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

Abstract

Some years ago, while researching a history of American food in the Library of Congress, I came across “America Eats,” a long-neglected collection of unpublished writings commissioned by the Federal Writers Project (FWP) in the late 1930s. At first I thought I had struck gold: a series of descriptions of American food habits during the depression produced by writers from all parts of the country. Alas, I was soon disappointed. The collection consisted mainly of descriptions of communal eating events such as the giant barbecues in the Southeast and Southwest and lutesfisk festivals in Wisconsin. It held practically nothing about day-to-day eating. Now, Camille Bégin has explained why this was so. She points out that the project aimed to extol traditional regional foods, thereby encouraging housewives to resist the homogenizing influences of the new industrialized food production system by reviving the homemade, local foods of their ancestors. She calls her exploration of this “sensory archive” a study of “New Deal food writing” that shows how “the state envisioned the nation's collective sensory identity in the midst of the Great Depression” (p. 154). However, although she supplements the “America Eats” collection with some other FWP sources—mainly travel guides—the label “New Deal food writing” is rather misleading. Aside from evoking images of Harry Hopkins reviewing Washington restaurants, it ignores the phalanxes of government home economists who were trying to counter old regional foodways by promoting diets based on modern nutritional science. Moreover, the writers, most of whom were not even professional writers, were representative of nobody but themselves. Nevertheless, Bégin does extract from their writing a number of interesting insights into depression-era Americans' attitudes toward food.