likewise, even as New Deal food writers celebrated southwestern ethnic dishes such as tacos and chili as authentic American cuisine, white people's hostility toward Mexican Americans and people indigenous to the Southwest worsened during economic hard times. Overall, Taste of the Nation offers fascinating insights into how regional culinary traditions were incorporated into the New Deal's nation-building project. While I love the brevity, liveliness, and focus of Bégin's book, she could have done more to address the organizational challenges inherent in a project that included national and regional editors and a diverse range of project writers and field workers. Given Bégin's careful attention to the racial and gendered meanings encoded in New Deal...