Table manners: how food choices helped shape culture and politics in nascent America.

• Author: Bjerga, Alan
• Position: A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America - Book Review

A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America By James McWilliams Columbia University Press, $29.95

Contemporary Americans who gather produce at the supermarket in the few hours after work might forget that the harvesting and preparing, of food was once an almost all-consuming activity for our forebears. But in A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, James McWilliams, a historian at Texas State University, explains how food choices shaped cultural and political identifies in nascent America. From the Puritans in Plymouth to plantation owners in Virginia, everyone needed to eat, and the ways in which colonists variously went about filling their stomachs had profound consequences. McWilliams argues credibly that decisions about which crops to grow, what was acceptable to eat, and who to wade with to get it accelerated the development not only of regional identities but of the colonists' collective desire to secede from England.

Take the Pilgrims. The settlers who held the first Thanksgiving came to Massachusetts with a goal of self-sufficiency in proper English fashion. They wanted to show those high-church types what clean living and a new world could do for godliness, but they didn't want to grow so foreign that they couldn't be emulated in the old country. Arriving in Plymouth to plant seeds of salvation, they quickly found problems with the soil--namely, that it wouldn't grow wheat, the staple crop of choice for proper English families. Corn was much better stilted to New England soil; the Indians seemingly could grow it without any effort, a double affront to an already well-cultivated Protestant work ethic. Building a colony on corn automatically threw the Puritans off their script. In old England, corn was something fed to pigs, and its New World stares as the preferred crop of heathens didn't help matters either. But holiness doesn't stave off starvation, so the Puritans began to grow corn. In time, they even grew to like it. In 1662, colonial leader John Winthrop stood before the Royal Society of London to make the case that corn was completely fit for human consumption and just as good as wheat "like someone today saying that we should eat dog food," McWilliams observes. It's not hard to imagine Winthrop, returning to his colony after a skeptical reception in London, realizing that while his colony served the English crown, it wasn't as English as he had once thought or hoped.

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