DUKES FANS:
“History is mostly side
effects’” historian Arnold Toynbee
“Nothing comes from
nowhere…there is a story behind every happening
that is often more fascinating than the happening itself” Anonymous
I was listening to a recent episode of the
Public Radio program Fresh Air, and Terry Gross was interviewing two people who
had written a book on the food of the Great Depression. I have both taught and
studied the Depression, and while not an expert on it, I do have a good general
knowledge of the era. I know about most of the historical and economic events
that led up to it, some key decisions that could have or should have been made differently,
the different popular music of the time, and a lot of the personal stories of
people of different cultures, colors, classes, and nationalities. But I knew
very little about the food of the time and how that cuisine was not only a
byproduct of the Depression itself but also a mirror of certain social
attitudes, technologies, and emerging science. As usual, there was a story
within and beneath the story, and it made for a fascinating 45 minutes of
radio.
Terry interviewed Jane Ziegelman
and Alex Coe, authors of A Square Meal: A
Culinary History of the Great Depression. They discussed how politicians, nutritionists,
social scientists and civic planners tried to approach food scarcity on a
nationwide scale. That was a huge endeavor in and of itself, but these
players also wanted to do more. They wanted to create a cuisine that would not
only provide hungry people with food and nutrition but also make an identity
statement about the United States. The questions and problems connected to food
scarcity tied not only into economics and health, but also into the nation’s
fears of immigrants and rising social and demographic changes. The planners
developed new ways to use institutions to address a nationwide problem, and they
took clever advantage of the relatively new technologies of mass canned and frozen
foods. They also tried to “help” millions of first and second generation
immigrants in the county adjust to being “American’ by eating an “American”
diet. This was as much about cultural identity as it was about food.
To that end, according
to Coe and Ziegelman, “strange “ foreign spices were to be left out of recipes
and prepared foods, especially spices that were too hot, strong, or, well
“spicy.” Vinegar and mustard were to be
limited as they might make people too “nervous or energetic.” Also left out and
limited were foods that were too “textured’ an/or ‘rough.” Smooth, creamy, and
what we today would call “bland” was the order of the day. If root vegetables
were to be a part of one’s cuisine, they had to be either baked or smothered in
a fairly tasteless sauce, preferably white. Calm foods were what was desired.
There were recipes for pasta and spaghetti, for example, but in both the government
recommended and prepared menus of the time, the pasta had to cook for some 25 minutes
until it was a mush. And many of the recipes
called for it to be mixed with white cream sauce, boiled carrots or other overcooked
veggies. Nutrition and supply were important-taste was less than secondary. Besides,
if it was too tasty, some planners thought, people might get too used to it and
start depending on it. That, it was thought, might “weaken their will “to look
for work; they would become too dependent on handouts.
This was also a time when public schools had
become mandated, so feeding kids via school lunches was another way civic
planners sought to address the food shortage. (We still do this today; free school
lunches and vaccination programs are outgrowths of this approach.) But this was
also another way to sell the American approach to eating. Kids of immigrants were
not only learning English and how to be trained to work in US factories; they
were also being taught how to grow up eating “American.” According to the
planners, they were using the new science of nutrition and the new technology
of being able to rapidly can, freeze and move food to help these poor and
disadvantaged kids get food and good nutrition. But no one had been checking to
see if these kids were already getting adequate nutrition in their meals at
home and if the only food problem they had was inadequate supply. Immigrants and
poor people in general know a lot about making do with little and creatively responding
to scarcity. When Ziegelman and Coe looked at the typical Italian immigrant
menu of the 1930’s they found that it had as much or more nutrition that many
of the meals recommended and provided by civic planners. But for the planners, nutrition
by itself was not enough; the students had to learn to eat less foreign and
more American. As with many social
problems, the backstory behind the problem was about much more than the
problem. Solving the food problems of the Depression was about much more than
just food.
There were some
interesting side effects that came out of this Depression era approach to food.
For better or worse, the growth of what was to be called “food science” really
got started during this era. Canning and freezing food to be shipped and delivered
to many different places was just the beginning. Frozen and canned foods became
an important way of serving food in the 1950’s-just think of the frozen dinners
that started appearing on the scene during the 1950’s and that still fill
freezers in supermarkets today. As refrigeration technologies grew, it soon became
possible to eat a strawberry in Connecticut in January or a spinach salad in Alaska
in February. Today we are wrestling with the questions of GMO’s-Genetically
Modified Food- bee killing pesticides, and more. All of these possibilities are
outgrowths of what happened during the Depression. For better or worse it took
off from there.
And there are many historians
who attribute the success of the US military in World War II in part to the planning
and organization that happened in response to the Depression’s employment and
food problems. President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conversation Corps, for example,
gave men employment doing the hard physical work of logging land, building
parks, clearing swamps, etc. This developed their bodies and got them used to
working as part of a squad and following discipline-essential qualities for a
military. But they also needed to be fed to do all of that work, so the Corps made
use of canned and frozen food and the “new American’ cuisine to efficiently
feed the hundreds of thousands of men who were in the Corps. This meant that by
the start of the war the US had a relatively large supply of men who were
fairly well-fed and healthy and who knew about unit discipline. It also meant
that the infrastructure for supplying and shipping large amounts of canned and
processed food overseas was already in place by the start of the war. They
needed only to develop an overseas component. According to these historians, then,
responding to the food crisis as it did inadvertently helped the US government fight
and win the war.
So once again, one event
or happening in history had side effects that rippled through the culture with surprising
and unexpected long range effects. That is not surprising; it is how history works
and how cultures, peoples and nations function. To me this is one of the joys
of history-to be able to trace some of the stories behind events, to make
connections, and learn and to tell those stories. When we are able to do that
we make some wonderful discoveries. For everything has at least one story behind
it-nothing comes from nowhere.
A link to the Fresh Air story:
http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2016/08/15/490049518/fresh-air-for-august-15-2016?showDate=2016-08-15
A link to LA Times story on feeding families during the Depression:
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