American History Hit - A History of America in 5 Foods

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

You are what you eat - and so is America. Various foods have played their part in the country’s history. Anna Zeide, author of US History in 15 Foods, takes us through 5 of them - Corn, Peanuts, Graham Bread, Spam and The Big Mac.Produced by Freddie Chick. Mixed by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you’d like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Way back in the 1990s, in the early days of my career, I appeared in commercials. Lots of commercials, from aspirin to deodorant to telephone pricing plans.

But one food item stood apart from the other products. One world-famous, mainly chocolate cookie that bases its branding on how you can twist and separate the cookie waferes from their inner white filling. You know the one I'm talking about, Oreos. You might even have a vague memory of me sitting at a little bit of me sitting. at a table demonstrating this age-old practice for a two-year-old toddler named Gary. Gary, it's time I taught you something every man should know how to eat an Oreo cookie. Twist it off. Oh, you did it. Just give it a lick. It was an unusual experience shooting this shot, I remember. It involved lab-coded food technicians

heating individual cookies to an optimal temperature for effective camera-friendly licks. Gary and I were portraying the essential human bond between father and son, but that was, of course, secondary to the more important human connection to cookies. Now, you just learn to tie your shoelaces and you'd be all set. Crossing time and generations, one need only know how to twist the wafor off to get to the really good stuff in the middle. There's a metaphor there. Connection to food is human history of the highest order and the lowest.

Either way, it's universal. We all have our food stories to tell. and they are so often delicious. Everyone, I'm Don Wildman, your host. Welcome to American History Hit. There are so many historical lenses through which to examine the flow of human events, but none can be more universal and all-encompassing

than the production and consumption of food. We are what we eat, and so is our history. So today we're going to attempt a history of our nation through food, from corn and the early Americans to gram bread in the era of good feelings, to the Civil War is told through the story of peanuts, right up to spamming World War II and Ronald McDonald's biggest burger. My guest today is the author of U.S. History in 15 Foods, a new book that chronicles a full menu of iconic comestibles,

served up through the centuries from pemmican to maize to jello and green bean casserole. It's a full buffet, fodder for the ages, offering us a chance to really chew on what it means to be American. I'm hungry for history. Hello, Anna Zeta. Welcome to American History yet. Hello, I'm so happy to be here. Food is the essential foundation of human survival, of course.

Our very existence is structured around it. Our economies are built on it. Everywhere, everything, every day is one way or another about food. What an ideal way to examine the recipe of American history. Anna, food is the essential foundation of human survival. But set the table for me, why food history? What drew you to the subject? Right.

I think that food, as you say, is both so fundamental to our daily lives and practices, and yet in that kind of dailiness of it, often recedes from our attention and becomes this mundane background. And in this book, I think I try to reclaim food as really central to all of American history and to all of our lives. It's not just these 15 foods specifically, although I hope that they offer tasty bites to really pull readers in. but more broadly to reestablish how central food has been to so many of the broad themes of the U.S. history that we certainly know about, whether that's the Civil War or the Great Depression, and yet showing how food is central to each of those in turn and how paying attention to that can reclaim both our celebration of and acknowledgement of the importance of food in the past and the present and the future. The book's a meal itself. I mean, each of these foods is a chapter scanning the table of contents here. sorry, I can't escape the puns.

Spaghetti, oranges, pot liquor, Korean tacos. It's a diverse array from organic to processed. But that's the point. Foods represent the panculturalism of America. Was it difficult to decide on which specific foods to cover? Yeah, it was definitely a process, I would say, almost as long as writing the book itself, was just coming up with the table of contents

that I used as the book proposal. And the thing is, and I say this in the introduction, I think, you know, it could be a totally other set of 15 foods or a hundred others that could have been used to tell these stories. And I hope that people, as they read this, will think about what other foods that they understand as being core to different parts of American history. Well, we can't obviously cover all 15 of them, but let's try, say five. And let's start with corn, maize, that most American of all foods that has been foundational, certainly for the indigenous tribes who developed it in the first place. How did corn become such a

staple of early American society. Yeah. And corn, I think maybe more than any other, when you look at the table of contents, is one that we do talk a lot about in U.S. history when we talk about European settlement of the Americas and engagement with indigenous cultures and foods. And so, especially when the British colonists come to the United States or to what becomes the United States, there's kind of a shock at how much corn is being produced. And corn in many British eyes is sort of a lower status grain, something that's used for pigs or animal feed and not so much for human consumption. And yet it's very clear that this crop is by now so well adapted to American soils, that the methods that Native peoples have cultivated make it incredibly abundant and that survival

in this new land is going to depend on using the crop that's so in place here. And of course, barring on the indigenous knowledge that allows for the British survival in the early colonies. And hunger plagues those early years so significantly that figuring out a stable food crop that can sustain the colonies is top of mind. It's the flexibility of corn. I mean, it goes in so many different directions. You can ground it up. You can eat it off the ear. There's all sorts of ways of doing it. But what really surprised me reading your book was that it's actually developed by indigenous societies. I mean, quite scientifically. So they're the ones that breed this and figure out how to take it from a few seeds on a plant to an actual useful plant itself. How do they do that?

Yeah, it's the result of thousands of years of crop cultivation and breeding that allows the kernels of the corn to become something that can be actually ground from the grass that has its origins in Central America that over the years, the selection for the heartiest and sweetest and biggest kernels gets adapted. And, you know, there's still many, many varieties of corn and maize, as it's known around the rest of the world. And this crop, because of its breeding in particular places, not all indigenous communities used corn, but certainly agricultural communities did.

And so it becomes adapted in different strains and varieties of it become adapted to different parts of the land based on climate and environment and soil. As far as the English settlements are concerned and their sort of intersection with this food, you have Jamestown in the Virginia area and then Plymouth up in Massachusetts. a totally different relationship to corn, really, in terms of their relationships with the indigenous peoples.

Yeah, although I would say, you know, a commonality is that the timing is different, but in both cases, pretty quickly the desire and the hunger for land, in large part to grow corn and to cultivate expansion, drives the conflict with Native peoples and the warfare that comes to characterize both on different timelines. And I think that's one of the things the chapter conveys is just how much this desire for land was a desire for. for land on which to grow food. And in this case, maze, right, which is I think not at least to my learning the way that we talk about desire for land. It's less often. What are we using this land for? And of course, we get to mining and other kinds of uses of land later. But the ultimate natural resource in this moment of need for survival is food. The difference between them, as I understand, Jamestown is the trading for the corn, essentially, not growing it necessarily, whereas Plymouth, very famously, with squantor.

as we're taught in fifth grade, teaches the pilgrims how to cultivate corn. Putting that dead fish in the ground that always surprised me. I've never seen that done since. But that's the difference between it. It's kind of like teach a man to fish and he can live forever. Yeah. And I think both colonies have very different approaches to market economies versus developing a kind of more rooted agricultural relationship to land.

Although I think in both cases, figuring out how to grow also characterizes some of that need for survival in addition to the trade. especially as the kind of relationships feel less and less stable, having some control of that production. Those early colonists, did they just take the recipes from the Native Americans or did they develop this on their own? I think it was a lot of adaptation. I think early on a lot of colonists, well, first they wanted to plant their own wheat, you know, that they were familiar with in England and saw that it wasn't working. You know, we didn't yet have adapted varieties of wheat that were going to grow in this different climate. And then when it's clear that this needs to be used, I think there was a desire sometimes to adapt British recipes or modes of using other grains to corn. Sometimes that worked and it led to syncretic food dishes.

Other times, it was very much a direct observation and learning from Native peoples to understand how do you mash corn and make a drink out of it, brew it, ferment it. How do you grind it up to make breads? How do you use corn as a vegetable? And so I think seeing the diversity and versatility that you mentioned was certainly an observation from Native peoples that was then adapted to British tastes as well. It also becomes the beginning of the system of slavery in the colonies and then later on, United States. Slavery is a system pretty much originally created to cultivate sugar in the Caribbean and eventually cotton in the American South. But in between, corn production creates the first real demand for large-scale free labor. Yeah. And even when enslaved peoples were working on rice plantations or other early plantations, I mean, corn was the major food being fed to enslaved peoples in this early period really from the early 17th century. And so corn as both a production crop and the mainstay of diet throughout the history of enslavement really provides the nutrition that keeps that labor source going.

Right. And it becomes ubiquitous. I mean, I use corn every single day. It's embarrassing how much corn. Not to mention drink it in the form of whiskey and so forth. It's everywhere. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing is also we don't realize it. And Michael Pollan does the excellent analysis in the omnivores dilemma where he sends off like McDonald's meals to lab for analysis of what percent of corn is in each of the dishes. And from soda being 100 percent corn, corn, between the corn syrup and the caramel color and the flavors and everything else that's in it, to even like the chicken nuggets being 60 percent corn because of the breading and the chicken. and feed. And, you know, all of this, I often teach that tidbit. And I think it's kind of a shock at first. And then it's like, oh, yeah, you know, we don't realize we're eating corn at all moments. And yet it's come to so deeply pervade our food system. It's what I like about the book. Each one of

these chapters could be a book in and of itself. I mean, these are huge subjects that have the inevitable tipping point of society within them. You know, you can follow this trail, this thread throughout all kinds of our lifestyles and so forth. It's really interesting. Where the word corn come from? I'm just curious. It was called maize. Why'd they call corn? Yeah. Well, corn, as I understand it, was a much more generic term for grain in England. So corn met grain. I don't know the etymology. So corn could be used to refer to any range of grains. And so it's only in the United States. And it starts to be called Indian corn, meaning the grain that the Indians used. And then over time in the U.S., it shifts from being called Indian corn to just corn and becomes a much narrower application of that term.

It's so much the case where the new world is also new things to eat. But part of that is adapting it to your own culture, getting over the prejudice against it and the people that you're stealing it from in terms of where the idea comes from. Let's move on to another chapter. So gram bread, I love this subject because I learned so much from it. I mean, we're skipping a century ahead to the early 1800s. I'm talking about gram bread, not graham crackers. So people understand. This was created by a guy.

named Sylvester Graham, who I'd never heard of. Of course, I've heard of it because I've said the word Graham crackers all my life, but I never knew his name. So tell me first about Sylvester Graham. Yeah. And I did think this was such an interesting hook because, as you said, most people have never heard of him himself and yet have heard the name and used it from childhood and eating s'mores or whatever. So Sylvester Graham was, yeah, an early 19th century moral reformer. He comes to prominence in the temperance movement, moving around, giving these speeches against alcohol. And this is also the time of terrible cholera outbreaks where concerns about public health and disease are really widespread. I mean, Americans are looking for answers or looking for

reasons why these health problems are so widespread and how to address them. And so Graham steps in and starts to give this wide-ranging advice, not only against alcohol, but dietary advice and moral sexual advice as well about how to maintain health, both moral and physical health through diet. And so he encourages abstention from alcohol, but also is an early vegetarian advocate against meat and as well against white bread, which is where the grand bread comes in to play here. This is so much a time of change in America. I think it's fair to say most Americans don't think about this time period very much between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. I mean, we think of it as antebellum, but actually that comes a bit later. This is the interesting period where you've got a new

generation coming in. We're over the hump of founding the nation. You know, all that is behind us now. The Federalist Party is gone or at least morphed into something else. And they're thinking now in different ways. One of the big changes sociologically is that mechanization has come into play. And you've got these factories starting, you know, for grain. And a lot of farm workers are moving to the cities for these new jobs. That's a threat to a lot of Americans like Sylvester Graham. Bad things are afoot in those cities. Yeah. And that is very much the error that he is breathing and so many Americans are breathing is just that all of this change is happening from the way that we are used to eating to the places we're used to living, that there's something

unhealthy about these cities. And in truth, the concentration of people with unhealthy water supply was contributing to much of the disease of the time, especially before large-scale systems were set up to accommodate such concentration of people. And there's early waves of immigrants coming in to work in these factories. And all of this change feels unnatural to many people. really does lift up white bread as an embodiment of much of this change, that it's highly processed, that it's feeling like it embodies this frenetic pace of the city, and that in contrast, grand bread, which is this whole wheat, basically unbolted flour bread, which would have been very common, just a couple of generations prior, which is quickly getting outpaced by commercial

breads and commercial milling and commercial bakeries. The grand bread, eating this whole wheat bread, is a way to kind of harken back to the past. And he says as much, in his book. He writes a treatise on bread making and says bread made by mothers grown from wheat and virgin soil. In some ways, a vision of what we should be eating at the same time as he's also putting forward some fairly progressive notions about eating fresh fruits and vegetables and whole wheat bread and staying away from meat and some kind of prescient dietary advice in a lot of ways as well. This is such a strain of American society that starts at this point. I mean, what was he so afraid of. You know, if people are going to eat this white bread, what was going to happen to him?

There's this huge movement of Gramites, as they're known, followers of his, who are writing into him saying, I've suffered from these terrible health conditions. I don't know where they came from, but they seemed to be a combination of how I was eating and how I was living. Then I started following a Graham diet. And now my life is transformed. And his followers created these journals where they circulated these kind of stories. They created Graham boarding houses, which were places for people to stay in the city where they could be eating this diet. And so I think there's a real reinforcement that there was something wrong with the broader culture and that that was manifesting in people's bodies in their health, in this individual focus and that it could be addressed by individual

behavior and dietary change, which I think is a really appealing feeling in a time when systems around you are changing and you can't control those, but you can control how you eat. And I think that drawing on that individual change is certainly present today as well. How do we control things? I'll be back with more American history after this short break. March 2020, marked 20 years since the start of the Iraq War. The war was waged to rid the world of a brutal dictator, yet it would end Mard in controversy. So why did the Iraq War go so badly wrong?

and what legacies has it left behind today? Well, I'm your host James Patton Rogers and every Monday on the Warfare podcast from History Hit, we're exploring a different aspect of this tumultuous period in history. We'll be asking, what was the role of the UK government and Prime Minister Tony Blair? Could the Secretary of State legally order British forces into Iraq and could British forces follow that law? And how did ISIS rise from the destruction left behind? But ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Join me, James Patton Rogers, on the Warfare Podcast from History Hit, as we look back on one of the most controversial conflicts in recent history. This is the origins of Back to Nature. This is Yule Gibbons. It pops up all the time all throughout American society as, oh, my gosh, this is all getting away from us. As soon as we lose control of what we eat, we lose control of our morals, we lose control of our way of life. Shades start to come through food diet issues.

He is a preacher. I mean, this is important to stake out. This is all sort of happening in Philadelphia area. He joins the Temperance Society of Philadelphia. This is also the beginning of that, but eventually becomes prohibition in the 20th century. This is a really cool thing to point out at this point. Change takes a lot longer in American society. than people think, especially today.

You know, we think of all these movements historically as, oh, that was the year when the amendment changed or something like that. These things happen over decades. And this is a good way to look at this because Graham Bread was a whole beginning of something big. Yeah. And I think it's critical to point out that this is also a time when early abolition movements are coming forward, fights for women's suffrage, temperance movement. In a lot of ways, all of those movements don't really reach their realization.

for 50 to 100 years more. And his dietary reform is right there embedded with these other moral reform movements that are pushing for broad change in culture. And they intersect. So the grand boarding houses become spaces where abolitionist groups that are mixed race groups can stay, where they're not allowed to stay in many other places that are segregated. But grand boarding houses become a safe zone for activists who are working on these other issues as the different issues intersect. How successful is the movement? It grows and grows or stays sort of local? During the years of activity, which I think is about a 20-year period, it's quite successful. There's, as I mentioned, that Graham journals that start to be circulated much beyond where

Graham himself is. A lot of his followers take on even after his death to continue to promote his views. But then it does fall off not long after his death. But I would say that the undercurrents of what he's arguing, the movement certainly crops back up. The later 19th century, turn of the 20th century era of the rise of Kellogg's and the other dietary reformers when Graham crackers themselves are invented, which is more around the turn of the 20th century, are all drawing on Graham's legacy. And certainly there's recipes for gram bread and gram flour products all throughout into the middle of the 20th century. Only recently has it become quite difficult to find gram flour. I tried to buy some to make some grand bread for some of my book events. And I couldn't find it.

Bob's Redmill had sold it until about 2011 and then phased it out. So Graham flour had a long staying power for sure. Yeah. It's also vegetarianism is a big part of this as well. I mean, a lot of what happened in Grammism is very sensible. There's nothing wrong with returning to natural foods and whole grain foods and so forth. It's just interesting to see that in American society, we meld our other influences into these kinds of things so much that it's fascinating to unpack how that works.

and also most importantly, how those influences morph into other kinds of ways of thinking that aren't necessarily how they start it. And that becomes its own unpure brew, I suppose. We never really talked about the flower itself. Basically, it's not necessarily whole grain. There's really something special about this flower. Yeah. So he refers to it as unbolted wheat flour. So taking the kernel, the wheat berry from the grain at a certain stage of development,

it. And then, yes, grinding the entire grain so that there's no separation so that the germ and the brand and the endosperm of the grain are all in there together. And so it's a very coarse, dense flour that, especially with the baking technologies of the time, led to a pretty brick-like intense bread, though it was often cooked with sour milk and early leavening agents to try to introduce some lightness to it. And is that what they used for graham crackers? Because that comes later. That's the 1890s, it's Nabisco. Yeah, so Nabisco, I think they're largely drawing on Graham's legacy more than his ideas so much because Graham crackers pretty quickly become a fairly highly processed sugar-laden

object, which is not something Graham would have himself endorsed. But yes, they do try to use gram flour in the early creation of Graham crackers in order to make them a little bit more palatable and a little bit more snack-like, all still using the Graham flour. It does not something Graham would have himself endorsed. But yes, they do try to use Graham. flour in the early creation of Graham crackers in order to make them a little bit more palatable and a little bit more snack-like while still using the Graham flour. And swell with a melty marshmallow and

Hershey bar on it. Right. The ultimate subversion of Graham's ideas. He was right to be worried. We took it over. All right. So let's move on. It's almost like we're looking at a buffet here and I'm moving you through the dishes. Chapter six is peanuts. Another critical distinction, peanuts are not nuts. And we could finally be done with this argument. They are legumes. And I'm not really sure what that means, but more like peas and such. Is that right? That's right. Yes. And as legumes, they have this very unusual soil improving function in that legumes have certain nodes that grow on their roots that create space for nitrogen fixing bacteria. So as opposed to most crops, which just pull nutrients from the soil without replenishing it, legumes have this benefit of inviting this bacteria that helps

pull nitrogen from the air into the soil. Peanuts are grown in the South and were a food prior to the Civil War, very associated with African Americans, with enslaved people. Fair to say? Yes. Why is that? How did that happen? Yeah, so even though peanuts have their botanical origin in the Americas, quite early, they get taken to Africa and incorporated into a wide range of African dishes. And then when the enslaved peoples are brought to the Americas, peanuts are often a crop

that they're familiar with. P peanuts are also often grown to. to feed to animals, livestock, pigs and the like. Some knowledge about their soil replenishing qualities are known. So sometimes they're grown as a cover crop. But the food itself is not really seen as very valuable. And so often enslaved peoples are the only ones eating them. Sometimes poor whites as well. But they have a really low class association,

both because of the way they're fed to animals, because of this lack of curiosity about what they're capable of. And that's very much the case through the Civil War. And then, as I describe in the book, the Civil War, as with many other foods, is a time of real regional migration that allows people from the north to soldiers who are fighting in the south to taste foods that they have never tasted before and then bringing home those tastes. And because of the need during the Civil War for substitutions, for foods that are not available, peanuts start to be used for oil as a coffee substitute, sometimes as a flour substitute.

so they need to take what's ever available locally and substitute it for foods that would otherwise be imported that blockades prevent. I just want to remind people, we're talking about a book called U.S. history in 15 foods here, written by Anna Zeta. And what I love about this book, really, it's very engrossing. You do a really great job of melding together the story of the food,

the real basics of the science, the food, even, with the history backdrop that you're talking about. And there's a factoid here about peanuts that I found so fascinating. In the Civil War, one of the early moves Lincoln made, as things got very serious, was a naval blockade against the southern ports, which had a very, very real effect. And suddenly, white Southerners are eating legumes like never before. I mean, pedants to them aren't so bad after all. But you mentioned one fact that I never realized that the one campaign Lee made into the north, Gettysburg, is largely motivated by getting his troops fed.

I mean, things were that bad at that point. Yeah. And hunger is such a major actor in the Civil War. and really the surrender of the war, too, comes because they'd run out of food. And the South had invested so heavily in cash crops in the period leading up to the war that there really wasn't a lot of infrastructure for agriculture, which was much different in the North. And the North had developed a lot of agricultural lands and technologies.

And so that ability to feed both civilian and soldiers was critical to the war effort and to the success of the United States Army. The irony becomes, here was this food, Peanuts, which was seen as a lowly food, not desirable, associated with the enslaved people for so many decades. In reconstruction after the Civil War, peanuts are suddenly associated with this sort of romantic notion of lost cause, a sentimental reminder of this way of life made possible, sadly, by enslavement. But peanuts are this sentimental notion at that point, embraced. Yeah, and there's this whole movement north where, as with so many things,

as a nationalizing happens around this food, as, Peanuts development in Virginia largely starts to be sold northward, such that cities, immigrant vendors start to sell peanuts. Peanuts start to be incorporated into these new leisure activities like the circus or baseball and have these associations with fun and with a snack that's easy to eat on the go. And then later, around the turn of the 20th century, are incorporated into these like vegetarian sanitariums as a source of protein and also suffragist parties and things like that. And so they start to have a very different social class designator as they start to be embraced by northerners and white people in the cities and wealthier people.

Sure, it's economically driven like everything else. It's a cheap food to grow and it becomes its own replacement cash crop of the South. Ironically, of course, it's George Washington Carver, a black food scientist who comes along to change everything for the peanut. And he establishes the usefulness of peanut farming in proper agricultural practices, which you've referred to already. But this is a big, big deal. I mean, this really changes American agriculture and global agriculture, really. Yeah, and one of the really tragic contrasts that I try to draw out in the peanut chapter is how much black labor and black ingenuity are at the heart of cultivating this crop, everything from the black laborers in the fields themselves to, as you mentioned, George Washington Carver, who's well known for his peanut science. And then I also rediscover the story of Ben Hicks, who was a black farmer who invents a peanut harvester that helps to mexico.

recognize the process. And sadly, because he's illiterate, is denied the patent on this peanut harvester such that he never really makes the profit from it. And so at the same time that the peanut is able to rise in social status because of all this black labor and knowledge and intelligence, at the same time, the black people who are responsible for that do not experience the same rise during this period. And in fact, the hope that reconstruction holds out gets really squashed at the end of reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow era. And so that there's this contrast between the food and the people. So peanuts are appropriated. It's just yet another cultural influence appropriated by white Americans. Interesting. How much does peanut butter have to do with this? Yeah. So I don't get

into peanut butter that much yet because as with so many of these foods, and you mentioned, I could have followed all of these foods into many different eras. But in terms of the era that I use peanuts for peanut butter hasn't really been widely adopted or used yet. It comes later in the 20th century. But it certainly emerges out of the widespread cultivation of the crop that creates this abundance. Was it about the roasting? I mean, what was the big change as far as making this more palatable, especially to a white market? Yes, they can be roasted. They can be boiled as they often are in the South, still in the shell, salted, incorporated into other snack mixes. So my sense is that it was about the versatility and the finding many different ways to incorporate peanuts into

different foods. And then yes, with the creation of peanut butter, which is a very American food, creating this sandwich filling that makes it very popular with young kids and cultivated as lunchtime food. I need some meat in my diet. Let's move on to the chapter about spam. Spiced ham. Many people don't realize this. When you squeeze two words together, you get spam, and squeeze is the operative word. They were putting a lot in one of those cans. Are you a fan of spam or not? I'm not personally a fan of eating it, but I am very much a fan of the food. I think it's a fascinating story and one that I grew up hearing about actually because my dad was born in Russia in 37. And so he remembered and told me as a kid about how as a child the American soldiers who were

stationed in Moscow were spreading spam from their rations around and how it tasted like the most delicious thing he had ever tried. And my dad was a vegetarian as a an adult during my whole childhood. So the thought that he was savoring this canned meat product was very hard for me to imagine and also really evocative in terms of the hunger and the values that the spam was carrying. When I was a kid, I was a backpacker and I didn't know how to backpack. So I took a lot of canned goods with me. And one of them I threw in just because it looked kind of neat. And my mother hated it was spam. And I took it up there was almost an act of rebellion against my parents. And it was pretty good. I was surprised. It did the trick. You have a quote in the book,

Speaking of what you were just mentioning, war is probably the single most powerful instrument of dietary change in human existence. How does spam demonstrate that point? Military ventures are made possible in large part because of processed foods because of the ability to feed so many people on the move. And spam is a food that's invented just shortly before World War II begins in 1937, I believe. And very quickly, it's seen as both protein heavy and nutrient dense food that can be packaged and shipped. to any corners of the globe, anywhere that American soldiers are fighting, it starts to be sent very significantly as foreign food aid to allies who are starving during this time. Again, hunger is a major part of the war here about as many people died from hunger and starvation

during World War II as on the battlefield. And I think that having this meat product that could be highly versatile and shelf stable and transported into so many different locations, allowed for this feeding that was necessary. At the same time, of course, there's a lot in that chapter about how American troops came to really revile spam by the end because they were eating so much of it. Too much of a good thing or a bad thing. Let's talk about the recipe.

It's the lesser part of a pig. It's the shoulder meat. It's mixing that with water, salt, sugar, and sodium nitrate. The challenge is how you can keep cooked meat and keep it fresh. Did it sell at first? Was it a popular food item before the war? Yeah, it was. It pretty quickly was used in butcher shops and delis and because of its ability to take this pork shoulder product that was hard for butchers to get much out of. It's hard to get it out in this uniform piece and it creates lots of little pieces that needed to be processed into something.

But spam had a very widespread advertising campaign quite early on. Hormel, the company that makes spam, jumps in really quickly to make use of radio advertising and other kinds of products. And it had this really catchy name in a lot of ways. Spam is the first, but then there are other one syllable, not quite real word, can't meet, like more and treat and others that emerged to mimic spam success. Because it was going well. They were selling a lot of it. This is sort of the tail end of the Great Depression that we're talking about. So cheap food is a premium.

But yeah, you mentioned his advertising campaign, which was rather iconic. It was a $500,000 campaign in the days when that was real money. Yeah. And there's a funny line where the father who had started the company tells his son who had made this advertising deal, I wouldn't spend my father's money like that. And the son says, well, your father didn't have that kind of money. And so it was the early success of the Hormel company on other products that allowed them to be successful enough that by the time spam comes around, there are these funds to invest in advertising, which pay off, but are a bit of a gamble. And he promotes the idea of spam with everything, with eggs, spam witches, spam for dinner. There's all sorts of ideas of using spam, but it's really World War II that makes spam a part of

American life and then part of American foods exported around the world. I mean, this is really the beginning of a globalization, the idea of putting it out there simply because you could ship it. Right. And that's the tradition today, even in so many places where spam is highly popular in parts of the Pacific where American troops were stationed in the war against Japan. And spam is still widely popular in Hawaii and Guam and parts of East Asia. And so those are all relics of this time when spam was embodied this amazing American technology, the wealth, the cheap meat, which was and is not still quite common around the world.

And so it comes to be really highly regarded in those places and incorporated into food traditions in other parts like Spam Musubi and Hawaii, where Spam is prepared with seaweed and sushi rice, incorporated into local tastes. It's funny to think of the different ways that the world looks up and down to us based on what we've shipped to them. Speaking of American food around the world, and we're coming to the end of our meal here, McDonald's. This story has been done to death in the movies, so let's discuss one of their items up close and personal, the Big Mac. In your book, you explain the Big Mac is a term interchangeable with McDonald's as a company. I'm just going to do it. Two all beef, patty, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, and the sesame seed button. I was probably eight years old when that's a company.

came out and we were all running around singing that song because it was so much fun that you could memorize it in no time flat. But that's the magic of an advertising slogan. Yeah, and Big Mac, as you say, the chapter is as much about McDonald's as it is about the Big Mac specifically. And it is also as much about the Big Mac as it is about America because one of the arguments of that chapter is that by the 1990s, you really have McDonald's standing in for America on the global stage in all of its strengths and weaknesses and the way. that this globalization of the food company represents a globalization of the American way of eating. It's the 1990s when McDonald's as a business really defines globalization, which is for about

five minutes, that it was a favorable idea. Nowadays, not so much. This is really a chapter about McDonald's becoming the symbol of American imperialistic business practices. It's not the only one. God knows there's oil companies and everything else, but they become the brunt of so many things. And, you know, it's kind of a miracle that McDonald's survived this period. Yeah, it is remarkable. And it's also the values of American food and American culture that McDonald's carries around the world in the way that it's both celebrated and obviously very successful in this cheap, tasty, clean, well-organized, structured, efficient model, which are all strengths, one could say, of the American model. And at the same time, it's attacked as during the Iraq war by anti-war protesters attack McDonald's or vandalized McDonald's around the world. And so it also embodies these imperialistic visions of what the United States has become in all of it. You know, I stayed in a room, actually, above the McDonald's that was opened in Moscow. And it was really interesting, especially when I was there, which was early 2000s,

how fond the Muscovites were of McDonald's. It was a special place for them. And I think that's still the case in many parts of the world, that there is something particular about what McDonald's has been able to do, both in imparting its Americanness and also in some ways adapting to local tastes by having very, varieties of things offered on different menus that are somewhat localized while still maintaining the standardization that the company is known for. And I use that McDonald's in Russia that opens in the early 90s just after the fall of the Soviet Union as really as an embodiment of this

right at the end of the Cold War, right? When the United States and its values had been so reviled by the Soviet Union, suddenly this most American of companies comes in and it becomes a hit. And so what it says about this tension that exists at the same time that there's a desire. It's a field day for a business class to study the ups and downs of McDonald's. Anna, the story of food, and we've got a whole bunch of leftovers here on the table. The book goes the distance on tofu, Korean tacos, not to mention oranges, green bean casserole, and spaghetti, which I loved. It's a feast for anyone interested in making a meal of history and digesting the facts of civilization. And if I make one more food pun, I might be ill. So, Anna, how did this whole adventure of writing this book change your feelings

for food and food history? It's cemented and deepened my sense of how valuable studying food is as a way to understand U.S. history. I mean, I would love for this book to be used in just general U.S. History survey courses because I really try to do the work of giving the context, not just telling the food story, but also the moments. And I think that for students who don't always have a strong connection to moments in history or for anyone who likes history but doesn't always find a common way of telling it or as accessible, that there's something about seeing it through food that really pulls us in and gives us that seat at the table. It's the universal thing. It's the way into history that is commonly understood by most people.

Thank you for joining us, Anazeta. The book is U.S. History in 15 Foods. It's kind of delicious. Let us know when the dessert book comes out, okay? I will. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.