From house slave to glamour girl

Revolution at the Table

The Transformation of the American Diet 

by Harvey Levenstein

Gosh! I'd never dreamed of all the history behind our crappy American diet. Except...it wasn't always as crappy as it is now. The book leaves off in the 70's, so it doesn't fully comprehend our fast food and convenience food explosions. It doesn't mention the extremes of over-processing that makes so much of the food in a grocery store not really food at all. It omits how nutritional qualities and flavor were whittled away as industrial agriculture learned to grow things bigger and faster. And it's not able to tackle the issues of weight gain and adult onset diabetes and other diet-related diseases. I assume these things come in the next volume.

But I'm going to have to give it a rest before attempting the sequel, Paradox of Plenty. This one was heavy going--it wasn't a slog, had no more detail than needed, and was very well-written--but I still found it heavy.  (And the print was small)  Mr. Levenstein did his research well, covering 1880 through 1970, and that's a lot of material.

He writes about how prohibition helped shift our idea of eating out from a rich person's or drinking man's prerogative to and activity that can be done by everyone, every day. Shoppers and shop girls, working men and whole families--they all began to enjoy light meals, sandwiches, cold drinks and ice cream at the soda fountains and cafes.  He writes about how the science of Home Economics was created as a career path for women who weren't approved to work in the hard sciences. He shows how diet reform for the working class people was seldom attempted and seldom successful, but the diets did change, eventually, through peer pressure (school lunches; army mess halls) and aspiration to eat like the middle class. There's a chapter The Rise of the Giant Food Producers all about Campbells and Heinz and Schlitz and the triumph of pasteurized milk over fresh. He spends a chapter on the food fads, frauds, and plain old nonsense that abounded at the turn of the century.

Other than the influence of prohibition on eating patterns, I was most surprised to read about the shifting expectations for middle class women, from mistress of servants to homemaker. I don't know what percentage of middle class women employed cooks in the 1800s, but that percentage dropped steadily and drastically--by 1970 it was rare. Without the cooks and servants to direct, the woman was supposed to do it all herself--to be a good cook, an exacting house cleaner, a careful mother, and a thin, beautiful, sexy lady. Wearing stockings and perfectly manicured nails.  Hows that for a self image goal?

I did get weirded out by one factual error. In writing of Mexican laborers diets, he states that...the processing of the corn for masa, which involves soaking it in lime, removes important nutrients as well.  Huh? I have always read that the preparation of corn with lime water increases the nutritional value of the corn meal it produces. Specifically it allows the niacin to be easily absorbed, and although it reduces the overall protein content slightly, it improves the balance of amino acids. As a side effect it adds minerals, especially calcium.  I'm not an expert on this, but the error seemed rather glaring and it made me doubt his other assessments of traditional diets of immigrants against the American diet they adopted.  So I went back and read that chapter; didn't see anything else wrong. In an earlier chapter he'd talked about Italian, Jewish and other immigrants to the cities of the north; her writes how their diets also changed and in some ways, much for the worse. 

Writing all this makes me want to read the sequel now. We'll see.