We Are What and How We Eat

Abstract

COMMON, EVERYDAY ACTIVITIES-SUCH AS PLAYING, EATING, LOVING, AND WORKing-are ideal subjects for students of the culture of the United States. Explaining them makes it imperative to cross disciplinary boundaries. However natural they seem at first, culture and tradition have profoundly shaped them. Of these fields, scholars in American Studies have devoted much attention in recent years to two: playing and loving, including the latter's co-conspirator, sexuality. In contrast, eating has only begun to emerge as a subject with a cultural past. Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of books by historians greatly enriched our sense of how to think about the relationships between food, culture, and the past. Most notably are Warren J. Belasco's Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry (1989), Joan Jacobs Brumberg's Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (1988), and two by Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (1993) and Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (1988). With the publication Amy Bentley's Eating for Victory and Donna R. Gabaccia's We Are