excerpts from
excerpt copyright (c) 1996 by Angel City Press. All rights reserved.
Looking at the twentieth century with twenty-twenty hindsight, it can be argued that this has been the single most remarkable century in the history of getting a bite to eat. Prior to this century, the way things worked with regard to food was pretty simple. The rich indulged their culinary taste however they wanted, living a fine life on pheasant and grouse, river salmon and trout, wines of distinction and desserts of decadence. The rest of us ate pretty much whatever we could get our hands on. For not just the lower classes but for the middle class as well, dinner was the stew pot, the mulligan, the goulash, the ragout, the salmagundi.
It’s been said that prior to the twentieth century, Americans ate only three vegetables -- and two of them were cabbage. Voltaire’s famous observation that the English have forty-two religions but only two sauces could easily be transferred to Americans on the cusp of the 1900s. As a nation, we did not eat well. As the Comte de Volney observed at about that time, “I will venture to say that if a prize were proposed for the scheme of a regimen most calculated to injure the stomach, the teeth and the health in general, no better could be invented than that of the Americans.”
Then along came the twentieth century. And through a combination of pluck, ambition, good ole American know-how, inventiveness and the desire to make a buck at it, food became big business in these United States. The seemingly ubiquitous cereal-advocate John Harvey Kellogg kicked off the century with his dire warnings on the dangers of eating meat, of not chewing your food often enough, of eating sugar and of failing to endure a minimum of one colonic a day (and far more if the system was out of whack). He was against sex as well, feeling that it sapped the body of its vital fluids and purity of essence. Naturally, the fact that he raged against the pleasures of the flesh -- culinary and otherwise -- made untold thousands who heard his lectures hunger for a taste of beef, pork, lamb and chicken. What we were warned against was what we most wanted. So the inhabitants of the early twentieth century got busy eating. And their offspring kept the faith -- the twentieth century has been a hundred-year-long all-you-can-eat buffet.
The more I learn about the history of food and the corresponding world of food in history, however, the more convinced I grow that it’s written on Jell-O. There’s very little in culinary history that can be nailed down absolutely; it’s the most nonlinear form of history imaginable. It’s hardly even cyclical. If anything, it’s random and arbitrary, with no imaginable way of stating when and where the first tuna noodle casserole or turkey meat loaf was conceived and consumed. Like Athene from the head of Zeus, most culinary innovations seem to have emerged fully formed. One day they didn’t exist, and the next day everyone was making them. The Food Stork brought them.
Which is why this decade by decade history of American eating and drinking habits is a book of informed opinion. I’m not suggesting that the recipes included in each decade were born in that decade, though in many cases that’s true. What I’m dealing with here is an impression of food history: the dishes assigned to each decade are indicative of the culinary life of that era. There’s something about baked Alaska and oysters Rockefeller that speaks volumes about the 1900s; onion dip and cheese fondue are very much the 1950s, and turkey burgers and tiramisu are so much the 1990s. These are the symbolic dishes, the Jungian culinary icons of their decades. If a dish could be a decade, and a decade could be a dish, this is how things might work out.
When it comes to food, the twentieth century has been a wild and wacky ride across a culinary landscape filled with TV dinners, M&Ms, microwave ovens, granola, Spam, kiwifruit, Tang, Diet Coke, Crock-Pots, electric can openers, pasta machines, Coffee-mate, Caesar salad and tamale pie. We’ve eaten more different things in this century than all the things eaten in all of recorded history -- never before have people had access to the variety of foodstuffs found in a single suburban supermarket. In the annals of food, there’s never been anything like the twentieth century. It makes me mighty hungry for what’s next -- in the twenty-first century.
--Merrill Shindler, Los Angeles, 1996
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