All of these categories are subsumed under the larger question of what it means to be an “American.” A partial answer is manifested in how inhabitants of the United States have chosen to fill their stomachs. I investigate how Americans have used food practices as a way to perform religious, gendered, racial, and political identities. The book surveys United States food history from the time of European contact through the present. If the entire book read like that I would certainly crush my editors’ hopes that I have written a book that will prove enticing to hard to please undergraduate readers, to the discerning “general reader,” and to the historical community. Year by year, the American food supply was controlled by fewer and fewer corporations. By 1890, four companies packed 89 percent of the country’s beef. Just as improvements in wheat milling were too costly for small millers to install, refrigeration equipment too was affordable only to major meat packers. Refrigeration technology became increasingly more effective decade by decade, but the necessary equipment and infrastructure remained expensive. For example, look at this passage from page 99 of How America Eats: Sometimes that obligation to an externally existing historical reality makes for dull reading. Novelists have creative control over how they shape the fictional worlds their characters inhabit while historians, like myself, owe fidelity to the real word. However, the same practice is more haphazard when applied to works of non-fiction. Each page 99 captured something of the author’s style and essence as a thinker and writer. Out of curiosity, I applied the test to a number of the novels on my bookshelves, and they all passed handily. I would rather that readers ignore the old adage and judge my book by its playful and artfully designed cover rather than on the basis of page 99. Wallach applied the “ Test” to How America Eats and reported the following: In 2010 History News Network named her a “Top Young Historian.” Swindall, she is also at work on two edited food history collections titled American Appetites: A Documentary Reader and High and Low on the Hog: African-American Foodways from Slavery to Obama.

Food and Culture (2012) and is the series editor of the University of Arkansas Press Series on Food and Foodways. She is also the author of How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. She is the author of Closer to the Truth than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow (2008), Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen (2010), and the co-editor of Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas (2011).

Jennifer Jensen Wallach is an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas who specializes in African-American history and United States food history.

Arsnick by Jennifer Jensen Wallach