American Food in American Literature
The months between the cherries and peaches of the
If is brimming cornucopias which spill
Fruits red and purple, sombre bloomed and black;
Then, by the rich fields and beaches of the river ice
We will trample bright persimmons, while killing you
Bronze partridge, speckled quail and Canvasback.
Elinor Wylie1
I ate another apple pie and ice cream, which is practically all you ate all the way throughout the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.
-Jack Kerouac2
In October 1998, Jiao-Tong literary editor of The China Times in Taipei, Taiwan, invited me to write an essay on American food in American literature for presentation at the First International Conference on Food and Literature, held in Taipei in May 1999. I thought I would find many books source High on the subject. After extensive web searches and communications with several professors of American literature at universities in the United States and Canada, I I was quite surprised to find any book in print on the subject. Not only was no book about him had not single article that addresses directly address the issue of me. The absence of secondary sources, explains why most of the references in this essay are primary sources. The limitations of time and space to this writing yet to explain why I have limited my study of American literature of novels, short stories and poetry. I tried to make a representative selection among novelists, short story writers and poets including nearly two hundred years of American literature, both genders and a variety of ethnic groups. Due there are so many versions of major works that quote, I limited myself to those citations the author's name, job title and the inside as the verse, chapter, or section and omit the page numbers of the particular versions, I've used. Less well-known works, collections and anthologies receive standard citation format.
To bring some order to this vast amount of material, I created three themes around which I can weave what I found about American food in American literature: the continuity and discontinuity, purity and impurity, and abundance and scarcity. These three themes allow several important truths about the American experience through time to appear as concerns of its writers as well. For example, the great changes wrought in the land and indigenous peoples were accompanied by deep accessories and sustainable European food habits. In addition, the tremendous abundance of natural resources and artificial wealth America has long lived with the land devastated and abject poverty. The greatest American writers like Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck, have repeatedly recognized and incorporated these extremes in their plots and characters, much as are embodied in everyday life and the personalities of Americans.
As an introductory framework for my presentation, I would like to offer some possible explanations for the lack of secondary sources. First, I think the most famous and popular American foods such as pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream are derivatives of European food. The pizza came from Italy. The hot dog is a version of the German sausage. The reforming the meatballs burgers joined with the bread that is as old as civilization itself agriculture. And the ice cream also has its counterparts in the kitchen European nations. So the first reason for the lack of secondary sources is that most foods are derived from American and American original.
A counterexample is ironic in this context China's fortune cookie. As food, has very little nutrition, but as part of the American idea of Chinese food has become a necessity in the American Chinese restaurants. However, they have asked several owners, waiters and waitresses in Chinese restaurants in America if Chinese cookies of fortune came from China. All of them have told me they did not. They were invented in the United States and most likely, according to this oral history in San Francisco. This I seem to be a credible story. San Francisco grew up as a city on the money generated by high-risk occupations such as hunting, shipping, mining gold and deep-sea fishing in the ocean. We can readily imagine an enterprising person watching how concerned Chinese Americans in these professions were with her future good luck or bad luck, getting this knowledge, together with the well-established American taste for sweet desserts, and creating a sweet dessert that looked different and contained words of wisdom about the fate of the consumer.
Secondly, until recent decades, American literature and literary criticism is dominated by men whose worldview connected feeding women and put them both in the kitchen and out of sight. Most male writers I read for this trial used food and activities around food to highlight aspects of character or plot. They do not mind the food gathering and preparation, cooking, serving, eating, drinking and cleaning activities that substantially enhanced aspects of their characters, most of whom are men, or as events that substantially advanced the plot, plot or themes of his writing.
In fact, a related topic could be included in this type of study that deals with body care in general. For example, it is extremely rare for an American writer of mentioning all bodily functions and that the excretion or urination. Different types of breathing are clearly associated with different types of physical and emotional conditions, such as fear, sadness, fatigue, exhaustion or contemplation. But food and other processes body usually ignored, taken for granted or glossed. I mention this topic only in passing, and do not have the time or space here to live in it, but simply point which focuses on food as a topic in relation to literature is an important innovation that represents a range of human activities whose presence or absence in the literature would be an interesting expansion of this approach.
Third, as an American, I believe that most Americans take food for granted. Us we tend to see it as an inevitable burden placed on our freedom of activity for the condition of having a physical body. We tend, especially in the last decade of the century 20, to try to ensure the least possible time and energy for all life stages related to physical nourishment of our bodies. Growth, the popularity and power of the fast food industry in the United States reflect this disdain for the needs of physical nourishment.
After the Allied victory World War II, the U.S. experienced unprecedented prosperity while the applications of new technologies allow more tasks to perform with speed growing. Full acceptance of free market competition in ideological opposition, political and economic centrally planned economies, planned and societies, the enormous success of the rapid production, the mass scale in support of military forces during the war, and increasingly tense and complicated struggle between capitalism and communism began to change the values of American society from the slower, more simple values of rural life and rural life more faster, more complicated values of industrial production and urban life. Speed began his emergence as a core value of America. For example, in 1955, just before the experience gained in Kerouac On the road, the two fast food companies are now America's largest-McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken-were founded. "In the 1980s there were about 440 food franchising companies with a combined total of over 70,000 outlets in the United States. "3 U.S. small, congested living conditions in Europe slowly adjusted to the field of American land and resources. Size on everything great, became a common value in all areas of American life. With the advent of speed as a value for the American ideology rest of the 20th century was its principal described: the bigger the better, faster is better. From cars to burgers, this ideology began increasingly govern how Americans thought about everything they did. Both values play a significant role and significance in the relationship between American food Latin literature.
In addition, the social environment of European derivation, male dominance and indifference to food, is the traditional character of the writer American success. The most famous writers of the United States have been and are still men. Most of these male writers such as Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Poe and Miller, continuously since its protagonists, most of whom were men, in positions that require the creation of a Steady state and significant life. Like the early settlers, like the pioneers, such as immigrants, their characters are constantly faced with challenges to their survival, their ability and honesty which defines the last in terms of superiority manifested in verbal and physical place of mutual cooperation or foster care. An irony counter-example is Ayn Rand, a writer who fully accepted the values of competence, personal power and rugged individualism. His characters powerful men, as the architect almost divine in Atlas Shrugged, face problems and situations that require strength, individual development and mass production.
That the creation and production also consumes energy, resources, time, and money was not a central concern to the beginnings of the environmental movement in the late 50s and early 60s. The fact that the creation and production often result in emotional and physical deprivation of less independent beings such as kids, animals, women, the poor and the groups of ethnic minorities was also a central concern of American writers and critics until the late 50's and early 60's. The previous writers felt compelled to produce and reproduce the feelings, drives, pictures and characters guidance male, individualistic creation and production in his writings. As a result, many of the facts of life such as eating, drinking, digesting, excreting and nurture were systematically absent, implicit, glossed or ignored.
These at least four reasons why there is a shortage of secondary sources on the topic of food American in American literature. It is indeed a book waiting to be written.
Fortunately, however, there are many cases of food in literature American and they are some interesting patterns and features. I created three themes to focus on these patterns and characteristics: continuity and discontinuity, purity and impurity, and abundance and scarcity. First I will briefly describe the content and justification for each item and then proceed with the literary material, particularly illustration and lights up with every post.
A. Continuity and discontinuity. The first European settlers in the east coast of the United States saw several discontinuities and began to create new ones. Crowded European cities and reached extensive farmland, sparsely populated forests, mountains and valleys. Rigidly intolerant societies many 16th and 17th century European countries came to a land whose societies, indigenous peoples, total strangers were closed to them. A life of poverty and scarcity that came to a land that gradually resources and dissemination of wealth beyond your wildest dreams. Since ancient times, were established parts of Europe that had been domesticated long ago by the sword, the plow, the cross and the crown came to the desert that seemed indifferent to the grandeur and traditions European civilization.
Within these discontinuities also creates disruption in the lives of indigenous peoples by war, trade and intermarriage. In the natural life cycles of the new land, but also began to create discontinuities in the invasive activities of logging, agriculture, mining, urbanization, hunting and fishing. The cultivation of the ends that have
accessories American life began at this time. Americans had I loved the desert and indigenous ways and shed as many of their European ways as possible. Americans are hated the desert and native forms and worked modify or destroy them both. The latter, among the first settlers insisted on the continuation of religions and European languages, official protocols, forms social customs and all that food might do in the new world, such as bread, or sent from Europe without waste, such as tea.
The Indians lost to the biggest waves of mostly European is convinced that the Indian was a dead Indian better. For example, it is estimated that in 1600 had approximately 10 million indigenous people living in many different groups or tribes in the Americas. In 1900, under a U.S. government's official policy extermination that the total had fallen to about 500,000 people. The impact of the new inhabitants of the land has not been so strong. In 1600, most of the land east of the river Mississippi and west of the Rocky Mountains was covered with mixed wood and deciduous forests. In 1990, less than 3% of the original trees remain standing.
In addition to the clash of Europeans and indigenous peoples, the growing population of Americans cultivate land for crops, especially cotton and snuff, sold to a growing population of consumers in Europe provided a market for human consumption slave labor. The slave trade, initiated by the Netherlands and persecuted by almost all Western European countries with the navigation experience, created extreme discontinuities in many aspects of African life that are out of reach of this essay. However, the importation of Africans as slaves created an entirely new power of Americans, for two hundred years subject to conditions Planting near starvation, he invented and innovated with little edible material accessible to them. His creativity has helped many different types of distinctly American foods such as chitlins, greens and a variety of foods focused on the bayou area of Louisiana known as Cajun food. Along with original contributions made by indigenous peoples to early settlers and pioneers such as corn diets, some of these foods that have outlasted the institution of slavery also sites have been found in American literature.
B. Purity and impurity. The first settlers in the American East Coast brought a deep fear of hell and a deep desire to purify the life of any element that prevents the practice of true Christianity. True Christianity means to them a literal reading of the Bible and a literal interpretation of the social life around the teachings and doctrines of the Bible. Red, for them was the devil's color, the color of evil and the color of indigenous peoples. pure black and pure white were the colors of your choice.
Those Americans who loved the desert, however, quickly adopted the use of animal skins in various colors for clothing and natural dyes to dye fabric or leather. Therefore, not only historical accident that the Cultural Revolution United States adopted the 60 wildly colored clothes, vehicles, hair and clear language as a significant and dramatic against the dark suits, white shirt, dark tie and black shoes creation figures. It was a historical accident that the beatniks and hippies came so close to food, very different in flavor, color, smell, taste and texture of white bread, roast beef, milk, potatoes, oatmeal and tea. He was also a historical accident that some of the writers most influential of the era, such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, which is deep and lasting inspiration from literature and food from the land and villages Off the coast of the United States.
C. Abundance and scarcity. From 1895-1915, approximately 23 million immigrants moved from Europe to United States. These people came from all over Europe. It left the living conditions characterized by poverty, political unrest and oppression and lack of any opportunity for improvement. America was a land that promised to turn their dreams of prosperity, wealth, abundance and freedom come true. Many immigrants made their fortunes in America and 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 American scene increasingly heterogeneous. This period of intensive migration saw the beginnings of neighborhoods in big cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. These were ethnic enclaves for the Italians, Poles, Germans, Jews and blacks trying to find an alternative to the defeated militarily, but racism still powerful, his former masters in the south, or others whose strong sense of group identity always brought special foods that were amplified by the increasingly large scale of American life.
At the same time, the rapid growth in large-scale manufacturing in factories that employ tens of thousands of immigrants who were poorly paid and allowed only a minimal education beyond the history of its European origins, became some of these neighborhoods in the slums and ghettos first American. Extremely low wages, non-existent social services, the waves of unemployment and growing pressure large families and newcomers often that many of these new Americans at the edges of malnutrition, hunger and starvation, even. Abundance and shortages began to appear as poles of an oscillation driven not by socio-economic institutions as evident as slavery, but by beliefs, prejudices and attitudes about the superiority and inferiority of different types of people, along with well-established patterns of access and lack of access to resources. The negative impact of First World War was followed by the euphoria of the 20 positive. In that decade of unprecedented prosperity and national expansion was followed by the Great Depression the 30s. America was clearly moving in the forefront of a world order whose extremes ranging from genocide to the population explosion, from famine to putrefaction and surplus feet of clay used free throws to polish toenails on satin slippers on polished marble.
A first look at the issue of continuity and discontinuity can be seen by comparing the two quotations at the beginning of this essay. Elinor Wylie lived from 1885-1928. Jack Kerouac lived from 1922-1969. Ripe fruit appears as an edible food from the tree in Wylie's poem and as an ingredient of cake on Kerouac's novel. Wylie cherries and peaches are close to raw nature of the apple pie baked Kerouac. Wylie poem means the establishment of the first European settlers in a land that provided ample food. Kerouac's novel represents the concern of urban Americans for whom food had become an interesting need.
Wylie poem and it means abundance Thus the value of greatness without the addition of speed played an important role in the life of Kerouac's character Dean Moriarty.
In fact, Dean Moriarty was based on the real man, Neal Cassady. In 1964, lived in Palo Alto, California, after leaving Stanford University to try my hand at writing fiction and poetry. I met a lovely young woman who was a freshman at Stanford and invited to a party. The party was in a house on the east side of Palo Alto was known increasingly as a place for non-conformists and beatniks. Party Leading many people whom neither my friend nor I knew with much wine. He also offered some very unusual. At one point during the party drank wine in the small kitchen, with lots of light. In a tumult of laughter, speeches people, a young man with a radiant smile and laughing call, whose feet seemed barely able to stay on the ground, hovered and flew around the room while the man who had invited me to the party I introduced him as Neal Cassady. He recognized me and disappeared out another door. Never saw him again, but held until the day of the vivid impression of the speed of light and he also seems to have given Kerouac.
The continuity between the poem and the novel Wylie Kerouac is indicated by the American saying: "It's as American as apple pie!" Another kind of continuity seems, on the other hand, when the verse after that quoted above from a poem by Wylie is considered:
Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There is something in this richness hatred.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotonous.
There's something in my own blood has
Bare hills, cool silver on a sky of slate,
A trickle of water, milkshake series
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.4
Overall, this verse and quoted at the beginning of this essay spectacular screen the three themes. There is a continuity and discontinuity between the doctrines of a religious European heritage, Puritanism, which emphasized the great worldly accomplishments, but so little screen as mundane possible. One of the most important contributions of Max Weber to the understanding of modern Protestant view is its clear delineation of the conflict in early Protestantism between the wealth of the acquisition of large to mean being in favor of God and show humility only to the rest of the world without ostentation pietists material, the Puritans, The Luddites and many other Protestant groups found so distasteful in Catholicism.
Weber argues, convincingly, I think, that the Puritan " like every rational type of asceticism, tried to enable a man [sic] to maintain and act on their motives constants, especially those taught himself against emotions. "5 The purpose of this action was to take some kind of life" free from all worldly temptations and all the details dictated by the will of God, and be certain of their [own rebirth in heaven after the sentence] passed by external signs manifested in their daily conduct. "6 In the Bible, as well as any other religious literature, success at difficult tasks is a clear sign of God's favor. For Protestants, such signs do not guarantee salvation, but are the closest to a guarantee that a Protestant can get. In fact, that "God blessed his chosen through the success of its work was undeniable … … for the Puritans. "7 This doctrine that combined asceticism with luck on their projects placed worldly Protestantism to be the driving force behind capitalism religious and the great creations and accumulations of material wealth that have occurred in modern times. But the fact remains that this combination can be a rhythm, an oscillation, confusion or conflict. This combination provides clear much of the historical essence of our themes of abundance and scarcity and purity and impurity.
A condensed example of the oscillation between wealth and the austerity of American Puritanism can be seen in a brief passage from the novella, The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Feather by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). This passage also highlights the way in which foods and activities around food have been treated by many of the greatest men America needs writers-as inevitable, but uninteresting, even in a fictional scenario: "The table was set beautifully out. It is loaded with silver, and over loaded with delicacies. The profusion was absolutely barbaric. It was not enough for meat have celebrated the Anakim. Never in all my life, I had been so lavish, so wasteful expenditure of the good things of life. "8
The tension between narrator and his hosts in the Poe story is shared by the tension between the narrator and the hero of the road. Jack Kerouac's appointment is part of the story first-person novel by Sal Paradise, the secondary character, secondary based on Kerouac himself. For the duration of their cross-country hitchhiking trip, he lives in the apple pie and ice cream. This diet not only reflects the poverty of salt, but also clearly places the novel in an American tradition continues to diminish the importance of body physical or material world. A discontinuity, however, occurs between the natural character of the fruits in the poem of Wylie and the food impersonal, processed Sal Paradise ate. A discontinuity more in the fact that Sal is taking their food on the way to the race at high speed, while Wylie is painting a picture of human beings relating to trees which by its nature can not move from where they are.
Wylie poetic picture drawn from her life New England. Many early settlers remained in or near the coast, allowing them to continue the seafaring life and occupations that have been practiced in Europe and because they provide an abundance of food. However, Puritan ideology was often in life that was lived to the extent that wealth as "cold silver on a sky Wylie slate. "Another American poet, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), born in Massachusetts and raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia in the east, marine Province of Canada. Their lives overlap in part of Wylie and she also paints the spirit of that particular area in terms of food, but with an emphasis on the austerity of his diet:
From narrow provinces
fish and bread and tea,
house of long trips
where bay leaves the sea
twice a day and
the herrings long rides, 9
Moreover, the abundance Wylie hates Kerouac is also rejected by one of his left hand casually, as if time unless a man dedicated to something as mundane as food of better quality or greater a person he was. However, the oscillation between abundance and scarcity appears in Kerouac's novel in the contrast between Sal Paradise and the hero of the road Dean Moriarty.
"… But Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love, did not care one way or another," so long that I can get that girl with that lil sumpin Lil ole down there between her legs, boy, 'and' so long, we can eat, son, y'ear me? I have hunger, I'm starving, let's eat now! "And off we would rush to eat, of which, as stated in Ecclesiastes: "It's their share of the Sun '" (C. 1 (emphasis added))
It is also certainly worth noting in passing that in both authors, differentiated by gender, origin and by the time there is a strong connection between religion and diet. This generality and continuity clearly occur in the traditional American holiday of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. All three feature unusually large and long lunches, and as strong connections with the Christian origins, Protestant early American colonists, settlers and pioneers. As with bodily functions mentioned before, what about food and literature in the foreground also illuminates the strong presence of Judeo-Christianity in American life and literature. Once again, this innovative item turns out to be a powerful lens for viewing a wide range of meanings that are repeated and pervasive in American literature.
In fact, the theological basis Wylie's hatred of "this" wealth is the Puritan soul struggling for the liberation of all attachments, implications, entanglements and concerns, and the world with material. battles are fought on battlefields Metaphysics empirical. In this case, the battle between the ontological metaphysical powers of good and evil is in the field Battle empirical relationship between a poet and edible, natural fruit. The apple represents the fall of man in the woman's hand. Hatred of "The Wealth" is therefore a self-hatred that leads to further women impure nature and closer to the purity of the immaterial soul austere and unadorned Protestant. The continuity of the body human nature is displaced by the discontinuity of the immaterial soul with the body. The abundance of human bodies and souls are moved by the paucity of elected officials, the doctrine Protestant chosen by God from the foundation of the world to survive the final trial and live eternally in heaven.
Serious reflection on the relationship between food and literature leads to a series of signifiers that all literature is based, namely, religion. Why? Because the original writing served the purpose of conveying the most valuable at the point of view and experience of the group. The most valuable asset of all is undoubtedly favors the survival of the group. All human groups long ago discovered that humans depend on greater powers for survival. All human beings need air, water, food, warmth and sleep. Fear, respect, adoration and sacrifice of the powers that govern life, both visible and invisible, is the substance of all ancient religions. The old truth and the key message of all religions is the dependence of humans on the powers, including the power of reproduction which is represented in the worship of ancestors. Religion embodies, ritualized and maintains the fundamental truth of human dependency. The denial of that dependence can lead to creativity in innovative and transformative largely deep spirituality and self-destruction and madness. Humans can imagine the absolute freedom, but to try to live it, as Nietzsche showed, only leads to self-destruction and madness.
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) fought with the madness of life and ultimately ended his life by suicide. The following poem opens with the kind of hymn to the natural wealth that we saw in Wylie poem ends with a similar feeling of empty space and cold silver. The contrast between the expressions "Nothing" and "berries" in the first line represents the tension between the abundance and emptiness. This significant turn connects with the tension between purity and impurity through the signifier of nothing as convenient and advanced spiritual state and as the material condition of spiritual devotees on earth. In this poem, these issues are again carried by concrete images, local wild foods and abstract, created that moves the reader away from the presence of an abundant to absent but pure implied above and beyond the physical ground:
Moras
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries
Blackberries on either side, but right about everything
A blackberry alley, going on hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of she panted. Moras
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With juices, blue-red. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for that brotherhood of blood, but must love me.
They fit my milkbottle, the reduction of its sides.
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks "
Bits of burnt paper turning in the sky burned.
His is the only voice, protest, protest.
I do not think that the sea appear at all.
The high meadows are bright green, as if lit from within.
I come to a bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hang the blue-green belly and wing panels in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them, who believe in heaven.
A hook more, and the berries and bushes end.
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To cope with the hills' north, and the face is orange rock
That gives nothing nothing but a large space
White lights and tin, and a sound like silversmiths
Beating and hitting an intractable metal.10
It is no coincidence, in this perspective, Neal Cassady, the person who lives behind the Kerouac character, Dean Moriarty, died of a drug overdose on the tracks hot shiny steel of a railroad track in central Mexico. The use of drugs in all groups traditionally associated with personnel and line-up of the largest powers in order to expand the capacity of the group to survive. Court of its traditional moorings in religion, drugs have become a way to experiment with the dimensions physical, mental and spiritual absolute freedom. The fact that many drugs, including LSD, cocaine, methamphetamine and opium, which the user feels they need no other food or natural supports for their existence, shows just how they fit into the attempt to deny dependency and achieve absolute freedom. The discontinuity of American experience in relation to the ancient traditions, the abundance of material wealth and usually the unacknowledged background ideal of a pure, immaterial soul have worked together to produce in their literary characters as Dean Moriarty who make life and death of treading the border between innovation and self-destruction.
O to pack our items in the expressive and poetic language par excellence of American William Carlos Williams: "The pure products of America go crazy" (from "On The Road To The Psychiatric Hospital)
Apple pie and ice cream, on the other hand, they also provide the opportunity to Kerouac value declaration clearly shows the abundance and the great thing: "I ate apple pie and ice cream, which was better as I was more in Iowa, the pie larger, richer ice cream. "(Chapter 3)" Best "," deeper "," bigger "and" rich " work together to define a value system that was both in the U.S. bigger is better and romantic background and richness.11
The theme of abundance can be found in all periods of American literature. In Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, for example, a character who is the father of Customs, the patriarch, not only of his squad some officials, but I dare say, respectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States, was one some permanent Inspector. "12 The Customs officer was the federal government office responsible for inspection of all cargo coming into the country by boat, and to determine if all rights had to pay. In the novel, this particular Customs is located on a pier in the port of Salem, Massachusetts. In this particular character, Hawthorne means a of the most important aspects of the American diet, which is also repeated in the literature, in their consumption of large quantities of meat. The Inspector had the rare ability to remember in great detail
"The dinner well that it had made no small part of the happiness of his life to eat …. hear him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster …. I am always pleased to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry and meat from butchers, and preparation methods most of them eligible for the table. His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the royal banquet, seemed to bring the flavor of pork or turkey in one of the nostrils very …. A fillet of beef, veal rear quarter, a sparerib pork, a particular chicken, or turkey worthy of praise, which had adorned his desk … such might have to remember … '13.
The dominance of U.S. meat in the diet can be seen in several ways. One of them is the following table specialty food franchises thirty individual fast food companies in the U.S.:
Type Number of Food Franchises
Chicken 8683
Hamburger / Hot Dog / Roast Beef 29 600
Pizza [usually served with a
meat stuffing] 11,593
Tacos [It is usually served with a
meat filling] 3620
Seafood 2630
Pancakes / Waffles [usually eaten
bacon,
sausage or ham] 1.63014
Another view American food this habit comes from the consideration of the quantities of meat consumption and production in the United States States. For example,
"Americans spend about 25 percent of their food budget on red meat. The per capita consumption of beef in the United States has increased steadily, while pork has declined …. Only in Australia, New Zealand and Argentina is higher per capita consumption in the United States. The United States normally produces about 27 percent of the beef in the world. "(Ibid., (13) 190)
From the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the source of these statistics Compton's Encyclopedia and the work of Hawthorne's 19th century, we can pass the late 20th century. In the late 1980s, Fried Green Tomatoes at the stop Café Whistle, a California writer, Fannie Flagg, was published. In the first section of the novel, a reproduction of an article in his hometown weekly newspaper Fictional southern U.S. Weems, Flagg described the basic menu of the newly opened Whistle Stop Cafe:
… The breakfast hours are 5:30 to 7:30, and you can get eggs, beans, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham and red eye gravy, and coffee ….
For lunch and dinner can be had: fried chicken, pork chops and gravy, catfish, chicken and dumplings, or a plate of barbecue, and your choice of three vegetables, biscuits or corn bread, and drink and dessert ….
… The vegetables are: creamed corn, fried green tomatoes, fried okra, kale or turnip greens, black-eyed peas, candied yams, the butter or lima beans beans.15
Later in the novel, the elements of a particular food to a customer is described as "fried chicken black-eyed peas, turnip greens, fried green tomatoes, cornbread and iced tea. "16
The fat, the abundance and purity of U.S. meat in the diet have also been used by some authors as an array to another type of shortage and impurity. Sylvia Plath uses the tradition of a large meat meal on Sunday, as once a week special session for American families, which often has a large turkey, roast, for contrast with other types of oven:
Mary Song
The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
Fat
Sacrifices its opacity …
A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious
The same fire
Melting the tallow heretics,
Expel the Jews.
Their thick palls float
A scar over Poland burned
Germany
They do not die.
Grey bird obsess my heart,
Boca ash ashes of the eyes.
Installed. At high
Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.
It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child world are killed and eat.17
One of the most gifted and enigmatic United States of contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize winner John Ashbery (1927 -) becomes the abundance of United States in an array of impurity, but the shortage as a lack of security:
Hardly anything grows here,
However, the barns are full of food,
The sacks of flour stacked to the ceiling.
The streams of sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
The dish of milk is collected at night
Sometimes I think of him,
At times, always with mixed feelings? 18
Besides the importance and priority of meat, and lists Plath poem Fried Green Tomatoes at the stop Whistle Café foreground important continuity and discontinuity in foods of America. Continuity most important is the fact that the early settlers and pioneers, trying to live in a strange land before it had developed for agriculture, they their bread mainly locally available grains, especially maize. Related wheat and other grains were too hard to grind to a mill hand and requires heavy, complicated, that early settlers could not carry with them. Corn became a staple as important to early European settlers as it was for the Indians:
Young, ripe corn is consumed as roasted corn. In winter, the shells of the grains were soaked out with lye to make hominy. For breakfast and dinner was boiling corn meal mush. Sometimes, the slurry is fried and served with butter or lard. The most common dish, however, was bread hot corn. Bake on a sheet of hoe before the fire, this was called hoe cake. Mixed with water until the dough is hard and covered with ashes hot, ash cake. since emerged as Dutch oven cornbread or corn bread. small cakes corn bread corn called Dodgers 19
In the passage from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, both chicken and turkey are mentioned along with pork and chicken. The chicken and turkey were most likely caught and shot in their natural habitats. Pork and chicken were more likely raised and slaughtered in a pet store. This combination of wild and domestic meat began with the first settlers and continues until today. In fact, pioneers who traveled on foot, by cart and horse from east to west in the Americas found an abundance of wild game for meat. However tried carry enough family, nutritious food for them last for the trip to their new family home and to carry out periods when wild game was not available. A typical charge for an adult traveling by oxen-drawn cart to the west was:
"… 200 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of pilot bread, 75 pounds of bacon, 10 kilos of rice, five pounds of coffee, two pounds of tea, 25 pounds of sugar, half a bushel of dried beans, a bushel of dried fruit, two kilos of baking soda, salt 10 pounds, half a bushel of corn flour. And is that in addition to half a bushel of corn, roasted and ground. A small barrel of vinegar should also be take. "20
In many rural areas and sparsely inhabited parts of the mixture of wild and domestic meats America continues to this day. In Alaska, for example, where I lived for many years and is one third of the area around the forty-eight states in the U.S., many people still depend on hunting a large part of its meat supply. John Haines, past Poet Laureate of the State of Alaska and Alaska best known poet, began homesteading near Fairbanks, Alaska in the 1950s. I've known personally for many years and read poetry with him on stage Loussac Library in Anchorage in 1986. His poetry clearly shows how the dependence on bushmeat may crystallize the issues of wealth and purity in an identification with the predator:
Calls once again If the Owl
sunset
of the island in the river
and is not too cold,
I'll wait for the moon
increasing,
then take flight and glide
to meet
We will not talk
but shielded from frost
soar above
alder flats, searching.
Griffon Eye
And then we sit
in the dark spruce
collect bones
neglect mice,
while the long moon drifts
to Asia
and the river murmurs
in its bed of ice.
And when you go up in the morning
limbs
going to participate without making a sound,
fulfilled, floating
home as
the cold world awakens.21
Long before Haines or any other European Alaska residents, however, indigenous people have lived long in any meat that could kill and prepare animals. In fact, when first French explorers they met and spent time with indigenous people in the north of what is now Canada, who were so impressed by the dominance of raw meat in the diet called "Esquimeaux" which is French for "raw meat eaters." Going beyond the coasts of Canada and Alaska, however, millions of salmon to large rivers and are captured and used by the local population. These Americans now eat salmon after being smoked or cooked, as told in the following poem, "Keep # 2 "by Andrew Hope, III (1949 -), of Sitka, Alaska:
Dog salmon color
Bright
Evening Sun
Incoming tide
Washing of the beach
Dog salmon luster
Silver purple flash
Reach
Lifting a large
By the tail
Incoming tide
Washing of the beach
Time to eat
Salmon fried dog
To dinner22
There are five types of salmon that migrate to inland waters Alaska and used for food. Each class has its own name and type also has different names in different areas of Alaska. Thus, through discontinuities time in preparation-from raw to cooked, have occurred along the discontinuities in the time between the practice of naming the same food. are called dog salmon so because they were used by the thousands to feed the many dogs on which the indigenous people of Alaska for transportation was based during the long winters. This type Salmon, however, is perfectly fit for human consumption and now that many indigenous peoples of Alaska only travel by motor vehicles in all stations, dog salmon have become a staple of human nutrition.
These discontinuities in contact with the discontinuity meanings for the ingredients in the food and the second date of the first Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café is regional variation of food. Grains, for example, is a type of cereal or pasta or corn is coarsely ground wheat. Grain is considered by most Americans to be a food characteristic of South America. His public presence in northern cities is usually the result of southerners to the north and opening restaurants offering American Southern cuisine. Other typical dishes are American Regional cod associated with the northeast of seafood, lemon cake associated with the cuisine of the Florida Keys, tortillas and red beans associated with the kitchen to the southwest from the U.S. Hispanic heritage, and the salmon associated with northwest Alaska and kitchens.
One of Alaska Native American poets, Charlie Blatchford, a Yupik Eskimo who I knew personally and who has died, said the case of meat in a simple way in one of his few poems published:
Forgotten Words
Our language, I know,
has been prepared
with wisdom and grace.
Thin skin has been specified
and is on the side.
The bowels have cared
been exposed.
Its sweet flesh
ready to party.
Meat, staple of life,
is consumed with satisfaction …
Our need for sedation
for new words.23
In the hands of more contemporary poets who are not Native Americans, as was Charlie Blatchford, the meat still mean substantial food and often accompanied by a kind of substance that could serve as a separate item with toxic foods like alcohol and drugs. In Whitman, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and many other writers, wine, beer and other mind-altering substances often accompany food, especially meat. This range of meanings of consumption has a story in all literature that is as old as interesting and as important as the meat and other foods. In fact, putting the light of the interests of food has once again highlighted a major stream in the lives of all people who could well serve as the subject for more extensive research, discussion and writing. In many poets, the connection between meat and wine are made short, as in the fourth verse of "asylum" by Herman Fong (1963 -):
In just eat foods it,
give the smallest pieces of meat,
especially fat, and a few drops of red wine.24
A concentration on the details of ordinary life that characterizes the style of many American writers, both young and old. John Steinbeck, Nobel laureate and one of the pre-eminent American literary voices of the 20th century often drew his characters and settings of everyday life of people in California. Some of his best and letters popular novels like Cannery Row, Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, and the collection of stories, The Long Valley, characters function and configuration of the coast, southern and central California. Tortilla Flats has the lives of the "peasants" who lived near the California's central coast city of Monterrey. According to Steinbeck, a civilian was a mix "of Spanish, Indian, Mexican and assorted Caucasian blood" (Chapter 1). The main character, Danny and his friends hear about a ship that has foundered on the nearby coast. They go to the beach and floating debris to rescue the remains then sell. The sale puts five dollars in possession of Danny, an unusually large amount of money:
The five dollars of the ransom had been like fire Danny's pocket, but now know what to do with it. He and Pilon went to market and bought seven pounds of hamburger and a bag of onions and bread and a big role candy. Paul and Mary Torrelli Jesus went to two gallons of wine, or drink a drop on the way home, either. (Ch. 5)
Part of the genius Steinbeck as a writer and one of the aspects of their histories that distinguish them from other writings of America is the intentional use of food and activities for the characterization and plot development. Tortilla Flats is an example of his style as well as continuing to demonstrate the importance of meat in the American diet in all geographic regions and ethnic groups:
Danny business was pretty straightforward. He went to the back door of a restaurant. "Are you some old bread that I can give my dog? "asked the cook. And while we were finishing gullible man food, Danny won two slices of ham, four eggs, a lamb chop and a flyswatter.
"I will repay you some day," he said.
"There is no need to pay for scraps. I throw them away if you do not take them. "
Danny felt better about the theft then. If that was what they thought, on the surface was innocent. He returned to [Torelli is the] wine merchant, traded with four eggs, lamb chop and a glass of water fly grappa and retreated to wood to cook their dinner. (Channel 1)
The particular food item for onions appears in the first passage as Tortilla Flats a small detail that represents a series of regional food in the American Southwest first settled by European settlers from Spain, not England. Among the burgers and onions are both easy to prepare continuity and consumed the flesh and the discontinuity of the regional cuisines of America. Another great American literary voice, that of William Carlos Williams, was also carried out this series of signifiers Southwest in its sole and only trip to that part of America. In addition to a fine ear for the peculiarities that distinguish American English from all other kinds of English, Williams also had an eye for small details of place that takes the reader about the subject of Williams's writing. The following excerpt is from "The Desert Music," which was based on Williams' trip, the American Southwest and its pilgrimage cities at that time, Hispanics were far more than whites:
– Paper flowers (for Los Santos)
baked red clay utensils, smeared
blue, silver,
dried peppers, onions, print products, children
clothing. The desert place, but all
for a few Indians squatting on the
cabins, unnoticing (do not you think it)
as if he slept there 25
The use of activities around food to develop the plot and the character is also part of the style of another American writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Faulkner (1897-1962). From the deserts and valleys scattered in southwest the dense forests, swamps and prairies of the Deep South, American literature, as enduring literature of every language, has always insisted that the physical and features are part of history. In the following passage from Light in August, Faulkner uses McEachern attempted to feed Mrs. Joe as a reflector for both characters:
He lay so with his back, his hands crossed on his chest like an effigy of the tomb, when he heard again the feet on the stairs close ….
Without turning his head to the boy heard Mrs. McEachern work slowly up the stairs. He heard her approach through the floor. It seemed, But after a while his shadow approached and landed on the wall where you could see, and saw that he had something. It was a food tray. He put the tray on the bed. Not had once seen it. He had not moved. "Joe" he said. He did not move. "Joe," which, he said. She saw that her eyes were open. Do not touch.
"I have hunger," he said.
She did not move. He stood, hands on her apron. There seemed to be looking at it, either. Seemed to be talking to the wall beyond the bed. "I know what you think.'s Not it. He never told me to bring. I thought I do so. He does not know. There is no food that you sent. "He did not move. His was the calm like a face carved, facing strong pitch maximum table limit. "He has not eaten today. Sit and eat. It was he who told me to bring. He did not know. I waited until he was gone and then I fixed myself. "
He then joined. While she looked at him, got up from bed and took the tray and took it to the corner and turned it, dumping the dishes and food and all on the floor. Then he went back to bed, carrying the tray empty, as if a custody and that the bearer surplice of cut underwear that had been bought by a man to wear. She was looking now, though she had not moved. His hands were shot still in her apron. He returned to bed and fell back again, eyes wide open and even the ceiling. He could still see his shadow, formless, a little stooped. Then he left. You could not see but could hear his knees in the corner, getting the pieces back into the tray. Then she left the room. There was absolute silence then.26
Faulkner lived and wrote in the Bible Belt. The Bible Belt meaning that most people in the south were Protestant fundamentalist Christians who hugged the spirit of austerity and longing for a paradise of this world of simplicity and peace so strongly articulated by writers New England and Wylie and the bishop. Although food is often produced in the work of Faulkner, is rarely sufficient, develop or lost. In general, serves to highlight physical scarcity and weak moral status of people living on the edge of a society whose wealth rarely appears in his work:
And Judith. She lived alone. Maybe once had lived since last year that Christmas day and the year before and then three years and then four years ago, because although he had Sutpen gone now … she lived on nothing but solitude, what with Ellen in bed in the closed room, requiring the constant attention of a child while waiting to incomprehension and amazement passive die and make her (Judith) and Clytie and maintaining a garden of the class to survive, and washing Jones, living in neglect and rot fishing camp on the river bottom, which Sutpen had built after the first wife-Elena-entered his house and past the deer and bear hunter left the itself, where Wash and now allowed her daughter and granddaughter to live, which makes heavy garden work and the provision of Ellen and Judith and Judith with fishing and hunting from time to time, including the house now, until Sutpen went, he had never approached closer to the scuppernong arbor behind the kitchen, where on Sunday afternoons and drank Sutpen of the demi-John and the bucket of spring water to wash download almost a mile away … '27.
Another indication of Faulkner's genius is his ability to see an event as common as a young Cakes and coffee with a waitress who secretly want some kind of relationship of potential for drama well, the background. Faulkner preference for food was scarce and small items of food continues to show the issues of scarcity and purity that were inevitable in social relationships and historic environment. In the following passage, Faulkner describes Joe, the boy in the passage just given, that has come to a restaurant to be served by the waitress, transparent in terms bring into play the signifiers of purity as an intangible nature and food as a necessity required, the heavy equipment:
He believed that men in the back … laughed at him. And he stood very still in his chair, looking down, the dime clutched in his palm. Not saw the waitress until the bulky two hands appeared on the front against him and at the hearing. I could see the calculated pattern of her dress and apron bib and two hands bigknuckled lying on the edge of the counter as completely still as if it were something she had brought from the kitchen. "Coffee and cake," he said.
He sounded depressed, completely empty. "Chocolate coconut lemon."
In proportion to the height from which you came his voice, his hands could not hands at all. "Yes," said Joe.
The hands did not move. The voice did not move. "Chocolate Lemon coconut. What kind. "The others they have seemed very strange. Unlike other through the darkness, fighting stained, and greasecrusted frictionsmooth, must have looked a little as if in prayer: Young countryfaced in clean clothes spartan, with a clumsiness that invested him with a spiritual quality and innocent and the woman in front of him, head down, still waiting, which by their smallness also participated in the quality of its, of something beyond the flesh. His face was highboned, skinny. The meat was very tense in
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Michael Jackson’s Food Fight… 