Food Nations

Warren Belasco is Professor of American Studies at University of Maryland and one of the leading scholars in food studies. He is the author of Appetite for Change:How the Counterculture Took on the FoodIndustry.Philip Scranton is the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and research director at the Hagley Museum and Library. He is the author or editor of six books, including EndlessNovelty: Specialty Production and AmericanIndustrialization.

"Food Nations is a book I can't wait to teach. The individual articles capture the centrality and complexity of the relationships between food, nationhood, markets, and the manipulation of cultural meaning within modernity." -- Judith Goode, Temple University"Food keeps scholars honest: clarity is right there on the palate, the plate, and the factory line, and nothing can illustrate better the power of identity, class, and the marketing of nationality better than a pickle, an avocado, a donut, or a tortilla. Food Nations treats foods as keys to personal, familial, community, and national identity. Reading the volume's elegant essays makes me hungry for more." -- Merry Issacs White, author of The Material Child"Until recently, American consumers have limited their concerns about food to additives and pesticides. But to be truly responsible and healthy consumers, they also need to know something about food business, politics, science, history, aesthetics, and traditions." -- Nancy Ralph, Director, New York Food Museum"Food studies is serious business and Food Nations is a major contribution to our understanding of the business of food. This meticulously researched book is a most welcome addition to an exciting new field." -- Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author of Destination Culture"That food and drink are at the very center of the body politic is dramatically enforced in the revelatory collection of essays, unified by the proposition that food is power and power, food. If anyone can doubt that food is as serious a subject as politics or business, let him read any one of these essays and stay amazed." -- Betty Fussell, author of My Kitchen Wars"Food Nations is a cornucopia of fascinating information about why we eat what we eat. There is much in this wide-ranging book to stimulate anyone with an interest in the past, the present, and even the future of food." -- Harvey Levenstein, author of Revolution at the Table "Food Nations joins a growing body of scholarship that proves emphatically that food matters. . . .Food Nations should take a respected place in a sophisticated and complex literature about food, identity, society, and power." -- Hasia R. Diner, New York University, author of Hungering for America"If anyone can doubt that food is as serious a subject as politics or business, let him read any one of these essays and stand amazed." -- Betty Fussell, author TheStory of Corn and My Kitchen Wars

• Preface, Phillip ScrantonPart 1: Contexts1. Food Matters: Perspectives on an Emerging Field, Warren Belasco2. Food and Eating: Some Persisting Questions, Sidney W. MintzPart 2: The Construction of National Cusines3. Rituals of Pleasure in the Land of Treasures: Wine Consumption and the Making of French Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century, Kolleen M. Guy4. Eddie Shack was No Tim Horton: Donuts and the Folklore of Mass Culture in Canada, Steve Penfold5. Food and Nationalism: The Origins of Belizean Food, Richard R. WilkPart 3: The Business of Taste6. Inventing Baby Food: Gerber and the Discourse of Infancy in the United States, Amy Bentley7. How the French Learned to Eat Canned Food, 1809-1930s, Martin Bruegel8. Searching for Gold in Guacamole: California Growers Market the Avocado, 1910-1994, Jeffery CharlesPart 4: Ethnicity, Class, and the Food Industry9. Untangling Alliances: Social Tensions Surrounding Independent Grocery Stores and the Rise of Mass Retailing, Tracey Deutsch 10. As American as Budwiser and Pickles? Nation-Building in American Food Industries, Donna R. Gabaccia 11. Comida Sin Par. Construction of Mexican Food in Los Angeles: Foodscapes in a Transnational Consumer Society, Silivia FerreroPart 5: Food and National Politics12. Industrial Tortillas and Folkloric Pepsi: The Nutritional Consequences of Hybrid Cuisines in Mexico, Jeffery M. Pilcher13. Berlin in the Belle Epoque: A Fast Food History, Keith Allen14. Food and the Politics of Scarcity in Urban Soviet Russia, 1917-1941, Mauricio BorreroNotes on the ContributorsIndex