The Pecan: A History of America's Native NutJames E.McWilliams. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American IconCindyOtt. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900KendraSmith‐Howard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900. KendraSmith‐Howard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Abstract

The Pecan: A History of America's Native Nut James E. McWilliams. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon Cindy Ott. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.Pure and Modem Milk: An Environmental History since 1900 Kendra Smith-Howard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.In the decade since historian Andrew Smith wrote that culinary fakelore and food fallacies reigned in the absence of authoritative histories, scholars have raced to fill in the gaps.1 Smith himself has penned a dozen histories and encyclopedias of American and drink while editing the Edible Series from Reaktion Books (distributed by University of Chicago Press) which has produced nearly fifty global histories since 2008. In tune with this studies movement, The Journal of American Culture has shown a dedication to reviewing histories (there were two such reviews in the March 2014 issue alone). This review essay represents a departure from the typical structure of the book review in this journal, but it demonstrates both the intensity of the trend toward histories as well as the journal's continued interest in the exploration of foodways in American culture.The three texts under review here continue in the tradition of food micro-his to ries, defined in Melissa Stoeger's bibliography, Food Lit, as a subgenre of history focused on single ingredients or dishes (154).2 Following in the footsteps of texts like Sidney Mintz's foundational Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modem History (1985) and Michael Pollan's bestselling Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World (2001), these micro-his tories trace the complex and changing social and cultural meanings of through natural, environmental, and cultural histories while appealing to popular and scholarly audiences alike.James McWilliams's history of the pecan in America focuses on how the mutually transformative relationship between humans and nature transformed pecans from wild to domesticated and changed pecangrowing from a passively cultivated cottage industry to a mechanized international exchange (2). For most of American history, the pecan has remained wild, neither grown nor consumed far beyond its native habitat near Southern waterways (Chapters One and Two). Because the demand for pecans remained local and the profits remained small, farmers developed habits of passive to harvest wild pecans (Chapter Three). The advent of grafting pecan trees in 1822 meant that for the first time a good pecan tree could be replicated to produce nuts of uniform and consistent quality, the first step toward commercializing pecans (Chapter Four). However, this technology did not take full effect until the beginning of the twentieth century when farmers and USD A extension agencies finally worked together to establish methods that were profitable (Chapters Five and Six). As pecan orchards became more productive in areas where pecans had never grown before, the surplus of pecans had a significant effect on America's eating habits, showing up in cookbooks and in processed foods for the first time outside of the South (Chapter Seven). Today, China is the largest market for pecans, offering growers unprecedented profits while passing on a price hike to American consumers (Chapter Eight).McWilliams uses The Pecan to challenge metanarratives of American agriculture. He counters the notion of the treadmill of production that links technological change to the inevitable degradation of the environment, discussing grafting in the early twentieth century as a technology that made large-scale, mechatoo nized cultivation of pecans possible with the point of view that human intervention in natural processes has no inevitable consequences, and that the consequences have no inherent valence. Similarly, McWilliams offers a challenge to the image of farmers as laborers working from the neck down (85). …