On U.S. Cuisine

All-American food is corporate food.

1.

“Listening for voices from the past is crucial,” writes Sandra Oliver in a 2006 piece for Gastronomica titled “Ruminations on the State of American Food History.” “What do people in the past say about why they ate what they ate? Was there some ideology in mind, or did they eat what was on their plate because it was food?” 

Is there a way for food to be non-ideological? Many people would argue, yes: Their choices around food are made out of simple convenience and immediacy and necessity, nothing more. But what factors influence which foods become convenient to access, immediately appetizing, and of necessary (or not) nutrition? There is no escape from politics in food, even if that’s not apparent. What Oliver is getting at is that early American food histories made the mistake of looking only at cookbooks written by and for more elite classes (see last week’s notes on how it’s historically been the tastes of the elites that trickle down to become the taste), as well as repeating myths of rampant Puritanism and a related lack of cake. This perspective erases the experiences of “the enslaved, the poor, the newly arrived, and even the middle classes,” Oliver writes. 

The notion that these folks would be eating non-ideological food is interesting, and it’s one that continues to be a perspective in the U.S.: It’s ideology to go to the farmers’ market; it’s not ideology to eat a hot dog. To be in poverty or marginalized, this well-intentioned notion suggests, is to have no choice, no access—is this not a violent erasure of agency? Why isn’t that ideological?

2.

A lot and also not so much has changed about the narrative of U.S. food since 2006. There certainly has been an urgent, important desire to un-erase the folks who contributed to the creation of and continue to develop what we consider the national cuisine. This has provided necessary narrative shifts and expansions. What I and others have long wondered is whether enveloping all of these foods under one rubric is truly useful to building a more equitable food future. Who does a melting pot theory of U.S. cuisine serve if it doesn’t make transparent who is now working the land and who is now reaping the profits? Effectively: What use is history if we don’t learn from it?

There has also been the idea that Indigenous foods are the “original” U.S. foods. (I don’t refer to the U.S. as “America”—the U.S. is the settler colonial nation built upon one part of the American continent.) It’s something that happens in Canada, too, as Eric Ritskes documents at Anise to Za’atar:

So, in Canada, saskatoon berries and salmon and moose and wild ginger and cedar and fiddleheads and maple syrup and bison and wild rice and Arctic char become representative Canadian foods.

But, to put it bluntly: this is a culinary invention born of settler colonialism. These foods are not Canadian foods. Or, at the very least, they did not begin as Canadian foods. They are Indigenous foods. They are Sḵwx̱wú7mesh foods, Gwich’in foods, Nehiyaw foods, Anishinaabe foods, Inuk foods, Miꞌkmaq foods. These ingredients, methods, and dishes belong to nations that existed long before Canada did and nations that continue to exist. How they came to be called ‘Canadian’ is part and parcel of the larger invention of Canada, part and parcel of the settler colonial legacy that permeates Canada to the present day.

What I argue is that we can talk about regional cuisines in the U.S., Indigenous cuisines, immigrant cuisines, third-culture cuisines, historical cuisines of various periods in various places of various peoples, etc., but there is truly no good use for creating a blanket idea of a national cuisine. It would simply require too many caveats, too much erasure. 

3.

There is too much difference, and even if Rachel Laudan in Cuisines & Empire notes the similarities between how the elites and middle class and the poor have come to eat through industrialization, there are chasms of differences between how, for example, I grew up eating on Long Island and how someone the same age grew up eating somewhere in the Midwest, West, or the South. I grew up eating wildly differently, too, from others who grew up nearby because one side of my family highly valued food and cooking, Puerto Rican foods were a regular and beloved part of my diet, and my young parents enjoyed trying new things. (Our neighborhood sushi restaurant figures into my book for this reason. My little sister was requesting “salmon sushi” from her high chair.) 

Our commonalities across all differences in the U.S. emerge through interaction with fast and widely available processed foods. My local diner, pizza place, and bagel shop could be novel for someone in the same way I have found ranch dressing and Waffle House novel (and delicious), but we will likely be able to compare notes on breakfast cereals, go-to childhood McDonald’s orders, and reminisce over “Got Milk?” and “Pork. The Other White Meat” campaigns that were part of commodity check-off programs. 

Or you can mark difference by having not been exposed to those things, by parents who fed you carob. There is the idea that foods of what has been called “counterculture cuisine”—brown rice, tofu, sprouts, kombucha—have become American by virtue of acceptance into the marketplace, but this is the issue: the concept of U.S. national cuisine is one almost wholly defined by the marketplace, an increasingly smaller marketplace that wields a massive amount of lobbying power and concentrates profits at the top.

4.

Those of us who know the names of hip tinned fish and olive oil brands (and the details of their spats on LinkedIn) and buy our spices from ethical companies might as well live on Mars, and we’re also not really “opting out” because that’s an impossibility.

How various groups relate culturally to food and to the food market will depend on their demographics, sure: Even a hamburger, even an apple pie, will be made according to cultural, regional, and economic standards and differentiations. A grilling technique passed down the patrilineal chain here; a secret spice great-grandma wrote on an index card recipe there. But some of those ingredients—whether the meat is from an “ethical” butcher or the butter is from a regional farm—will have been produced by one of a few massive corporations: “A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans…” 

I think all the time about Andy Warhol writing in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, which I read as a teenager, something that captures both the magic and the terror of corporate food oligopoly in the U.S.—its dark appeal, its toxic hold:

“You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

The accessibility and ubiquity of Coke don’t somehow keep it siloed away from politics. The origins of Coca-Cola’s switch to high-fructose corn syrup from sugar were about government subsidies, yes, but also a 1971 “massive, surprise sale of US grain to the Soviet Union,” per Mother Jones, that led to a boom in corn prices and an increase in planting. Everyone, from the president to you… still drinking up the result of a Cold War grain sale.

What binds together a U.S. national cuisine is its reliance on and political support of agribusiness cultivating sameness in every corner, which is buoyed by the cultural idea that we’re all just one right move away from wealth—one Coke away from our 15 minutes of fame (at this point in history, the idea is maybe we’re all one viral TikTok away from being able to afford a carton of eggs and a mask that will allow us to breathe in ever worse air quality).

This is why it’s a cuisine that has its tentacles in all the different regions and demographics, the unavoidable results of centuries’ worth of political decisions on the plate no matter one’s class or culture. Even a vegan attempting to reject industrial animal agriculture may not know how the cashews in the fermented nut cheese were shelled, how the palm oil in the margarine was sourced, or who picked the lettuce in the extreme heat. An endless sense of abundance built upon people and land worked to the bone, owned by a few companies, supported by government subsidies, romanticized by notions of an ever-expanding “American food”: That’s U.S. cuisine.

5.

These are essentially notes on an idea I’ve been circling for years now, which is that in the U.S., there’s a false idea that certain choices around food aren’t political and also that U.S. cuisine is big enough to hold all the foods of the world. This melds into notions around how the market and technology are inevitable and infinite, and thus can save us from any crises. It’s not gastronativism, but gastroexpansionism: If U.S. cuisine can encompass everything, there is nothing to protect, whether that’s biodiversity or cultural significance. It can grow into anything it has to be, even if that’s lab meat and Soylent.

Adriana Gallo, in MOLD, writes “non-traditional diets” that emerge through industrialization and military needs “originate in a moment of alienation”:

In the 20th century (through present day) hygiene and ease of preparation became major selling points for frozen or ready made and packaged foods, preying on an increasing fear of the “raw” (both visceral and existential) while also eroding entire generations of food preparation knowledge in order to create increasingly fearful, inept, and ultimately alienated consumers both within developed nations and as a colonial and imperial strategy abroad.

Industrial convenience foods have been sold as ways of creating time and leisure for the homemaker, someone who has increasingly also been tasked with working outside the home. Industrial food, fear of and alienation from ingredients eroding connections to the natural world, and loss of knowledge become “modern” and “feminist,” but did our economic structure give anyone a real choice in this? Did our uplifting of the nuclear family structure give anyone a real choice in this? How does the ceaseless alienation circle back to make “traditional” family and gender structures appealing, and lead to mistrust of vaccines, of seed oils?

6.

As a person of mixed and fragmented identity, I don’t see an issue with understanding fragments—many cuisines, in this case—as composing a whole, but I also understand the political purpose of a blanket national cuisine to form a national identity, despite the impossibility in a place so heterogeneous and with such cultural distaste for taking food seriously. Basically: a flattening of identity or cuisine is to the service of entrenched powers. Refusing flattening to acknowledge complications is what’s generative, what can be built upon for a future free of false corporate abundance that has led us to a political, economic, and ecological precipice. To create the future of food not in a moment of alienation, but communion.

For the prior entries in this series, see “What Could ‘Food Is Political’ Mean?” and “Foundations of Food Politics.”

This Friday’s From the Kitchen dispatch for paid subscribers will be the July edition of From the Desk Recommends… a compendium of links. Last week, I talked about one of my kitchen essentials. See the recipe index for all recipes available to paid subscribers.

News

My piece for the latest issue of Lux is about the Palestinian artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna’s films Foragers and Wild Relatives. I love the work this magazine has allowed me and others to do—this is my third piece for them. Please consider a subscription.

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I’ll be in conversation with the fabulous author of Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen Rebecca May Johnson on July 19 on Zoom through D.C.’s Bold Fork Books (where I’ll be making a live appearance on my book tour in September). Tickets are available!

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My small capsule jewelry collection with By Ren, whose designs are handmade in Philadelphia, is live through the end of 2023. The pearl cocktail picks would make a wonderful gift for a martini drinker!

Reading

I have started to be obsessed with writing about the gendered labor of social media performance and at the suggestion of someone writing on the topic for Lux (intellectual synergy), ordered a copy of Joanna Walsh’s Girl Online: A User Manual.

Cooking

A lot of salad. A lot of experimentation with passion fruit curd, pineapple, and pomarrosa.