The focus and methodology of We Are What We Eat, excerpted from "Sources."
Most of my primary research was undertaken as part of five regional case studies: in Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Francisco, Charleston, New York, and San Antonio. My goal was to choose cities and surrounding areas that represent the regional and ethnic diversity of American food markets. I wanted to encompass the culinary legacies of diverse physical environments (desert and swamp, mountain and plains, hot and cold), the complex legacies of three major early European empires (Spanish, English, and French), the African slave trade, and several major Native American cultures, and thus the regional cuisines of North, South, Midwest, East, and West.
Furthermore, I wanted my case studies to reflect the differing histories of regional integration into the national marketplace for foodstuffs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, encompassing areas of production, processing, and sale, of subsistence farming and of rapid urbanization, and of corporate and commercial evolution. Finally, I wanted my case studies to reflect a wide range of ethnic interactions: between indigenous peoples and colonizers, between native-born Americans and immigrant newcomers, between northerners and southerners, and between immigrants of differing backgrounds during the mass migrations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and during the post-1965 migrations. By no means are all of my illustrations of general patterns drawn from New York, Charleston, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, but I have drawn heavily on my research in these five cities for stories of how family, community, and business intertwined in defining ethnic and national identities in particular times and places.
I chose Charleston because in its own peculiar way the city represents the regional eating of the Southeast. Settled early by English, Scottish, and French Huguenots, Charleston's European population quickly found itself outnumbered by the Africans they enslaved to raise the principal crop of the coastal Carolinas and Georgia--rice. The wealthiest plantation economy in the South in the eighteenth century, Charleston declined in the nineteenth century but never lost its reputation for good and extravagant eating among both white and black residents. Significantly for my study, Charleston never attracted large numbers of new settlers from abroad, but remained a largely biracial society--a declining port city with ties to its largely agricultural hinterland--well into the twentieth century.
In sharp contrast to Charleston was the burgeoning multi-ethnic city of New York, home of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. North of New York lived some of the most highly organized Native Americans of the pre-Columbian era, but they were also representatives of a corn-based culture characteristic of much of the eastern woodlands. The New York area was colonized first by the Dutch and then by the English, and New York's unique colonial and commercial, and later industrial and corporate, development made it what it still is today--an astonishingly diverse "city of immigrants." Germans and Irish dominated the nineteenth-century city; Italians and Jews were prominent in the turn-of-the-century city. Native minorities from Puerto Rico and the American South joined the crowd of multi-ethnic eaters in the interwar years, while today Chinese, Korean, Puerto Ricans, and peoples from the Caribbean and South America--many of African descent--again make New York the urban East Coast melting pot par excellence.
The contrast between the relatively conservative eating habits of the Southeast and the rapidly evolving multi-ethnicity of New York City points clearly to the role of population movements in defining and altering regional markets and cuisines into the twentieth century. New York was a center for kosher food production and beer brewing, where rich and poor Americans alike first weighed the pleasures and dangers of eating new foods plied by exotic strangers, and where eager public officials tried, with only limited success, to convince foreign-born consumers that an American diet of cream sauces and simple New England staples was a necessary step along the road to full participation in American life.
Representing the Upper Midwest, westward expansion, and the vast wheat-based agriculture that changed American eating in the nineteenth century are the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Colonized initially by the French, and subsequently by immigrant farmers from Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, Minneapolis became my case study of the American heartland, of the interaction of foreign eating habits with a new American environment and of the relationship between large-scale commercial agriculture and food processing. Much of the grain that changed the United States from a nation of corn-eaters to wheat-eaters found its way to Minneapolis to be milled, and the city was home to some of the most important milling corporations of the country. At the same time, no region better demonstrates how immigrant communities experimented with noncorporate forms of food processing and food retailing, largely through producer and consumer cooperatives. Although this region has attracted some new immigrants recently, its local life and culture has been less affected--again, until quite recently--by the northward migration of African-Americans. It was rather the immigrations of northern Europeans during the nineteenth century that defined the region and the cultural mainstream of American (or more properly mid-western) eating. It also provided Garrison Keillor with much humorous material for his sketches about Lake Woebegon casseroles (with their mushroom-soup base) and the yuppie snobbery of the Cafe Boeuf. In a multicultural America, the eating habits of the Upper Midwest and the South--regions relatively untouched by the significant migrations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries--seem oddly old-fashioned.
Selecting a city and region in the Southwest posed the most difficult choice in this study. I wanted a town shaped by significant, and long-term, immigrations of Mexicans. But having already settled on Charleston as an example of a city and region with a colonial-era local cuisine relatively unaffected by more recent migrations, I was careful not to duplicate that pattern for the Southwest, as I easily could have by studying Tucson or Santa Fe. Looking farther afield, I chose San Antonio. Although geographically outside the historical center of Meso-American corn cultures at their most elaborated (for example, in New Mexico), San Antonio shared with that region a common encounter of Native Americans with the Spanish empire and the establishment of missions on its frontier region, El Norte. In addition (and unlike Charleston), its food markets brought local Spanish speakers into contact not only with Anglo-Americans but with a variety of immigrant groups--both European and Mexican--in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ultimately, then, I opted for a look at Tex-Mex regional eating, rather than at Southwest Sonoran or Hispanic cuisine (both of which did, however, find their way into my discussions of colonial era exchanges).
Having guaranteed attention to the Spanish empire and to Mexican immigrants in choosing San Antonio, I found it important to select for my West Coast case a city shaped by trans-Pacific exchanges. Los Angeles had its attractions, but San Francisco's multi-ethnicity made it a better counter-balance to New York in the East. The city has attracted large Asian and European immigrant populations, and it is located at the edge of one of the most important agricultural regions of the country. A further advantage is its nearby vineyards, whose quality quickly surpassed that of southern California and has made San Francisco the center of California's impressive wine industry today. While large-scale agribusiness was scarcely invented in California, it probably reached its zenith there, especially in the twentieth century. The state's truck farming, fruit orchards, and wine industry provide wonderful case studies of ethnic interaction, while San Francisco's urban elite bohemians and its tourist-oriented Chinatown also provide early West Coast examples of multi-ethnic eating.
My selections were not perfect. None of these cities falls firmly within the most intensive corn belt of the indigenous Native American world, nor within the later American corn belt of the pig-rearing, liquor-distilling region of the "Old Northwest" of Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois. To the degree that I may have neglected the place of salt pork in the settlement of the West, as well as the growth of the working classes in its large urban centers as well as the integration of the South and its slave population into the antebellum national economy, it is largely a result of this gap in my research. And finally, since I refer so often to America's creole eating habits, it may seem awkward that I chose not to study the city that actually calls its local cuisine a creole--New Orleans. This is a decision I now regret.
With all their limits, the eating habits of Americans in the five cities that appear and reappear throughout this book reveal surprisingly similar cultural dynamics at work. In each I found eaters looking to satisfy their tastes for the familiar and the novel; in each I found enclave businessmen balancing communal ties to their home communities with the search for wider markets; in each I found the identities of foods and producers, consumers and retailers, in considerable flux. Nowhere did cultural conservatism reign unambiguously, least of all in housewives' kitchens or "twixt cup and lip" at American dining tables. I believe I have not erred in taking these to be regional expressions of national, if not absolutely human and universal, patterns.
