Food and Diet

Food and Diet. If one had to sum up the history of Americans and their food in a word, it would likely be “abundance”. Although the first English settlers suffered difficult times, most were soon much better fed than their counterparts across the Atlantic. Thanks mainly to better diets, George Washington's Revolutionary War troops were, on average, much taller than the British soldiers facing them. Citizens of the new republic prided themselves on what a Philadelphia physician called their “superabundance” of food. For most of the free population, this meant lots of meat, accompanied by breads made from corn, rye, and, increasingly, wheat. Fruits and vegetables were abundant in season, while wild animals inland and plentiful fish and seafood along the coasts provided additional sources of protein. The winter and early spring diet comprised preserved pork, bread, beans, and root vegetables—filling, if monotonous.

By the 1830s new roads, canals, and steamboats brought vast new areas of farmland into the market economy, making a wider variety of foodstuffs available for longer durations. Food reformers now cautioned against excessive indulgence. The minister and temperance advocate Sylvester Graham, warning that meat, alcohol, and spicy foods sapped the body's vital force, condemned such foods as processed white flour that had been altered from its God‐given natural state.

America's slave population, totaling nearly four million by 1860, experienced a very different dietary environment. Slave families typically received a scant weekly ration of cornmeal and fatty pork. Some supplemented this unbalanced fare with fish, small game, eggs, and vegetables they provided for themselves.

After mid‐century, the expanding railroads transported affordable supplies of wheat, pork, and beef to the growing cities; market gardening and dairy farms proliferated around them; and steamships brought exotic foods from abroad. By 1900, skilled chefs were turning out elaborate multicourse meals in the style of French haute cuisine for the wealthy. The growing middle and upper‐middle classes could readily purchase the abundant foods but could not afford the servants to prepare and serve them in this fashion and were thus amenable to calls by a new generation of food reformers for dietary restraint.

The scientific basis for the reformers’ crusade was the so‐called New Nutrition: the discovery by chemists of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, each with its unique physiological function. Proper nutrition now meant consuming as much of these as necessary—any less was unhealthful; any more, wasteful. Urging immigrant workers to economize, the reformers insisted that the proteins in beans were fully as nutritious as those in beefsteak. The middle classes, heeding the call to choose foods on the basis of their “physiological economy” rather than taste, made culture‐heroes out of dietary faddists like John Harvey Kellogg, who amplified Graham's theories with purgative nostrums based on recent scientific discoveries that the colon harbored large amounts of bacteria. The “scientific cooking” advocate Fannie Farmer offered simple menus and exact recipes in her Boston Cooking School Cook Book (1896). Women in the new profession of home economics, teaching about food and health in the schools, similarly insisted that science rather than taste should guide one's food choices.

For the urban immigrant poor, meanwhile, providing even subsistence nutrition for their families proved difficult. In hard times, such as the Depression of the 1890s, it was more difficult still. Impure water, tainted milk, and spoiled meat contributed to illness, infant mortality, and periodic epidemics in the slums. Tougher public‐health measures such as the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and milk pasteurization gradually ameliorated the worst of these dietary hazards, but their health ultimately improved mainly because of more ample and varied diets.

During World War I, the federal Food Administration used the New Nutrition to persuade Americans to substitute beans, whole grains, and fresh vegetables for the meat and wheat being shipped to Europe. Meanwhile, the discovery of vitamins in the early twentieth century gave rise to a new nutritional paradigm. Its dissemination was encouraged by the transformation of food production by mass‐production industries characterized by large capital investments, mechanization, complex distribution networks, and large promotion and advertising budgets. Servants having practically disappeared from middle‐class homes, housewives were encouraged to buy labor‐saving processed foods such as canned goods, as well as vitamin‐rich citrus fruits and milk, which were said to be essential for children's health. Though still little understood, vitamins proved to be a food promoter's dream. Citrus growers, dairymen, the grain‐milling industry, pickle producers—almost anyone could and did make extravagant claims. When synthesized vitamin pills became available in the late 1930s, food producers insisted that such supplements were unnecessary: A “balanced diet” would provide more than enough nutrients.

Neither the Depression of the 1930s nor World War II undermined confidence in America's abundant food supply. Indeed, the Depression‐era agricultural crisis was defined as one of overproduction of food and maldistribution of income. And despite wartime rationing, many doubted that the shortages were real. Recurring rumors insisted food supplies were more than adequate, but that government incompetence or crooked middlemen were keeping them off the market.

In the postwar “Baby Boom” years, 1946 to 1963, the long‐term tendency of food preparation to move outside the home intensified as the food industries sold harried young mothers and homemakers on the “convenience” of their products. Frozen foods and other new kinds of processed, precooked, and packaged foods became popular. From 1949 to 1959, chemists developed more than four hundred additives to help food survive these new processes. Restaurants, especially the proliferating fast‐food chains, welcomed this development: With food preparation reduced to defrosting, frying, or adding hot water, unskilled labor could replace expensive, often temperamental cooks.

Gastronomical considerations took a backseat in all of this, but few seemed to notice, since haute cuisine had long since fallen out of favor. In the 1920s, Prohibition had deprived expensive restaurants of the income from alcohol that had padded their profit margins. During World War II, a preoccupation with fine food had seemed unpatriotic. By the 1950s, food tastes were no longer an important mark of social distinction. Most Americas seemed satisfied by beefsteak, pizzas, fried chicken, canned‐food casseroles, Jell‐O molds, and frozen TV dinners. Regional differences, already undermined in the 1920s and 1930s, practically disappeared under the onslaught of mass‐produced foods aimed at supposedly homogeneous Middle American tastes. Government officials, educators, journalists, and the food industries insisted that Americans were “The Best Fed People on Earth”.

The self‐satisfaction eroded in the 1960s with the realization that, amid massive agricultural surpluses, millions of poor citizens could not afford an adequate diet. Programs were instituted to distribute surplus commodities and food stamps to the poor. As middle‐class concerns over the healthfulness of their own diet increased, a new dietary paradigm, which one might call Negative Nutrition, arose. Whereas earlier nutritional systems had emphasized consuming healthful foods, Negative Nutrition warned against eating certain foods, particularly those treated with potentially harmful pesticides and chemical fertilizers and those robbed of nutrients by overprocessing. Veterans of the New Left, meanwhile, redirected their critique of capitalism toward its effects on food and the environment. The giant corporations, they charged, used their immense advertising resources to brainwash Americans into eating overprocessed, denutrified, unhealthful, and environmentally hazardous products. They pointed out, for example, that the spread of cattle ranching in South America to meet U.S. demands for beef was contributing directly to the destruction of the rain forests. Both health and morality, they insisted, dictated a preference for “organic” and “natural” foods, preferably grown by small producers.

The food industry responded nimbly, reformulating and repackaging their products with labels such as “Natural” and “Nature's Own”. However, new findings in nutritional science reinforced another aspect of Negative Nutrition, as specific foods came to identified as dangerous. Rising rates of heart disease were now blamed on high levels of cholesterol in many of America's favorite foods. Sugar, long linked to diabetes and now thought by some to be a factor in other diseases and psychological disorders, was called an addictive substance manipulated by food processors to “hook” children on nutritionally deficient products. Themes from the Graham and Kellogg eras resurfaced, as vegetarianism, once the domain of cranks, became a serious option for many. Issues relating to obesity added a new twist to the nutrition debate. In the later nineteenth century a full figure had been a mark of beauty for woman and a sign of health, wealth, and substance for men. Since the 1920s, however, evidence had accumulated of a relationship between excessive weight and higher mortality rates.

As in previous eras, food reformers mustered impressive scientific support. By the mid‐1970s, the federal government was supporting research on diet and health and urging Americans to lose weight and reduce the animal fat, sugar, and sodium in their diets. Organizations such as the American Heart Association underscored the need for dietary change. “Low‐fat,” “lite,” “no‐cal,” “cholesterol‐free,” and “sodium‐free” products now lined supermarket shelves.

The result reflected the paradoxes of American abundance. Many took to frenetic diet‐and‐exercise regimens, yet the average weight of Americans continued to rise. Although consumption of full‐fat dairy products and red meat fell, that of other fats soared, as did that of sugar and sodium. Dietary self‐denial was undermined by the foreign travel boom, which encouraged indulgence and helped once again to make food tastes a sign of social distinction. Consumers now had an unprecedented choice of foods and ways to consume them. As more women entered the workplace, the trend for food production to move outside the home accelerated. “Take‐home” foods boomed, as did eating out, particularly at fast‐food and other chain restaurants.

By the early twenty‐first century, as obesity and associated medical problems loomed ever larger as a public-health issue, diet, nutrition, and weight loss became national obsessions. Parents protested the introduction of fast foods and sweetened soft drinks in public schools. Lawyers planned lawsuits against fast–food chains, analogous to the lawsuits against tobacco companies, for knowingly endangering their customers' health. Weight‐loss programs proliferated, including the “Atkins Diet,” heavy on protein and low on carbohydrates, publicized by the cardiologist Dr. Robert C. Atkins in Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution (1972 and many later editions). An extreme manifestation of the preoccupation with food and diet was the growing popularity of expensive gastric bypass (“stomach stapling”) surgery as a last-ditch means of cutting intake and losing weight.

Persisting moralism, in the form of guilty consciences, impeded indulging in the abundance of food choices, but the targets of the guilt constantly shifted, as experts regularly warned of new food dangers and absolved old ones. With the Negative Nutrition now superimposed on older nutritional ideas, many Americans simultaneously tried to eat more of foods that were supposed to prevent or cure illness and promote general good health, and less of those foods deemed unhealthy or likely to cause weight gain. Americans seemed doomed by their past to both celebrate their food abundance and avoid enjoying it too much.
See also Agriculture; Alcohol and Alcohol Abuse; Canals and Waterways; Carson, Rachel; Dairy Industry; Depressions, Economic; Environmentalism; Health and Fitness; Immigration; Livestock Industry; Mass Marketing; Meatpacking and Meat Processing Industry; Roads and Turnpikes, Early; Slavery: Slave Families, Communities, and Culture; Temperance and Prohibition; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Richard Cummings , The American and His Food, 1940.
Waverly Root and and Richard de Rochemont , Eating in America: A History, 1976.
Stephen Nissenbaum , Sex, Diet and Disability in Jacksonian America, 1980.
Richard Hooker , Food and Drink in America: A History, 1981.
James Wharton , Crusades for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers, 1982.
Harvey Levenstein , Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, 1988.
Warren Belasco , Appetite for Change, 1989.
Harvey Levenstein , Paradox of Plenty: The Social History of Eating in Modern America, 1992.
Peter Stearns , Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West, 1997.

Harvey Levenstein