White People Food

White People Food Intentionally Processed. Intentionally Bland.

Green Bean Casserole - a cultural food item!

Blandness: An American Virtue - pg 8!

How Spaghetti - and Italians became White!

What is up with Jello Salad? “Shortly after the turn of the century there emerged a gelatin salad that crowned all these achievements, for it captured, confined, and molded raw vegetables themselves. This was the Perfection Salad.�89

Molded Cottage Cheese Salad

Meatloaf. Baked Beans with Pineapple. Pumpkin Pie. Cottage Cheese. Unseasoned Chicken. Tuna Noodle Casserole. Green Bean Casserole. Jello Salad. Mayonnaise.

All of these are foods that, today, fall under the category of White People Food. White People Food is only considered such in a society that also recognizes ethnic and regional food as valid ways of eating; it is the other that whiteness has so often set itself against.

Today white food can be placed in its own cultural category, but in the past, it was simply called American food. The story of white food is intimately connected with an American history of whiteness, and food itself gets to the heart of what it meant to be an American.

White food is by necessity absent a told history, because to tell the history is speak of colonialism, theft, patriarchy, and exclusion. Wheat was celebrated as an affirmation of empire and Manifest Destiny.1 America could not have indulged its long-delayed Pilgrim desires to be a country of meateaters without stealing Mexican land.2 And when the country began filling with immigrants, they discovered how essential eating white would be to be considered American.

White People Food: it is convenient, homogenized, and bland. Why do white peoples seem to be allergic to spices? Do white people know that Green Bean Casserole is white food? How did Spaghetti enter the mainstream? And what is up with Jello Salad? Let’s take a look!

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— Food places individuals in time, space, and social hierarchies.4 —

Green Bean Casserole A Cultural Item

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o look at green bean casserole is to see that it is made up of primarily two ingredients: cream of mushroom soup and canned green beans.

The culture of food is not a neutral thing. In analyzing the dynamics of food and culture, researcher Knut Oyangen says that, “food items become cultural items through the workings of a set of rules…Food roles and behavior, in turn, reflect the social structure of a society and the differences within it”.3 The green bean casserole is a cultural item that developed from a set of rules that emphasized whiteness. This reflected the social structure of a society that desired for everyone who wanted to become American, to first become white.

White food reflects the social structure of whiteness.

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Convenient Recipes An Archive of Whiteness

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anning technology emerged during the Civil War, and Americans willingly sacrificed taste for convenience.5 As food historian Jennifer Jensen Wallach says, by the beginning of the 20th century, “many Americans had grown to crave factory-processed foods”.6 One of the priorities of the processed food industry was homogeneity.7 Food coming out of the factory needed to look and taste exactly the same, every time, everywhere. This homogeneity standardized the national diet8 through mass production and distribution, and because the foods were intentionally bland in order to reach the widest possible audience9, blandness became standardized.

The homogenization of food did not just spread the same diet, but also the same whiteness. Recipes began to be built around convenience foods, and they were written for middleclass white women.10 These cookbooks played an important role in creating homogenized whiteness as the standard for what was considered American food, because the entire cooking industry also included “definitions of proper white womanhood”.11 The homogenization of the white diet can be contrasted with other cultures in America such as Creole, Cajun, and African, who did not abandon their food traditions in the name of uniformity and progress. In fact, Creole and Cajun food has been described as being “cheerfully unconscious of the very existence of Anglo-Saxon cooking”.12 As Michael Twitty says in his book about African-American cooking, the best food is homemade, fresh, and made from scratch.13 Part of the whiteness that is revealed in the convenience of green bean casserole is not having to do the work yourself. In describing his own Jewish and black cuisines’ history, Twitty says, “The food is an archive, a keeper of secrets”.14 White taste of blandness and uniformity was bred in the factory.15 There is no ancestral meaning behind a casserole. It is merely a manufactured whiteness.

This manufactured food got its start early in food technology history. Campbell’s started canning vegetables in 1869.16 In 1897, Campbell’s revolutionized soup by removing most of the water from canned soups, and in 1900, their soups were awarded 6

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a Gold Medallion at the Paris Exposition.17 But before real success could happen, the company needed to create a market for their product, because soup was a not a big part of the American diet.

One way they did this was by creating and encouraging “insecurities in women about their roles as mothers and homemakers…”18 The company’s main success came from the fact that they, unlike their competitors, marketed directly to the consumer, and not to sales reps or grocery stores,19 and they marketed their quality and low cost.20 As a means of selling more products, the Campbell company created recipes in free cookbooks, which eventually included both green bean and tuna noodle casseroles.21 How convenient.

But in the eating places along the roads the food has been clean, , colorless, and of a . It is almost as though the customers had no interest in what they ate as long as it had to embarrass them.

sameness

tasteless complete

no character

- John Steinbeck

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Enthusiastic Blandness An American Virtue

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ood and identity have been linked in the American consciousness since the beginning. Both the settlers in Massachusetts and Virginia believed that eating ‘savage’ Native American food created ‘savage’ people,22 and they submitted to it only as a last resort. They believed in the civilizing properties of simple British food, and thought there was a moral superiority in not being elaborate in their eating habits. This view was strengthened in the Revolutionary Era when luxury became associated with British aristocracy, and simplicity in food was the mark of a good patriot. As Wallach says, “Americans enthusiastically chose eating simply”.23 Along with simplicity of meal came simplicity of flavor. Influential food writers of the 19th century including Sylvester Graham, of the cracker, believed that rich food and spices caused indigestion24 as well as disease, madness, and social decline.25 As historian Katharina Vester says, early American recipes not only offered food that was “deliberately bland”,26 but promoted Puritan self-denial and middle-class virtues as being truly American.27 The absence of taste was a marker of class superiority, this voluntary sacrifice the mark of a good citizen.28 The first cookbook defined regional New England food as being American food,29 but of course, this definition of American food did not mean the inclusion of indigenous or African recipes; in saying American, they meant white.

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The food industry was soon populated by more than cookbook writers; a largely female industry called domestic science emerged towards the end of the 19th century, eventually becoming known as home economics. These women believed in the power of science and technology to transform the safety and quality of food that Americans ate. Like those who had come before, they also believed that identity and food were linked, that mealtimes contained a moral dimension, and that taste was of no consequence. Rooted in New England cooking, the foods these scientists spread to the nation were white in both intention and reality.

Domestic scientists believed, essentially as the first American settlers did, that wild food created wild people. They believed the ‘unhealthy’ diets of immigrants were responsible for all the social sins of the country30 and the solution was to abandon their tradition for the tradition of bland food. Domestic scientists believed that women would keep the country from moral decline, since they were the ones in charge of the family food. “It is an interesting fact that a well-fed man was never behind bars,” said one of them.31 Believing as they did, that the home was the “germ of Anglo-Saxon civilization”,32 teaching women to be white through food was approached with passionate dedication. One influential domestic scientist, speaking at the Chicago World’s Fair said, echoing the past, “cooking has a nobler purpose than the gratification of appetite and the sense of taste”,33 and women, for their part, were willing to let themselves be turned into machines that promoted whiteness.

These domestic scientists established cooking schools throughout New England, where they set about reforming the eating habits of a nation. They were spreading the New Nutrition of the day, which included warnings against overeating, believing it led to the infertility of white people.34 As science revealed more things about nutrition in the 20s, the domestic scientists incorporated it into their teachings.

But “they displayed little flexibility when it came to adopting new ways of cooking and spicing.

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The cooking they taught remained resolutely Anglo-Saxon in origin”.35 At its core, this ‘new’ way of eating was just a variation of the foods that these primarily New England raised women knew – British food that revolved around meats and potatoes. This ‘American’ food was white in origin, white in intent, and white in practice.

One way they spread whiteness was through white cream sauce. This white sauce was used to smother all sorts of food.

“One of the major civilizing influences in the American kitchen was widely recognized to be white sauce”.36 Women were taught to boil the hell out of their food and then cover it with the purity of a cream sauce.

White cream sauce was everywhere in domestic science cookery,37 and it was essentially a roux made of flour, milk, and butter. It got whiter with the invention of Crisco, which was advertised as a white substitute for butter. As food historian Laura Shaprio says, “with Crisco white sauce, scientific cookery arrived at a food substance from which virtually everything had been stripped except a certain number of nutrients and the color white”.38 When the canning industry combined with this scientific whiteness, the condensed cream of mushroom soup was born.39

This desire for, and use of, whiteness in food continued in the food habits of the mid-20th century. Irma Rombauer, author of the immensely popular Joy of Cooking cookbook, “was the ideal audience for ‘convenience’ products of the day,”40 and “canned condensed soups were one of her true loves”.41 Mid-century cookbooks “were still relentlessly mid-American, full of uses for white sauce but with hardly a reference to anything foreign- or ethnic- sounding”.42 Cookbook writers continually promoted easy convenience food that was white. “Betty Crocker did not teach shortcuts in making hominy grits and Kraft did not encourage the use of New Mexico chiles with its cheese dishes. The result was the further nationalizing of American eating habits and the strengthening of the food tastes of British origin which had always rested at the core of middle-class food habits”.43 In other words, by using recipes containing convenience foods such as cream of mushroom soup, cookbook writers were promoting a cuisine of whiteness.

This “deep-rooted distaste for most foreign foods” that was still “an integral part of American culture”44 made sense because White Americans were “heirs to a tradition that for centuries had derided foreigners for their eating habits…”45 The green bean casserole is the quintessential dish of White People Food. It is convenient, it is processed, it is bland, it requires no special knowledge to make, and it is the same today as it was 80 years ago.

Maybe food and identity are linked, after all.

“The

enveloping mask of smoothness and purity that each portion of white sauce brought to bear on the food beneath represented a kind of cookery that had been lifted beyond drudgery to a plane of harmony and order.”90

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Gelatin Finds Glamour Safely In Suburbia

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ecause processed foods had become so ever-present by the 1950s, there was this idea that cooking didn’t involve any skill. This, of course, was insulting to a femininity that was in charge of the moral fiber of a nation. The solution, obviously, was to make it seem as if creativity and glamour were required to serve a meal properly.46 The Jello salad came about partly because women’s hunger for food was equated with sexual hunger47, so they were taught to have not only a small appetite, but an appetite for salads. In addition, salad was considered an upper-class meal, and by turning food into a salad, it gained more dignity.48 Food scientists also believed that the appearance of a dish assisted digestion by activating salivary glands,49 and so by creating beautiful meals that could be digested easier, the nation’s moral health could be saved.

Because of its manufactured connection to a 1950s white, middle-class housewife, Jello came to represent wholesomeness, purity, and domesticity.50 It allowed women to fantasize about another world, making dinnertime a way of eating some

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thing exotic while still remaining safely in white suburbia,51 and to encourage this, the test kitchens of General Foods came up with 1,733 different ways to prepare Jello.52 Through the art of creating a jello salad, drudgery was turned into creativity, “an ordinary dish into an epicurean one”,53 and if a woman could

make the jello salad elaborate enough, it would become art instead of food to be eaten. For people who were supposed to have small appetites, this was considered a high compliment.

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How a culture eats gives information about group membership, status, and boundaries, according to researcher Susan KalÄ?ik.56 Creating gelatinbased salads had nothing to do with taste or tradition. It was a status symbol that erected boundaries about what appropriate femininity should look like. It was a way to continue the idea that the best place for

a woman was in the home, in the kitchen. It created an image of a white middle class culture that proliferated in the media, schools, and politics. Jello is considered an American food, and yet it was created to serve the goals of whiteness. The Jello salad represents a white femininity that embraced the docile, meaningless role it was given to play. It reflects the idea

that white people learned that knowledge wasn’t something taken from ancestors and passed down; it was taken in from mass media and food experts.57

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America, Land of Abandon Italian-Americans Get Assimilated

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hen Italians began coming to the United States, they did so out of deep poverty. Starving peasants, they came from various parts of the shoe-shaped country.

Their lives were lived primarily in New York City, but their hearts were still in the old country. They were, truly, Italian-Americans.

It was into this hyphenated space that they learned they were not truly American, and could not be, until they learned to be white.

To become American, one needed to take on the priorities and habits of whiteness. One of the reasons that canned foods were so appealing to whites was because of new laws and new technologies that ensured sanitary conditions. A lack of food purity had become associated with immigrants,59 and immigrants learned that citizenship came with an abandonment of traditional eating habits.60 Food was essential to Italian immigrants, so when they came to the States and started working, suddenly they had money, and could afford to eat the luxuries that had been denied them in Italy. Luxuries like olive oil, cheese, garlic.61 It was in America where Italian food as we think of it was born.

Here, the immigrants banded together as Italians and not as Sicilians and Genoese, melding food cultures as they did so.62 But lo and behold, the domestic scientist were waiting for them on arrival. Waiting to tell them how dirty and smelly their Italianness was. Teachers were waiting to shame schoolchildren for eating garlic,63 and judging their process of assimilation on whether or not they were still eating spaghetti. In school, Italian children learned that only bland ‘American’ food was healthy, while their own family’s food habits were embarrassing, inferior, and backwards, while also at the same time being taught the middle-class ideals of citizenship and whiteness.64 At school they would hear daily criticism of their lives and be told they were un-American.65 They were made to feel as if they didn’t belong unless they capitulated to these white priorities. Unsurprisingly, assimilation was more desirable than ethnic pride to the second generation.66 While teachers targeted immigrant children, various reformers targeted the mothers. Social kitchens, designed to teach newcomers how to eat like Americans, offered Italian immigrants 12

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food such as pea soup, tomato soup, beef broth, oatmeal mush, boiled corn mush, and rice pudding.67 These reformers “tried valiantly to discourage immigrants from eating spicy, mixed foods”.68 They believed that when foods were mixed together, the body couldn’t process all of the nutrients, and therefore it was wasteful. These reformers advised immigrants not to shop from street markets because they were full of germs. They also passed around pamphlets in Italian warning immigrants not to eat salami, sausages, and pickles, because they “damaged the stomach without providing any sustenance”.69 Immigrants were assimilated through food into middle-class white culture.70 What could be more American?

Teddy Roosevelt said that hyphenated Americans were “a danger to the country” and that there should “be no room for them in this country”,75 and President Wilson said “some Americans need

hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over”.76 13

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The Spaghetti I Struggle Spoiler Alert: Whiteness Wins

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mmigrants in general were condemned by home economists and presidents alike. Italian-Americans were seen as lazy and uncivilized,72 violent, Catholic, and socialist, and people who ate disgusting food.73 It didn’t matter that companies like Campbell’s ran largely on immigrant labor. To be accepted, immigrants needed to stop spending all of their money on imported Italian food.

They needed to practice the white habits of thrift, buying cheap bland food that required no community to create. Poor immigrants needed to spend less on food, that way they would have more money for living, and free factory owners from needing to give raises.74 KalÄ?ik describes the struggles immigrants felt in giving up or keeping their cultural food habits as they became part of American society.77 This struggle shows that being an American was something different than just living in America. If the identity of American was actually a melting pot of different cultures, the differences would be visible and respected. But cultural autonomy was not at the root of being an American. Food as a result of a machine was popularized just as immigration was drastically increasing, and the capability and imagination existed to mass-produce a wide variety of ethnic foods as they were and were meant to be, if ethnic respect and toleration was truly a goal of being American.

As we see today from the proliferation of authentic ethnic restaurants, capitalism can coexist with diversity. But tolerance and respect was not what being an American meant, even in the realm of something as ordinary as food. Being an authentic American meant embodying the ideals of convenience, blandness, and ease, all in the name of progress.78 For Italian-Americans, the first generation slowly came to terms with the Americanization of their children. The compromise that emerged was that eating became a weekly, private, ritualized event for first and second generation immigrants, which would tie everyone to a shared community and history. In exchange, the second generation would be able to embrace other American freedoms,79 and stubbornly, a hyphenated Italian-American culture was born.

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White Spaghetti Homogeneity In Everything

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hrough the assimilation process of ItalianAmericans, spaghetti as an American meal was created. But in order for spaghetti to be acceptable to white Americans, it first needed to be divorced from its Italianness.

There were many Italian-Americans running small producing pasta companies, and many in Italy exporting Italian food to the U.S. There were also non-Italian owned Italian food companies, and these white Americans worked to get laws passed that targeted both imported food and the small companies, making it easier for them to corner the market on Italian food. They also marketed their pasta as being produced in clean factories, which helped separate it from the image of the dirty immigrant, with one company even advertising, ‘cleanly made in America’. In advertisements, these producers acknowledged both pasta’s Italian and Chinese heritage (as a way of diluting the Italianness), but claimed that only in America is it truly good pasta.80 To dilute the Italianness more, the first canned spaghetti was produced by a French immigrant and advertised as a French recipe.

Betty Crocker jumped on the spaghetti bandwagon, spreading her “heavily Americanized” version to white homemakers, but this homogenized white people spaghetti contrasts with genuine Italian food, of which its flavors “are not disguised or sweetened or creamed away”.81 A homogenized American recipe was white food, because there is no single taste, 16

texture, or color uniformity in the sauces that real Italian-Americans eat.82 “Many Italian immigrants had never eaten pizza or spaghetti with meatballs before arriving in the United States,” and Italian-American food as we know it is an “invented” tradition.83 Italian food differs from White People Food in that Italian cooks are described as feeling the texture of food to know when it’s done, as having a memory of how food is supposed to be, instead of working from a recipe.85 But using a recipe ensures you will get the exact same result, every time. Homogeneity in everything.

The whiteness of spaghetti extended beyond the food itself. As the food spread through restaurants, it did so because the eateries were catering to “Anglo-Protestant middle-class fantasies about Italians,86 in the décor and types of food offered, evolving “to meet the racialized expectations of white customs”.87 Food in the Italian-American community was about history, good taste, and a larger society. It required time, money, and giving up social status to endure. The cost of Italian food is something that white people were never willing to pay.

Spaghetti and Cream of Mushroom Soup!

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White People Food White People Food exists because whiteness erected boundaries around what was considered edible.

It gave a moral underpinning to eating, and used food as a defense of the white, Anglo-Saxon way of life, calling it American.

White people have historically had a shared food system that is predicated on homogenization, ease, and lack of flavors. This comes out of a values system that is morally conservative, infatuated with progress, and has a large dose of narcissism. To be American, you must be white like us. You must value what we value and eat what we eat.

Green Bean Casserole, Jello Salad, and Spaghetti all reveal how ‘classic American food’ is, at its core, about promoting the superiority of whiteness. It is White People Food because the uniformity, conformity, and blandness that exists in these recipes is the same that exists in the story of American whiteness. White food reflects a system of whiteness, and it was as intentional as including 3/5 in the Constitution and ‘merciless Indian savages’ in the Declaration of Independence.

Part of the myth of the United States is that it is largely a nation of immigrants. But this is only partly true. A more accurate telling would be to say that it is largely (and only partially) a nation of immigrants who became white. It can be easy for white people to assume that what is normal to them is what is American, but that is only possible because whiteness has been so subtly embedded into every layer of the myth we tell ourselves about America.

But the story we tell can change. Thomas Jefferson said, “The earth belongs always to the living,” advocating the idea that every generation needs to define what it means to be an American. Domestic scientists loved recipes because they provided unchanging results. But our recipes themselves have changed. Diversity in culture and in food is as omnipresent as white cream sauce once was. White People Food now exists because it sits alongside the foods of other cultures, just one option among many in the buffet of American cuisine. We may not have rewritten the Constitution the way Jefferson pondered, but we the people have changed what it means to be an American. Originally created in the factory, canned and boxed food told no story. But in looking at the stories of the cans and the boxes themselves, we can see that they do have a story to tell.

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“I mean, when somebody’s offering you food, they’re telling you a story. They’re telling you what they like, who they are.

Presumably it’s a proud reflection of their culture…”

– Anthony Bourdain 19

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Endnotes 1 Katharina Vester, A Taste of Power (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 50.

2 Ibid., 80.

3 Knut Oyangen, “The Gastrodynamics of Displacement: Place-Making and Gustatory Identity in the Immigrants’ Midwest,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39, no. 3 (2009): 328.

4 Ibid., 325.

5 Jennifer Jensen Wallach, How America Eats (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 103.

6 Ibid.

7 Melanie Warner, Pandora’s Lunchbox (New York: Scribner, 2013), 12.

24 Ibid., 45.

25 Vester, 50.

26 Ibid., 44.

27 Ibid., 18.

28 Ibid., 48.

29 Ibid., 29.

30 Wallach, 86.

31 Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1986), 128.

32 Ibid., 181.

33 Ibid., 71.

34 Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution At the Table (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 83.

8 Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 27.

35 Ibid., 157.

9 Ibid., 123.

37 Levenstein, Revolution At the Table, 203.

10 Jessamyn Neuhaus, “Is Meatloaf for Men? Gender and Meatloaf Recipes, 1920-1960,” in Cooking Lessons, ed. Sherrie A. Inness, 92.

38 Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 215.

11 Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, “Beating the Biscuits in Appalachia: Race Class, and Gender Politics of Women Baking Bread,” in Cooking Lessons, ed. Sherrie A. Inness, 162.

12 Wallach, 60.

13 Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 36.

36 Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 91.

39 Levenstein, Revolution At the Table, 203.

20 Ibid., 14.

21 Wallach, 104.

22 Ibid., 15.

23 Ibid., 50. (

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60 Ibid., 179.

61 Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 49.

62 Ibid., 54.

63 Wallach, 126.

64 Simone Cinotto, The Italian American Table (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 30.

65 Ibid., 34.

66 Wallach, 128.

67 Michael J. Eula, “Failure of American Food Reformers Among Italian Immigrants in New York City, 1891-1897,” Italian Americana, 18, no. 1 (2000): 90.

70 Wallach, 126.

42 Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, 121.

71 Levenstein, Revolution At the Table, 105.

43 Levenstein, Revolution At the Table, 170.

72 Wallach, 78.

44 Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, 121.

47 Wallach, 133.

73 Richard Raspa, “Exotic Foods among Italian-Americans in Mormon Utah: Food as Nostalgic Enactment of Identity,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States, ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 187.

48 Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 97-98.

74 Eula, 86-99.

49 Ibid., 83.

75 June Granatir Alexander, Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 17.

46 Shapiro, Something from the Oven, 65.

19 Ibid., 18.

59 Wallach, 109.

41 Ibid., 131.

15 Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven (New York: Viking, 2004), 56.

18 Ibid., 17.

58 Vester, 65.

68 Levenstein, Revolution At the Table, 104.

45 Ibid.

17 Daniel Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell Press, 2009), 16.

57 Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, 31.

40 Anne Mendelson, Stand Facing the Stove (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996), 130.

14 Ibid., 70

16 “Campbell’s Soup History – A Condensed Version,” Campbell’s Soup, Nov 13, 2015, www.campbellsoup.co.uk/ blog/campbells-soup-history-condensedversion.

56 Susan Kalčik, “Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of Identity,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States, ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 54.

50 Sarah E. Newton, “The Jell-O Syndrome: Investigating Popular Culture/ Foodways,” Western Folklore 51, no. ¾ (1992): 252.

51 Joshua Gitelson, “Populox: The Suburban Cuisine of the 1950s,” Journal of American Culture 15, no. 3 (1992): 75.

52 Newton, 251.

53 Shapiro, Something from the Oven, 64.

54 Gitelson, 75.

55 Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 102.

69 Ibid., 106.

76 Ibid., 16.

77 Kalčik, 41.

78 Cinotto, 149-153.

79 Ibid., 49-50.

80 Ibid., 149-150.

81 Raspa, 191.

WHITE PEOPLE FOOD 82 Judith Goode, Janet Theophano, and Karen Curtis, “A Framework for the Analysis of Continuity and Change in Shared Sociocultural Rules for Food Use: The Italian-American Pattern,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States, ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 68.

83 Oyangen, 330.

84 Raspa, 193.

85 Ibid., 188-189.

86 Cinotto, 181.

87 Ibid., 204.

88 Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, 215.

89 Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 100.

90 Ibid., 95.

Bibliography Alexander, June Granatir. Ethnic Pride, American Patriotism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004.

Brown, Linda Keller and Kay Mussell. Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

“Campbell’s Soup History – A Condensed Version,” Campbell’s Soup, Nov 13, 2015. www.campbellsoup.co.uk/blog/ campbells-soup-history-condensedversion.

Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

Inness, Sherrie A. Cooking Lessons.

Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.

Levensten, Harvey A. Revolution At the Table. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Levenstein, Harvey. Paradox of Plenty.

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003.

Mendelson, Anne. Stand Facing the Stove. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.

Newton, Sarah E. “The Jell-O Syndrome: Investigating Popular Culture/Foodways,” Western Folklore 51, no. ¾ (1992): 249-267.

Oyangen, Knut. “The Gastrodynamics of Displacement: Place-Making and Gustatory Identity in the Immigrants’ Midwest.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39, no. 3 (2009): 323-348.

Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1986.

Shapiro, Laura. Something from the Oven. New York: Viking, 2004.

Sidorick, Daniel. Condensed Capitalism.

Ithaca: Cornell Press, 2009.

Twitty, Michael W. The Cooking Gene.

New York: Harper Collins, 2017.

Diner, Hasia R. Hungering for America.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Vester, Katharina. A Taste of Power.

Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.

Eula, Michael J. “Failure of American Food Reformers Among Italian Immigrants in New York City, 1891-1897.” Italian Americana, 18, no.

1 (2000): 86-99.

Wallach, Jennifer Jensen. How America Eats. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013.

Gitelson, Joshua. “Populox: The Suburban Cuisine of the 1950s,” Journal of American Culture 15, no. 3 (1992): 73-78.

The process of making a cuisine is often violent and exclusive.58

“It is no accident that…

Italian-American food entered the American mainstream only after the great wave of immigration from Italy subsided”.88

“Jell-O was the quintessential fifties ingredient: it was pure potential and it could be anything…

Jell-O was a vague, supple fantasy food which conformed perfectly to whatever vessel it was put into.”54

Warner, Melanie. Pandora’s Lunchbox.

New York: Scribner, 2013.

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Caris Adel 2018

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