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chapter eight

lATING AMlRICAN

A ye a r 0 r so ago, a colleague who was teaching a course in

science writing asked me to offer a lecture on food to her

class. I chose as my subject aspects of the history of domesti­

cation. I regard domestication as one of the most important tech­

nical achievements in the history of our species. The lecture was

well received, I thought. But in the discussion that followed,

someone asked a question that had to do in part with American

eating habits. When I responded, I mentioned in passing that I

did not think that there is such a thing as an American cuisine. I

thought nothing about it as I said it; though I had never discussed

eating american

hurtful, if not downright insulting. My gaffe (if that is what it was) became clear almost immediately. I was asked by one stu­

dent whether, since I believed we had no cuisine, I also believed

we had no culture. I responded with amazement. I talked mo­

mentarily about (North) America's I highly regarded art, litera­

ture, drama, and poetry, claiming as I said it that our music was

gradually achieving a stature equal to that we had won in these

other fields. Even as I spoke I realized that the questioner was re­

ally wondering whether she had come across one of those awful

persons who cannot resist running down his own country and,

with her question, was just looking for proof. (I recall thinking

that I had better mention some names-such as Ives, Gershwin,

Bernstein, Joplin, Menotti, and Copland-in my answer, or I

might be in even more hot water.) Another student took a differ­

ent tack. He talked happily about "eating Thai" one night, and

"eating Chinese" the next, and asked rather plaintively whether

that couldn't be "our cuisine." He plainly felt that having access

to a lot of different "cuisines" was a wonderful idea-and cer­

tainly better than meat loaf. It was all amiable enough; but I

knew 1'd said something a lot of people did not like to hear, nor

want to believe. Before the class ended, the instructor invited stu­

dents to write papers about my lecture; after a week she sent me

copies of two of them, written by class members. Reading those

papers made it additionally clear that I had touched a nerve. Nei­

ther paper included any comments on domestication; both talked

about cuisine. If America didn't have a cuisine, these folks im­

plied that it should; and they were certainly not prepared to ac­

cept my view of things. Though neither said it outright, I could

infer that both wondered about my motives. As a consequence, I

was left as interested in their sensitivity as I had been in the~topic.

Why, I asked myself, is having a cuisine important-is it because

other people have one? Do people really think having a cuisine is the subject with a class before, it wasn't a new idea. But in the

I like having a music, or a literature? Is having a cuisine like hav­

next five minutes of the dialogue, I came to realize I had said ing a literature? Could it be good not to have a cuisine? If you something that some members of the class found at the least don't have a cuisine, can you get one? 106

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One reason I want to write about American eating is my ea­

gerness to explain more clearly what I meant then. Whatever the

case, it seems important to make clear that not having a cuisine

is not like not having a literature; indeed, not having a cuisine­

assuming I can make any case at all-might be a price we should

be happily prepared to pay for "what's great about America."

Anyway, "eating American" is too large and too complex a

subject to be tackled in this chapter, and I have to acknowledge

that right away. There are a score of highly appropriate subjects

I ought to raise here. But covering all those would fill another

book. Still, I want to try once more to explain myself in regard to

cuisine-this time, I hope, more convincingly.

When it comes to food, grasping our particularity as a nation

requires us to get some sense of where our history differs from

that of other countries, especially European countries. 2 The

United States is extremely large in area and population, when

compared to any European country but Russia. Even in this

hemisphere, only Brazil and Canada are about as big, and neither

is as populous. These are two obvious ways in which we differ

from most places. We are predominantly European in origin,

and mostly Protestant in religion. Of course we are also a young

country by European historical standards-about two centuries

(or seven generations) old.

The whole New World stands apart from the Old, especially

from Europe, because its vast areas, as well as the aboriginal

peoples who occupied them, came to be dominated by relatively

small populations, and in the recent past. The conquerors mostly

came from a confined but important area of the Old World:

Western Europe. In terms of numbers, during the first two cen­

turies or so, it seems likely that more Africans entered the New

World than did Europeans; but their population did not grow in

place as fast as did that of the Europeans; and they were almost

entirely powerless, as were the indigenous peoples of the hemi­

sphere. Hence, though Africans certainly figured importantly in

the conquest and its aftermaths, though they were later joined by

I 08

eating american

substantial migrant Asian populations, and though some native

peoples of the hemisphere survived the impact, the Europeans

were the powerholders. Their overlordship was achieved in the

course of less than two centuries. Spanish and Portuguese domi­

nation, from what is the Southwest of the United States today to

Tierra del Fuego, was largely in place by 1700. The insular, Ca­

ribbean region was divided up among five powers, all warring

upon Spanish hegemony. That other New World areas farther

north took longer to become colonial was as much a function of

European wars as it was of any serious indigenous resistance.

In effect, seven nations-and to a large extent, people from

those seven nations only-predominated in the conquest: Spain,

Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Swe­

den. Norway, Germany, and Italy were not yet countries; but in

the eighteenth century, German migration to the hemisphere

was substantial, and in the nineteenth, so was Scandinavian, Ital­

ian, and East European migration. By the end of the eighteenth

century, the United States had become a sovereign state, the

hemisphere's first. Most Americans at the start of the nineteenth

century were white and North European in origin. What the

United States fully shares with many of its New World neigh­

bors is its newness as a nation, and its being composed almost

entirely of the descendants of migrants, coming from elsewhere.

We share with Canada, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and perhaps

Costa Rica the background fact that the vast majority of today's

inhabitants are descended from migrants who came from Eu­

rope.

A particularly cruel consequence of conquest was the run­

away depopulation of immense areas, due to the combined effects

of disease, war, enslavement, and inhuman labor practices._ The

early movements of Europeans and Africans to the hemisphere

were soon followed by others; and that movement of new

peoples, especially to the United States, has literally never ceased.

Except, of course, for the descendants of Native Americans­

anciently descended themselves, in turn, from migrants from

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Asia-all North Americans are originally from somewhere else,

particularly from Europe.

In the United States immigration continued apace during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While its volume relative

to the settled population has declined, the absolute numbers have

remained high; and in the last half century, the origins of the

newcomers have become much more diverse. Immigration laws

in the nineteenth century had been aimed at maintaining the eth­

nic structure of United States society as it was then constituted,

largely North European; only since World War II was that bias

modified legislatively. The pace of continued immigration, while

shared with some other hemispheric nations, is another relevant

marker of North American distinctiveness.

At the same time that immigration has continued, national

history has been marked by steady territorial expansion. The

Louisiana and Gadsden purchases, the purchase of Alaska, the

Spanish American War, the acquisition of Hawaii, Puerto Rico,

the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, for example, and the North

American imperialist policies these military conquests and pur­

chases represented, all played a part. But while Europeans were

migrating to colonial areas such as Canada, South Africa, and

Australia, in our case migrant Europeans were coming to what

was already a sovereign and democratic country-becoming citi­

zens as well as inhabitants. In each instance of additional expan­ sion, there followed further settlement, as in Hawaii and Alaska,

Puerto Rico, and the (U.S.) Virgin Islands. This expansion and

incorporation is another distinctive feature of United States so­

ciety worthy of mention here. In most of the Americas, people who came from elsewhere had their future quite firmly charted

for them by their class status on arrival; in the United States, that

""'as not so much the case. Public education, expanding economic

opportunities, and the openness of the political system produced

unexpected and dynamic results.

Since its establishment as a nation, the United States has

been marked by a high degree of mobility, above all geographi­

I I 0

eating american

cal. Expansion westward meant a spreading out and filling up of

the country as it grew. Such expansion involved military, then

cultural, aggression against Native Americans, a part of our his­

tory which has come to be acknowledged publicly, more and

more. Less noticed has been the enormous long-term benefit of

seemingly infinite land resources for farming and, even more,

ranching-a steadily dwindling treasure upon which the nation

has battened for centuries, and the presence and availability of

which has profoundly affected the way our eating habits (and

other habits) have taken shape.

From early on, this was a highly mobile country not only oc­

cupationally, but also economically. Perhaps upward mobility is

particularly noticeable when the rising group includes newcom­

ers. Today, the bankers, generals, CEOs, and members of Con­

gress in this country who have recent foreign forebears are le­

gion. This makes us different and, in the eyes of, say, Englishmen

of Germans, it may also make us seem rather undiscriminating.

Imagine the German army with its top general a child of Turk­

ish immigrants! Or the British army led by a child of Pakistani

immigrants!

From the end of the eighteenth century onward, different re­

gions of the new land called the United States gave rise to some­

what different diets. One reason for these differences was the

wide variation in natural environments-the Southwest versus

the Gulf Coast versus New England versus the Northwest Pa­

cific, for example. Another was the differing food habits of

various migrant groups. Broad differences between, say, New

England cooking and Southern cooking can certainly still be

sketched in. On a narrower canvas, we can speak of "Cajun"

cooking, say, or "Pennsylvania Dutch" cooking, and still have it

mean something. In the Midwest, some Scandinavian culinary traditions were established; in large Eastern cities, Italian and

East European cooking habits took hold. To these older patterns

have been added numerous others since World War II, of which

Asian foods and cooking methods, only poorly represented in

III

chapter eight eating american

this country before, are the most visible, though not the only

ones.

Yet such variety does not equal a cuisine, and is not the same

as a cuisine. There are at least two reasons why such an assertion

may seem unwarranted. On the one hand, there do appear to be

regional cuisines, of the sort mentioned in chapter 7, which I de­

scribed as the only "real" cuisines, anyway. On the other, I have

contended that national cuisines are not cuisines in the same

sense. So I must explain myself.

Since our beginnings as a nation, Americans have sought

ways to integrate and assimilate newcomer populations within

some generalized American culture. Though prejudice against

both African Americans and American Indians (and in its more

recent forms, toward other nonwhite populations as well) has

militated against that process, most newcomers have been en­

couraged to forgo their traditional cultures in order to "become

American." What this means is not always so clear. But the pub­

lic educational system, above all, and the tremendous power of

peer pressure, working on both children and adults, has helped

to reshape the behavior and outlook of successive generations of

new arri vals.

Several different things are happening at once. More people

coming from different places continue to arrive. They are subject

to pressures to change their ways, including their foodways, by

an Americanization process that goes on in the schools, in the

media, and in the course of daily life. The demands of new jobs

and new lifestyles, and the desires and claims of the children of

migrants, put great negative pressure, great pressure to change,

upon older, imported standards. Geographical and socioeco­

nomic mobility accompany these new pressures. We are not sur­

prised to find Hmong tribespeople in Montana, Vietnamese

fishermen in Texas, Sikh and Korean storekeepers in California.

In many different ways, some subtle and some obvious, these

people are changing their behavior and, unbeknownst even to

themselves, some of their values as well, as they "become Ameri­

can." How these migrants may identify themselves culturally is

not in dispute, particularly if they continue to use their native

language; but the cultural identity of their children is a different

issue and likely to be changing rapidly.

That there are powerful pressures toward sameness, working

particularly upon children, may be thought to increase the homo­

geneity of American food habits. Such foods as hot dogs, ham­

burgers, ice cream, and pizza are integral to acceptable adoles­

cent behavior, regardless of origins; young people are intensely

aware of it. In a certain way, then, these pressures do push to­

ward homogeneity. But while learning to eat ice cream, and at

fast food and ethnic restaurants, has the effect of increasing ho­

mogeneity of a kind, this experience is not the same as learning,

or creating, a cuisine. Strictly speaking, by learning such behav­

ior people are becoming sociologically more alike, but it is not re­

ally clear that they are becoming culturally more alike.

Americans eat out at ever-higher levels of frequency, and

barring serious economic contractions, that trend will continue.

At this point, nearly one-half of the money spent on food is spent

on eating out. But we have little data on how eating-out patterns

vary by class. It seems to me that eating out could only be cuisine­

related if if means Japanese-Americans were going to Japanese

restaurants, and Italian-Americans to Italian restaurants. But in

such a case, we wouldn't be speaking about an American cuisine,

but about the "national" cuisines of other nations, being eaten

by persons historically descended from immigrants from those

nations. Sociologically, that doesn't seem important at all, espe­

cially because the people doing it would probably not think of it

that way. At the same time, I don't think that there is a reliable

manner in which to speak of unhyphenated Americans going to

unhyphenated American restaurants to eat American cuisine,

because I believe that what they eat cannot be convincingly de­

scribed as cuisine. Of course we can describe what is eaten in culinary terms,

and that may be adequate for some readers. What would the cat­

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egory include? Certainly hamburgers, and probably Southern

fried chicken, and clam chowders and baked beans, steak, ribs,

and perhaps chili, and hot dogs, and now, pizza, and baked pota­

toes with "the works." We would have a dessert list beginning

with apple pie, and we could have many dishes based on maize.

But there is no need to enumerate here all of the dishes that

might be on the list because there are so many good American

cookbooks that do the job, and no end of irrepressible enthusi­

asts. 3 Despite those things, however, the list of ten favorite lunch

and dinner "entrees" for 1994, collected by the NPD market re­

search group, starts off with pizza and ham sandwiches and hot

dogs, and ends with cheese sandwiches, hamburger sandwiches,

and spaghetti. I don't think anyone wants to call that array a

CUISine.

Of the items on any more serious list, nearly all of the dishes

would be assignable to regional cuisines, which is as it should be:

all so-called national cuisines take from regional cuisines. The

maize dishes, lobsters and terrapins, the steaks and pork roasts,

the Boston baked beans, soft shell crabs and Manhattan clam

chowders would all deserve to be here. But regional cuisines

in the United States have undergone great change in the last

half century, most of it diluting or modifying the cuisines them­

selves. The destruction of native stocks of such foods as salmon,

shad, striped bass, terrapin, and crabs has seriously undermined

regional cuisines, for instance. But even more has been done

to change them by commercialization, a major debilitating in­

fluence.

Local variation in cuisine is under continuous pressure from

commercial enterprise aimed at profiting by turning into a na­

tional fad every localized taste opportunity. Any natural product

that is available in a place or a season, and any distinctive cooking

or flavoring method, excites merchants, packers, and processors

intent on broadening their market. Of course not all of the prod­

ucts travel, and many do not travel well. In the view of food busi­

nessmen it makes good sense to alter the nature of such goods in

eating american

order to make them available elsewhere, even if they no longer

are (or taste like) what they were at home. In the course of the

"development" of these new goods, their character is altered, and

the manner in which they had been prepared is likely to be modi­

fied-more commonly, simplified or abandoned. In many cases

the new product is no longer the same as the old product, and is

prepared in new ways, which are reduced and cheapened ver­

sions of the old ways. What happened in recent years with

"blackened redfish" is a fair example: swift vulgarization of its

preparation, substitution of other fish for redfish, cheapening of

the recipe, and another fad soon forgotten. The regional foods

most likely to remain more authentic are exactly the ones that

cannot be shipped, or do not travel well, or are either difficult or

impossible to copy. But not surprisingly, that they are difficult or

impossible to copy has never discouraged a North American

food salesman. Hence certain foods that are regionally distinctive

become known to people elsewhere who have never eaten them

except in the form of substitutes lacking any resemblance at all to

the original. Such bowdle~ization of food is still less frequent in Europe

and elsewhere. While restaurants in Northern Germany may

vaunt their Bavarian dishes, retail food markets are not likely to

sell modified variants of Bavarian food. The same is true for

France, and indeed for all of Europe. While one can eat bouilla­

baisse in a Paris restaurant that resembles bouillabaisse in Mar­

seille, the retail food stores of Paris do not yet offer Parisians a

bouillabaisse "exactly like the one you ate in Nice, that you can

now make at home-and in just minutes!" To be sure, perhaps

they soon will, so strong are the pressures to "modernize." But I

suspect that commercialization of this sort has been especi,!lly ef­

fective in the United States because we lack a standard cuisine

against which to test the sales pitch. Given our heterogeneous

origins, with what do we compare a new food, when deciding

whether to try it (or, for that matter, whether we like it)?

It is easy to romanticize the food of other cultures, and to un­

I I 5 I 14

chapter eight

deremphasize worldwide trends toward Westernized food pat­

terns. We Americans are probably not so exceptional as I may

seem to make us out to be. But in much of the world the food

repertory is still more closely tied to seasonal availability. There

are still large populations subsisting on foods drawn from a rela­

tively narrow geographical region. In many vast areas elsewhere

there are peoples who still cook in more and eat out less than we,

and whose diet contains one or several staple foods eaten every

day, perhaps even at every meal. Such people are differently

equipped to judge any new food from most of us.

By "most of us" I mean here literate Americans of the mid­

dle class, probably with some college education, travel experi­

ence, and familiarity with ethnic restaurants. We are not given to

judge each food novelty against a background of commonly rec­

ognized foods that we all eat frequently. We tend to try new

foods, seeking novelty in eating, as we do in so many aspects of

life. We are inclined to identify that novelty with knowingness,

with sophistication; and certainly being open to new experience

is a good val ue, most of the time. Because of our openness and

the dynamism of the food vendors, in the United States in recent

years consumers have learned about hummus, falafel, bagels,

"designer" coffees, coriander, basil, arugula and radicchio, Jeru­

salem artichokes, jicama, quinoa, buckwheat groats, new rice va­

rieties (jasmine, arborio, basmati), lactose-free milk, scones and

other sweet breads (not sweetbreads!), breads baked with ingre­

dients such as tomatoes or olives, a staggering variety of capsi­

cums, soy milk, tofu and dried soy products, previously neglected

seafoods such as monkfish, "artificial" crabmeat (surimi), and

many subtropical fruits, such as mangoes, soursops, red bananas,

and star apples, and a dizzying number of packaged foods de­

signed to relieve our worries, especially about fiber and fats.

We may each individually decide which items in this cornu­

copia we like, and which we do not like. Some of us may even

take up cooking or using one or another of them in our meals at

I I 6

eating american

home. If so, such foods will not be jostling with our cuisine; they

will be jostling with our quiche, our pasta, our chicken breasts,

our hamburgers, our peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, our

barbecues, our steaks, our ham sandwiches, and our yogurt.

These are among the things we eat the most. We can, if we wish,

call them our cuisine. As suggested earlier in this book, I do not see how a cuisine

can exist unless there is a community of people who eat it, cook

it, have opinions about it, and engage in dialogue involving those

opinions. This is not to say that people cannot debate the merits

of various restaurant renderings of quesadillas or chao dze; but

that is not the same as having a cuisine. On the one hand, then,

the regional cuisines of which we may speak have tended to lose

some of their distinctiveness in the dilution and "nationalizing"

of regional specialties. On the other, I do not believe that any

genuine national cuisine has emerged as yet from this process.

We do have a list of favorite foods, which we eat all of the time,

and that list is broadly representative nationally; I have already

enumerated most of it. What, then, does typify American eating habits? It is clear

that class, regional, and ethnic differences profoundly affect dif­

ferences in eating behavior. A noticeable number of Americans

now seek organically grown fruits and vegetables. About 7 per­

cent of the nation is said to be vegetarian. Many people eat along

lines prescribed by religious identity; others-but nowhere near

so many as we may think-take considerations of health very se­

riously in the way they eat. There are also differences at the

group level which betray class origins or class prejudices. In alco­

holic choices, the attention paid to bread, the label-reading habit,

the intense concern about weight, the sympathy toward vegetari­

anism, and the respect given "foreign" foods, some segments of

the American middle class exhibit difference. But for the major­

ity of the American people (including many in the above list), the

following features are probably correct: eating out frequently,

I 17

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chapter eight

often choosing fast foods, as well as ordering take-out food to eat

at home; eating much prepared and packaged foods, which re­

quire only intense heat or nothing at all to be "cooked"; continu­

ing to eat diets high in animal protein, salt, fats, and processed

sugars, low in fresh fruits and vegetables; drinking more soda

than tap water; and consuming substantial quantities of labeled

(low fat no cholesterol fat free lots of fiber no palm oil good for

you) foods, packaged to encourage the consumer to feel less guilty about what he is really choosing to eat.

This list is discouraging and negativistic; of course not every­

one eats this way, or all of the time. But it is worth pondering the

fact that food labeling, and considerable publicity about health­

ier eating, have not significantly affected food habits nationally,

at least not yet. The ten major sources of calories in the United

States diet, according to the Department of Agriculture, are

whole and low-fat milk; white bread, white flour, rolls, and buns;

soft drinks, margarine, and sugar; and ground beef and Ameri­

can cheese. Such a list is worrisome, at the very least on health

grounds, especially because of the fats and sugars. But if you are

a reader who reacts by saying to herself "But I never eat any of that stuff! "-then ask yourself who does.

The importance of sugar and fats in the American diet is

striking, particularly in view of the educational efforts to warn

people of the need for moderation in these regards. During the

twentieth century in this country, increases in fats and sugar con­

sumption have accompanied a progressive decline in the con­

sumption of complex carbohydrates [Cantor and Cantor /977; Page and

Fnend 1974J. Carbohydrate consumption in the years 19 10 to 19 13

was two-thirds potatoes, wheat products, and other such

"starchy" foods, and one-third sugar, the so-called "simple carbo­

hydrate." By the nineties, however, the share of complex carbo­

hydrates was down to half, that of sugars up to half. Over time,

more and more of what was left of complex carbohydrate con­

sumption took the form of deep-fried, salted, and sweetened par­

I I 8

eating american

ticles, so much so as to produce a special name, "munchies," for

such foods. Though there are annual variations in fat and sugar

consumption, both average figures have remained high since the

end of rationing after World War II. In 1991, Americans con­

sumed 164.9 pounds per person of sweeteners, and of those,

140.6 pounds were calorie-carrying (as opposed to noncaloric)

sweets. If the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils is right in

their estimate that fats consumption (in meat and dairy, and in

bottles and packages-that is, both "visible" and "invisible" fats)

for 1993 was 137 to 138 pounds, then when combined with ca­

loric sugars the total fats and sugars figure is 277.6 pounds per

person per year. While this figure is based on disappearance sta­

tistics (thus probably overestimating actual consumption), it is

nonetheless astonishingly high. The secular shift toward fats and

sugars has been accompanied in turn by significant increases in

the average weights of both men and women. Many authorities

now estimate one in three Americans to be twenty or more

pounds-that is, clinically-overweight. The implications for

health and health costs of these statistics are now so well known

that there is no need to review them here.

Americans also continue to increase the frequency with

which they eat out, and the frequency with which they eat in

fast-food restaurants. The numbers are interesting: in 1993, 6

percent of total per capita income was spent by Americans in res­

taurants; only 7.2 percent-I.2 percent more-was spent on

food eaten at home. (Incidentally, spending only 13.2 percent of

total income on food is an astonishingly low figure, when com­

pared worldwide.) Eating out, Americans had 793,000 "eating

places" (including here not only hot dog stands, but also army

mess halls) to choose from; and in them they spent 276 billion

dollars.

While individual customers choose freely what they eat, they

must do so in terms of what the food service offers. Eating out

reduces the individual's ability to choose the ingredients in her

I 19

chapter eight eating american

food, even though it may increase the length of the menu from

which she can choose. The tendency to snack remains important

in American eating habits; indeed, some weakening of the lun­

cheon pattern may be attributable to the strengthening of the

morning and afternoon "breaks" [Mintz 1982J, with the effect of

making fast food at noon a more attractive option. In 1993 snack

food sales reached a gross of nearly fifteen billion dollars. Drink

patterns in 1994 were consistent: 49.6 gallons of soft drinks, fol­

lowed by 3 1·3 gallons of tap water, 26 gallons of coffee, 22.5 gal­

lons of beer, and 19. I gallons of milk.

The Department of Agriculture predicted a rise in per capita

beef consumption in 1995, following 1994's 67.3 pounds. Beef

consumption dipped in the years 1991 to 1993, but it is now ris­

ing again. Pork consumption is also expected to rise, as is

chicken. Pork consumption had dipped slightly in 1990 to 199 1,

but it rose again in 1992 and has stayed up; chicken consumption

has simply continued to rise steadily. Increases in meat consump­

tion are paralleled by increases in the consumption of low-fat

products-any Imv-fat products. Nabisco's Snack wells, with

sales of 400 million dollars in 1994, are a glowing illustration.

This seemingly contradictory behavior tends to substantiate an

earlier assertion: people are both eating what they feel they want

and buying other foods in order to feel less guilty. They're eating them, too.

The dizzying overdifferentiation of food actually increases

sales enormously and, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is ratio­

nalized as giving the consumer what she wants:

Making the product "right" for the consumer re­

quires continuous redefinition and division of the groups

in which he, as an individual consumer, defines himself.

The deliberate postulation of new groups-often divi­

sions between already familiar categories, as "pre-teens"

were created between "teenagers" and younger chil­

dren-helps to impart reality to what are supposedly

I 20

new needs. "New" foods, as in the sequence skim

milk:half and half:light (table) cream:heavy (whipping)

cream split differences in order to create new needs. New

medicines, as in the treatment of daytime headaches and

nighttime headaches or daytime colds and nighttime

colds, do the same. [Mintz 1982, 158J

In all of the processes connected with American eating, the

element of time is extremely relevant, yet barely noticed. When

Americans speak of "convenience" in regard to food, they also

mean time. It is simply assumed by most of us that we have too

little time. I have argued elsewhere that the insistence upon the

shortness of time and the pressures of busyness in American life

is in one sense completely spurious. Americans are repeatedly

told that they do not have enough time, I think because it serves

to increase their aggregate consumption. Doing several things at

once is touted as evidence of leadership; but what it does for the

economy is to increase consumption. People are supposed to be

able to drink coffee and talk on the telephone while they drive,

smoke while they read, and listen to music while they exercise.

Vaunting such skill makes good corporate advertising sense;

people use up more stuff that way. No one seems impressed by

the fact that Mozart didn't chew gum or watch TV while he was

writing piano concertos.

As with anything else, not having the time to eat is a function

of how much time is thought to be needed for other things. To

take the easiest example, Americans would have more time to

cook and to eat if they spent less time watching television. The

shortness of time is in many ways, then, a coefficient of a view

that our time is in short supply, but also already appropriately dis­

tributed. Most "convenience food" is successful because of prior

conceptions about time. But much such food would not succeed

if Americans cared more about how and what they ate. That they

do not is a fact of great importance; it implies not only that they

lack a cuisine, but also that they probably will never have one.

I 2 I

chapter eight

What does the American future hold, so far as eating is con­

cerned?

In a series of brilliant recent papers, Cornell University scien­

tist David Pimentel and his colleagues have predicted sweeping

changes in American agriculture, and hence in American eating

patterns over the next half century.4 Indeed, the changes that

these scientists forecast, if they do occur, will be more radical in

their effects on American eating than even those of the last half

century-which is to say a very great deal. Demographic, agri­

cultural, and other factors enter in. Pimentel and his colleagues,

working from present trends, predict a doubling of the national

population by 2064; a reduction in arable land (through both ero­

sion and urbanization) in the neighborhood of 180,000,000 acres,

or 38 percent, in the same period of time; and a total exhaustion

of national fossil fuel resources in not more than two decades.

The figures on rapidly diminishing water supply are similarly

wornsome.

This is an unbelievably grim scenario. If it eventuates, food

exports (now calculated at an average of about $155 per person per year, given our present population) would be reduced to

zero. For Americans, food costs would increase by a factor of be­

tween three and five-at worst, up to more than half of total

income. Should these calculations prove correct, however, the

composition of the American diet would also have to change sub­

stantially. While nearly two-thirds of the national grain product

of the United States, grown on over 100 million acres, is now

used as livestock feed, by 2060 all of it would have become food

for us, not for our cattle and pigs and poultry. In effect, Pimentel sees North Americans coming to eat as most of the rest of the

world eats, with meat representing a much reduced fraction of

our total caloric and protein intake. Since India's nearly one bil­

lion people and the People's Republic of China's even larger pop­

ulation get 70 to 80 percent of their calories and nearly all of their

protein from grains and legumes, such a change in the United

I 22

eating american

States would be in the direction of aligning North American

consumption with that of the rest of the world. It would also con­ tribute to a vast improvement in American health. Substantial

farmland could be returned to agriculture; the number of bypass

and cancer operations would certainly decline.

But will it happen? As I write, McDonald's looks ahead to a

rapid expansion of its enterprises in such places as the People's

Republic of China, where it aims to add 600 retail establishments

in the next decade; and Japan, where it now boasts more than a

thousand. Whatever the scenario for the United States, many

companies are working hard to spread our way of eating world­

wide. Nor is there evidence that many Americans are much con­

cerned, either about our fossil fuel consumption or our diet.

Driving cars and eating meat are highly valued acts; though both

involve the expenditure of unimaginably large quantities of

water, soil, cereals, and fossil fuel, there is no collective indication

that anyone is deeply concerned. Only sudden shortages reveal,

as if in lightning flashes, how deeply held such consumption val­

ues are; Operation Desert Storm was a case in point. Indeed, one

"solution" to the Pimentel prophecies is war. Successful aggres­

sion could keep meat and gas available and affordable, at least

for a good while longer. Its effects on American moral integrity

would be utterly disastrous. But the enormity of the decisions in­

volved in such trade-offs would not be clearly grasped until after

the decisions were made. There is a real trap in our not separat­

ing what we are free to do, but need not do, if it is a bad idea­

from what we cannot help doing, even though it is a bad idea, be­

cause we think someone is trying to stop us from doing it.

No one can look down the road and predict how the Ameri­

can people will behave, fifty years from now. One sinister p[oph­

ecy is embodied in the words of Josef Joffe, the editorial page edi­

tor of Suddeutsche Zeitung, who writes: "It is profligacy-being hooked on the sweet poison of consumption-that might yet lay

low the American economy and thus American might."s But the

123

chapter eight

worry is not that we will let our consumption gluttony destroy

our economy; it is, rather, that we might let our obsessive notions

of individual freedom destroy our democracy. The long-term

lessons of our economic and agricultural policies are there to be

learned now. But we have to be willing to learn them.

Not e~

I. Introduction

I. See, for example, Malinowski 1935 and Firth 1957.

2. But apparently not only there. In his short story entitled "Sugar Babies,"

the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe [1973J skillfully builds a story with a moral out of the scarcity of sugar in war-torn Nigeria.

2. Food and Its Relationship to Concepts of Power

I. See, for example, Elias 1978.

2. For a different view, see Pendergrast 1993.

3. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom

1. As one Puerto Rican ex-slave once put it to me when I asked him about

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