Schedule of Readings & Assignments

1: Aug 19 + 21

Our task for this week is to make sure we’re all on the same page about how the course is structured and general expectations.

Aug 19: Course introductions

• Syllabus + course overview

Aug 21: Challenges and Rewards of Food + History

• Warren Belasco, “Why study food?”, from Food: The Key Concepts, 1–13.
• Andrew P. Haley, “The Nation before Taste: The Challenges of American Culinary History”, The Public Historian 34.2 (2012): 53–78.

2: Aug 26 + 28

Aug 26: American Food

The goal for today is to complicate the idea of “American” food. There are an unusually high number of readings for today, but they are all quite short and offer unique perspectives that are worth thinking about together.

• HAE, xi–xv. (Remember that HAE refers to How America Eats as described with a link at the top of the page.)
• Mind of Chef: Ed Lee on American Food
• Ruth Tobias, Is There Such a Thing as ‘American’ Food?. This article touches on culinary/cultural appropriation, which is a topic we cover in some depth in a few weeks, so focus for no
• Sidney Mintz, “Eating American”. (Remember, if there’s no link, it’s in the Zotero library). This is easily the most controversial piece this week, suggesting there is no such thing as American Cuisine. We’ll discuss in class how much you agree or disagree with his argument.

Aug 28: National Cuisines

Today we’ll broaden out our discussion of American food to discuss national cuisine generally.

• Alison K. Smith, National Cuisines, from The Oxford Handbook of Food History, part 5, chapter 25 (2012).
  • Skim/skip over the long Russia example at the end, but do read the last paragraph! This is definitely the driest of the readings for this week, but it clearly articulates several useful concepts that help us get a bigger perspective on the topic. Usually each paragraph introduces a new idea to how we can analyze ‘national’ food/cuisine, so it’s very organized that way, but there isn’t a particular ‘flow’ to it, which makes it easy to feel lost. Just look for the next point!

3: Sep 2 + 4

Almost everyone thinks about whether some kind of food or dish is “authentic” from time to time. But what does that really mean? The few readings for today should help us think more carefully notions of authenticity—particularly how it’s paradoxically an entirely superficial way of describing food, but still a very powerful one.

Sep 2: Authenticity I

• Rachel Laudan, Desperately Seeking Authenticity
• Dwight Furrow, American Foodie (7: Habits and Heresies: Authenticity, Food Rules, and Traditions), 133–48.

Sep 4: Authenticity II

• Sara Kay, Yelp Reviewers’ Authenticity Fetish Is White Supremacy in Action. I don’t agree with the conclusions of this article, but I want you to understand the argument. What else can an “authenticity fetish” represent?
• Clarissa Wei, What does authentic Chinese food even mean?
• CHALLENGE: Matthew Strohl, ‘On Culinary Authenticity’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 77.2 (2019), 157–67.
• CHALLENGE: Jeffrey Pratt, “Food Values: The Local and the Authentic,” 285–300.

4: Sep 9 + 11

Sep 9: Cuisines of Contact

• HAE, 1–31 (from Ch. 1: Cuisine of Contact).
  • This chapter gives us a lot of basic background information, but also very useful analysis of the meanings of food. For example, we learn how uses of food were essential to Puritan identity, especially the concern for feasting or fasting too much or too little. Puritans were afraid of both abundance and scarcity, as they saw food as means to survive, not a source of enjoyment.
• Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, America’s Founding Food (1: This Beautifull Noble Eare), read 4–15 and 45–48 more carefully; skim (but don’t skip) 15–45 on the various dishes.
  • In the early pages, look for how corn figured into different cultural value systems
  • In the section you’re skimming: What do the recipes do? What’s the point? They illustrate through specific examples (maybe too many) how many Native American culinary traditions were incorporated into English traditions, how English traditions adapted to new geographic circumstances, and how many Native American traditions were gradually were assimilated into what would be considered quintessentially American dishes (Riinjun bread into Boston Brown Bread).

Sep 11: More Corn

• Michael Pollan, Omnivore’s Dilemma, (Chap. 2: The Farm), 32–56. The point of this reading (it’s the fastest read for today) is to get a sense of the commoditization of corn and why it’s so cheap now. And to compare the meaning of corn as discussed in the other readings with how it’s portrayed in this chapter.
• Erick Castellanos and Sarah Bergstresser, “The Mexican and Transnational Lives of Corn: Technological, Political, Edible Object”, in Edible Identities (ed. Broulotte and Di Giovine), Taylor & Francis (2016), 201–216.

5: Sep 16 + 18

Sep 16: Early America, Food, and Households

• HAE, 33–55 (2: Food and the Founding). Continuing our thinking about food and identity, this chapter covers how capitalism and food were central to shaping early American identity. Both this chapter and the other reading emphasize the importance of capitalist markets, food production, and the development of cookbooks as a way of cultivating an American cuisine (and identity).
• Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, America’s Founding Food (4: Cookbooks and Commerce), 120–147. Even though not clearly marked, there are two distinct parts to this reading.
  • SKIM BUT DON’T SKIP the first part (to 129), which explains the capitalist logic of food production in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and how central food was to economic growth. This is important background knowledge to have, but don’t sweat the details.
  • The second part (129+) shows how early cookbooks start reflect the cultural changes underway during that time, and to some extent become drivers of those changes as well.
  • This reading complements the HAE reading with considerable more detail about the role of women in managing food, the household, and shaping American foodways.

Sep 18: NO CLASS

6: Sept 23 + 25

Sep 23: History from Cookbooks

• Review the Cookbook Comparison Guide to get a sense of what we’re working toward.
• Ken Albala, Cookbooks as Historical Documents. This highly skimmable chapter nicely lays out a process for interrogating cookbooks and reading in between the lines with many excellent examples.
• Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, “Cookbook as Resources for Social History”. This chapter very nicely sketches out, with many diverse examples, how cookbooks function as windows onto history, including how and why they were used in the world. It has a much broader scope than Early U.S. History.

Sept 25: Early American Cookbook Contexts

• Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, United Tastes: The Making of the First American Cookbook (2: Culinary Tradition), 29–51. This provides a fascinating cultural background of cookbooks and their evolution. Honestly the first few sentences of each paragraph will give you enough background.
• Rachel A. Snell, As North American as Pumpkin Pie: Cookbooks and the Development of National Cuisine in North America, 1796-1854. This title is misleading, as the article is more about how cookbooks can be used to create a national identity more than a cuisine. And that’s precisely why it’s interesting and useful to us in thinking about how to read old cookbooks. The analysis here is a great example of what I hope you’ll do (on a much smaller scale) with your own cookbooks.

Some cookbooks mentioned in the readings

• Amelia Simmons, American Cookery. For more, see Harry Haff, The Founders of American Cuisine: Seven Cookbook Authors, with Historical Recipes (2: Amelia Simmons), 21–33. This is a great example of how the author analyzes Simmons’s cookbook, particularly the way the author comments on how explanation or ambiguities in the recipes reflect what readers would know or not know.
• Lydia Child, American Frugal Housewife
• Mary Randolph The Virginia Housewife
• Eliza Leslie, Miss Leslie's Complete Cookery

7: Sep 30 + Oct 2

Sep 30: Expansion and Immigration

• HAE, 57–87 (3: Expansion and Immigration).

Oct 2: Restaurants as Agents of Change

• Samantha Barbas, “‘I’ll Take Chop Suey’: Restaurants as Agents of Culinary and Cultural Change”, The Journal of Popular Culture, 36.4 (2003): 669–86. As a complement to the HAE chapter, this article vividly illustrates how a certain kind of cuisine is adopted, adapted, and transformed into the melting pot of American food. There is way more detail than we need here, but Barbas paints an intriguing portrait of the creation of Chinese American food, which I would say has been one of the most vibrant genres of cookbooks in the last few years.

8: Fall Break

Oct 7 AND Oct 9: FALL BREAK

NO CLASS! Make some good food. Argue about its authenticity.

9: Oct 14 + 16

Welcome back! Is anything more American than cereal for breakfast?

Oct 14: Improving Nature

Today we look at an interesting early connection between food, health, and technology that still influences our food choices.

• Katherine Turner, How the Other Half Ate (Ch. 2: Factories, Railroads, and Rotary Eggbeaters), eBook pp. 40–48 (read up to the “Working Class Kitchens” heading). [online through UNM]

Oct 16: Cereal

• Sarah Pruitt, “How an Accidental Invention Changed What Americans Eat for Breakfast”
• Blake Hatton, The Early Years of American Ready to Eat Breakfast Cereal: The Breakfast Cereal Revolution Until 1930.
• Jaya Saxena, How Cereal Became the Quintessential American Breakfast. This is fun for for its focus on advertising.

10: Oct 21 + 23

Building off the theme of how dietary and moral advice are frequently intertwined, today we look at how popularization of nutritional science provided the perfect “objective” rationale for telling the working classes (and especially immigrants) how they should eat. As we’ll see, the goal seems to have been as much as about health as it was to encourage immigrants to be more economically efficient, and therefore “more American”. This topic may seem unique to the early 19th century and immigration, but even in 2025, a healthier body is still often thought of as a “better” body. The health industry is worth a gazillion dollars in part because it’s not just about health!

Oct 21: Nutrition, Economy, and Citizenship

The idea that we should make decisions on what to eat based on a supposedly objective metric of health has been labelled nutritionism—an ISM like catholocism, totalitarianism—an IDEOLOGY of food and how to eat. There is even an official disorder called orthorexia—wanting to eat “right”. This is often presented as a relatively new (last 40 or 50 years at most) phenomenon, but it actually has a LONG. It is striking that considering how much culture is very different now, and nutritional knowledge has advanced considerably since ~1900, the idea that we can assess and measure morality through food, diet, and health has persisted remarkably well.

• Katherine Turner, How the Other Half Ate (Ch. 1: The Problem of Food), ebook pp. 14–39. [online through UNM] This book gives us excellent background on working-class life in the U.S. around 1900. There is way more detail than we need (but helps ground the analysis in specific examples as I’m always asking you to do), so be sure you’re reading to grasp the big picture of who the working class are, how they eat, and what they value (and don’t) in food.

Oct 23: Scientific Moralization

• Charlotte Biltekoff, Eating Right in America (Ch. 2: Scientific Moralization), 13–44. This reading illustrates how early nutritional scientists and social reformers tried to contain and order the chaos of diverse tastes, preferences, and eating habits of all the different people immigrating to the U.S. from the 1880s to the 1920s. The emphasis on dietary habits was a way of creating/maintaining a more consistent societal fabric. In the minds of social reformers, there was too much cultural and culinary diversity; the country needed a standard way of eating to make a stronger and more unified, more civilized bodies of citizens. Note how this is somewhat contrary to the blending/adaptation narrative we’ve read about at times with respect to various food traditions. Biltekoff claims that all dietary advice has a strong moral component to it.

11: Oct 28 + 30

Industrializing Meat

Oct 28: Beef

• Joshua Specht, The price of plenty: how beef changed America

Oct 30: Chicken

• Emeyln Rude, Tastes like Chicken, 6–11; 27–39; 130–134; 141–160; 181–192.
  • Sorry for all the partial sections here, but the PDF is just the pages you need to read (the book tends to go off on lots of cool tangents, so we skip around to stay on topic).
  • This looks like a crazy amount of reading, but the physical pages and number of words on them are quite small, and many pages are recipes that you can skip over. It goes by really fast, and it’s a fun non-academic read.

12: Nov 4 + 6

Nov 4:

• Warren Belasco, Appetite for Change (Oppositional Identities), 43–67.
• Megan Elias, Food on the Page (Oppositional Appetites), 145–176.

Nov 6:

• Menaka Wilhelm, The Far Out History Of How Hippie Food Spread Across America

13: Nov 11 + 13

As you are all well aware, the Southwest has a pretty amazing mix of foodways. While we’ve read in general terms about blending of food traditions, this week is we have two primary goals:

• Learn more about the various historical traditions of food in the Southwest
• Look in more depth at a specific region as a site of adaptation and resistance to new foods.

Nov 11: Untangling Food in the Southwest

• Jeffrey M. Pilcher, “Tex-Mex, Cal-Mex, New Mex, or Whose Mex? Notes on the Historical Geography of Southwestern Cuisine”. Journal of the Southwest 43.44 (2001): 659-–79. Like many sources we’ve used, there is more detail than we need. But you know how to handle that by this point—read for the big picture!
• Anastacia Uriegas, Fajitas, Queso & Enchiladas: A Look at the Origins of Tex-Mex Favorites

Nov 13: Culinary Borderlands

• Katherine Massoth, “‘Mexican Cookery that Belongs to the United States’: Evolving Boundaries of Whiteness in New Mexican Kitchens”, in Food Across Borders (ed. Garcia, DuPuis, and Mitchell), 44–59. I love this article because it tells a clear story about the intersection of race, culture, and food with abundant historical examples. As much as we’ve read about mingling of ingredients and merging of dishes, most students get a new perspective on food and identity from this reading.

14: Nov 18 + 20

Nov 18: Culinary Diffusion

We’ve already looked at the intersection of food traditions in the Southwest, and today we look at food moving out of specific regions. We’ve already covered this a little with our reading on Chinese food in the 19th century, but here focus specifically on diffusion as a general concept and how meanings of food get twisted as food moves around geographies and cultures.

• Helen Zoe Veit, Modern Food, Moral Food (6: Americanizing the American Diet), 123–56.
• Amy Bentley, “From Culinary Other to Mainstream America: Meanings and Uses of Southwestern Cuisine”, in Culinary Tourism (ed. Lucy M. Long), University Press of Kentucky (2013), 209–223.

Nov 20: Food Blog Analysis

15: Thanksgiving

Just one meeting this week, and we’re going back in time a little to examine the historical construction of Thanksgiving. Lots of ideas for the dinner table!

Nov 25: Thanksgiving

• Philip Deloria, “The Invention of Thanksgiving”, New Yorker, 95.37 (November 25, 2019): 70–74. [Also in Zotero if the link doesn’t work.]
• Janet Siskind, “The Invention of Thanksgiving: A Ritual of American Nationality”, 167–91.
• First Thanksgiving Menu. This quick read serves two purposes: it’s a nice overview of what food were likely available at the harvest celebration of 1621. And it’s a good example of uncritical food history that focuses entirely on food without much of the historical context (neither in the 1600s or 1900s).

Nov 27: THANKSGIVING!

16: Dec 2 - 4

Dec 2: Culinary Appropriation

I find most culinary appropriation conversations to be unhelpfully superficial. It is pointless:

• to debate whether culinary/cultural appropriation actually happens (it does)
• whether it’s just some people being overly sensitive (it is)
• whether it can be an inadvertent or purposeful tool of marginalization (it can).

These are non-debatable facts. What matters for today is how we can learn to think and talk about appropriation in a sufficiently nuanced way that encourages innovation and adaptation in terms of food while simultaneously respecting cultural heritage and meanings.

• Michael Twitty, The Cooking Gene, 1–24.
• Michael Twitty on Culinary Justice
• Sarah Handley-Cousins, Slavery & Soul Food: African Crops and Enslaved Cooks in the History of Southern Cuisine. Listen or read the transcript.

Dec 4: Course Conclusions

No readings for today, but crucial tips for succeess on your final course reflection due next week!

Dec 12 Finals Due

Your FINAL Learning Reflection—over the WHOLE CLASS—needs to be turned in BY THE END OF TODAY. See the Final Course Reflection Guide. I can’t emphasize enough that this SHOULD NOT BE MERELY A SUMMARY of what we’ve covered. Instead, as the instructions explain in more detail, illustrate how your thinking about food has changed over the month, and how your submitted work justifies what you think should be your overall grade for the course.