(no subject)

[camwyn]

Back... I don't know, sometime in the late 1990s, when I was still living with my parents, I had made something of a hobby out of cooking. This was more because I was curious about some recipes that I never really saw on restaurant menus and figured I'd have to make myself than anything else. One day a friend of mine called me while I was in the middle of one of them, and I explained to him over the phone that I was having some trouble holding the phone for this call because I'd found this great-sounding recipe for linguine with cracked black pepper and I was in the middle of rolling out the dough by hand, having successfully cracked the peppercorns and realized they wouldn't go through the pasta machine very well.

There was silence on the wire for a bit. Eventually Jeff said, "You know, that's... not really normal. Most people just buy the food they want. Have you ever considered taking cooking classes?"

I am reminded of this now because the other day I acquired a copy of Gastroanomalies, by James Lileks; Something From The Oven: Reinventing Dinner In 1950s America by Laura Shapiro, and Better Than Homemade by Carolyn Wyman. I bought these partly because I enjoy being horrified by old recipe pictures and what people used to eat versus what we eat now (I had a copy of The Gallery Of Regrettable Food, too, but I never found it when I was packing to move). Part of it was because I was really fascinated by the prospect of learning exactly how far the American diet changed after World War II. Part of it was because there were several other books on the food of the time frame that caught my interest but that I couldn't afford just yet, and...

... and that was the point at which I heard "You know, that's... not really normal. Have you considered taking classes?" again in my head. And remembered that my mom suggested I take advantage of being in the vicinity of approximately eight squintillion universities to go back to school for a doctorate. I know she probably meant in computers or business or economics.

But food, man. Food. It's part of anthropology. I did a term paper in psychological anth on food taboos, back in college. Still have one of the primary sources I used- Calvin Schwabe's book Unmentionable Cuisine. (I keep meaning to buy Eat Not This Flesh, too- that's one I borrowed from interlibrary loan.) It's a huge damn industry and understanding the roots of where modern eating habits come from is kind of increasingly important in a world with a more and more rapidly changing food supply...

I am going to have to think about this. And gather more books about food and America's very, very weird relationship to it. You can't tell me our interaction with our diet is anything like healthy or normal.

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Did you ever read What Einstein Told His Cook??

[camwyn]

I've heard of it, but I've never read it.

[bjornwilde]

It's pretty entertaining and educational, especially if you want to know the nuts and bolts of baking.

[gramarye1971]

I'm going to pick up that book on reinventing dinner in the 1950s, because the library has it and I suddenly need to read that kind of social analysis like burning.

[agonistes]

Peripheral to your interests, maybe, but also kind of not really: the Southern Foodways Alliance. They occupy the upstairs part of the building where most of my classes have been the last couple of years. Their documentary projects might be of particular interest -- they trend more documentary/exploratory than psychological, and they're definitely regional, but they're also on the front lines of foodways scholarship, which is starting to be a Thing in interdisciplinary circles. And UMass-Boston, I know, has an American Studies grad program (as does BU) that is particularly into material culture -- food might be something they do.

[camwyn]

Ooooh. This, I think, I am going to have to look into. Thank you.

[ymfaery]

It might not have been that normal *then*, but I get the impression a lot of folks nowadays like making their food from scratch, especially with organic food getting more and more mainstream (if not necessarily cheap).

[rymenhild]

Huh. I bet you could do really fascinating work in that direction.

[telophase]

If you ever get your hands on a copy of Sylvia Lovegren's Fashionable food : seven decades of food fads, it's hilarious. I bought a copy for my mom back in 1995 when it first came out, and we both had the same experience reading it...we'd go along laughing at the ridiculous and horrifying things that middle America used to eat, then run smack dab into a dish that WE loved and have fond memories of (chuck roast in foil, in my case!).

We also saw how faddish foods for one generation growing up got translated into icky food for the next. When my maternal grandmother was growing up in the 20s and 30s, tomato aspic was a huge thing, and she continued to make and eat it after she started a family, and Mom grew up hating it. I don't remember the thing that

The book covers the 1920s through the early 1990s. It'd be interesting to see it updated.

[cameoflage]

I'd be quite interested in reading that.