American Food in American Literature
centered in the bayou area of Louisiana known as Cajun food. Along with original contributions made by the indigenous peoples to the first colonists’ and pioneers’ diets such as corn, some of these food items that have lasted longer than the institution of slavery itself have also found places in American literature.
B. Purity and Impurity. The early colonists on the American East Coast brought with them a deep fear of hell and a deep desire to purify their lives of any elements that prevented the practice of true Christianity. True Christianity meant for them a literal reading of the bible and a literal construction of human social life around the teachings and tenets of the bible. Red, for them, was the color of the devil, the color of evil and the color of the indigenous people. Pure black and pure white were their colors of choice.
Those Americans who loved the wilderness, however, quickly adopted the use of multi-colored animal skins for clothing and natural dyes for coloring cloth or their skin. It was therefore no mere historical accident that the American cultural revolution of the 60’s adopted wildly colored clothing, vehicles, hair and language as an obvious and dramatic signifier against the dark suits, white shirts, dark ties and dark shoes of establishment figures. It was no historical accident that the beatniks and hippies both reached out for foods that differed greatly in flavor, color, smell, taste and texture from white bread, roast beef, boiled potatoes, oatmeal, milk and tea. It was also no historical accident that some of the most influential writers of this era, such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, found deep and lasting inspiration from the literature and the food of lands and peoples far beyond the American shores.
C. Abundance and Scarcity. From 1895 to 1915, approximately 23,000,000 immigrants moved from Europe to the United States. These people came from all parts of Europe. They left living conditions characterized by poverty, political turmoil and oppression and lack of any kind of opportunity for improvement. America was a land that promised to make their dreams of prosperity, wealth, abundance and freedom come true. Many of those immigrants made their fortunes in America then returned with them to their families in Europe. But many others stayed in America, had their families there and began contributing tastes, colors and flavors to an increasingly heterogeneous American scene. This period of intense migration saw the beginnings of neighborhoods in major cities, such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. These were ethnic enclaves for Italians, Poles, Germans, Jews, as well as Blacks trying to find an alternative to the militarily defeated but still powerful racism of their former southern masters, or others whose strong sense of group identity always brought with it special foods that were amplified by the increasingly large scales of American life.
At the same time, the rapid growth of large-scale manufacturing, in factories employing tens of thousands of immigrants who were poorly paid and allowed only a minimal education beyond the background of their European origins, turned some of these neighborhoods into the first American slums and ghettos. Extremely low wages, non-existent social services, waves of unemployment and the increasing pressure of large families and new arrivals frequently put many of these new Americans on the edges of malnutrition, hunger and even starvation. Abundance and scarcity began to appear as poles of a socioeconomic oscillation driven not by such obvious institutions as slavery but by beliefs, prejudices and attitudes about the superiority and inferiority of different kinds of peoples coupled with firmly established patterns of access and lack of access to resources. The negative shock of World War I was followed by the positive euphoria of the roaring 20’s. That decade of unprecedented prosperity and national expansion was followed by the great depression of the 30’s. America was clearly moving into the vanguard of a world order whose extremes ranged from genocide to population explosion, from starvation to rotting surpluses and from worn feet in foul mud to toenail polish in satin slippers on polished marble.
A first glimpse of the theme of continuity and discontinuity can be seen by comparing the two citations at the beginning of this essay. Elinor Wylie lived from 1885 to 1928. Jack Kerouac lived from 1922 to 1969. Ripe fruit appears as an edible food from the tree in Wylie’s poem and as an ingredient of pie in Kerouac’s novel. Wylie’s cherries and peaches are closer to unprocessed nature than Kerouac’s baked apple pie. Wylie’s poem signifies the rootedness of the early European colonists in a land that