The intersection of food and culture. Foodways entered the stream of American folklore
studies during the 1880s—the decade that saw the founding of the American Folklore
Society and the holding of the Cotton Centennial Exposition. The development of
foodways as a subdiscipline of folklore has retained the stamp of identity placed upon the
discipline by the odd circumstances of its origin. Briefly recounted, these circumstances
revolve around Lafcadio Hearn, a struggling journalist and traveler, who in 1879 sought
to supplement a meager writing income by opening a small restaurant in New Orleans,
which he advertised as “the cheapest eating house in the South.” The restaurant closed in
short order, Hearn’s silent partner and cook taking off with the litde cash Hearn had
raised to open its doors.
In order to pay the debts incurred by this failed venture, Hearn turned to William
Coleman, a friend and bookshop proprietor. Hearn pitched Coleman on the idea of
publishing several small books on New Orleans life and tradition to be sold to visitors
expected at the Cotton Centennial Exposition, an event of World’s Fair scale planned for
New Orleans in 1884. Hearn was chiefly looking for an opportunity to publish a
collection of proverbs, the fruit of his ongoing, selfguided explorations of New Orleans’
Creole culture. Coleman agreed to publish the proverbs, but only if Hearn agreed to write
an additional collection of Creole recipes. Misfortune continued to plague Hearn’s
ventures, as printing delays prevented the books from reaching bookstores until 1885, by
which time the exposition and its thousands of tourists had left town. The two books—
Gombo Zhebes and La Cuisine Creole—were published to poor sales and reviews.
La Cuisine Creole met its author’s claim as the only work in print that described the
methods of New Orleans’ Creole cooks. But for folklorists and others who, in the decades
to follow its publication, were to value detailed, firsthand accounts of traditional
expression, particularly among America’s racial minorities, La Cuisine Creole came to
represent the tangible, visible part of an otherwise invisible world, mixing African,
Caribbean, and European cultures. La Cuisine Creole clarified Hearn’s sketches of street
life, transcriptions of street vendors’ cries, and collected proverbs. However, Hearn’s choice of food as the expressive “medium” through which to
communicate the cultural “message” of Creole tradition served over time to distance this
body of work from his other ethnographic writings. Even as Hearn’s stature as an
ethnographer rose among American folklorists, the medium of foodways, which had
proven so successful in his depiction of Creole life, failed to find the same scholarly
acceptance as custom, music, dance, or verbal folk genres.
In 1884 the term “foodways” was not in English currency. A stowaway among
European folk-cultural concepts that made their way into American scholarly usage a
half-century later, “foodways” owes its intellectual identity to “folklife.” The efforts of
American folklorists such as Don Yoder and Warren Roberts to broaden the range of
genres touched by tradition was at first largely perceived as a modest correctiv an attempt
to change folklore’s rules of evidence by adding material culture to the verbal and
customary expressions that formed the academic canon at the time. While folk craft, folk
architecture, folk costume, and other material genres did gain a heightened degree of
professional respect as the result of the folklife movement, foodways gained the most,
and for reasons that had more to do with imported ethnology than with food. The
European theoretical emphasis upon “common” culture—the ordinary structures of
everyday life—found in foodways a bridge to American folklore studies and an
opportunity to contribute to those intellectual trends in postwar America that sought to
widen the category of people considered “folk.”
Interestingly, the demand for a culture-based understanding of food within the social
sciences had been articulated in America far more eloquently and forcefully than in
Europe, largely due to the efforts of Margaret Mead and her colleagues at the National
Research Council’s Committee on Food Habits. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mead
worked with a large contingent of anthropologists, home economists, sociologists, and
nutritionists to develop profiles of cultural food preferences. The strongest of these
preferences, called “food habits,” became the data upon which statistical projections of
required foodstuffs and the hypothetical effects of wartime rationing could be calculated.
The data proved more hypothetical than the theories that prompted its collection, but
Mead succeeded in demonstrating the utility of applied anthropology and the close
association among foodways, cultural identity, and community.
In the late 1970s, foodways also proved to be the vessel for a revised model of
tradition in culture that combined two emergent concepts unrelated to any particular
genre: first, an expanded notion of “context,” and, second, increased attention upon folk
expression as “symbol making.” Unlike other genres, foodways were seldom anonymous:
The intentions of a person producing food to eat and the expectations of the people
consuming it were either evident or easily documented. Field research that focused upon
foodways was as likely to plumb the cultural significance of the names of foods as to
document the tools or techniques used to prepare it. Similarly, what folk informants
identified as traditional about a food could range from the occasion for which it was
prepared, to the origin of special ingredients, to customs that invested food with luck.
As a consequence, almost as soon as foodways came to be recognized within the
enterprise of folklore, the new genre branched out in nearly as many directions as there
were researchers. Not surprisingly, the patterns of this new work reflect accepted
folkloristic approaches to identity and community: age, ethnicity, gender, locale, occupation, religion. In an inclusive discipline, foodways became the most inclusive and
least-disciplined genre.
In this regard, at least, foodways research enjoys the benefits of a broad definition and
suffers few of the negative consequences. The term “foodways” has come to mean the
intersection of food and culture. Lines of research, analysis, comparison, or theory that
approach this intersection or pro ceed from it are generally viewed with equal acceptance. There is no mission for
foodways research—no priority list of work to be done and no palpable displeasure about
the absence of one. In some respects, it has been of benefit to foodways as an emerging
discipline that no single sector of the broad subject has come to dominate discussion: The
production of foodstuffs, patterns of marketing and processing, cookery, the sale of foods
in commercial venues, and even the customs and manners associated with eating have
garnered equivalent scholarly attention.
What have emerged as defining characteristics of American foodways research are,
first, a serious tone of voice, and, second, high regard for imaginative description. The
first of these characteristics distinguishes foodways scholarship from the voluminous
output of popular and promotional writings about food that flood the nation’s book racks,
magazines, and newspapers. The second is, ironically, a recognition that good writing
about food and culture turns up frequently in virtually every corner of the literary
marketplace.
One useful way of surveying the work that contemporary scholars have brought to the
study of American foodways is to examine what this body of work contributes to
folklore’s preoccupation with community.
Food and Age. With the exception of oral-history work, foodways research is less likely
to focus upon the food-related customs or behavior of a single age group. Foodways pays
respect to community elders—from the matriarch who presides over Thanksgiving dinner
to the sage Lake Erie fisherman whose skills in spotting fish suggest a third eye—but
probably less so than other disciplines. When cooking or eating is involved, the attention
is more likely to be focused upon household members personally involved in these
enterprises, and less likely to focus upon people either too young or too old to actively
participate.
Food and Ethnicity. Foodways has been identified as ethnicity of last resort—the last bit
of ethnic difference to be shed in America’s rush to assimilation. One might expect this
view to attract greater numbers of scholars interested in the display of ethnicity, but the
opposite is more nearly true. The loss of singing, craft, costume, and other traditions
seems more acute when “all” that is left is an occasional meal that conjures the
preimmigrant past. Nonetheless, foodways is probably the most available, quantifiable,
and comparable information offered to today’s students of ethnic community.
Food and Gender. Unlike other subdisciplines, which have seen new research into
gender-based roles, styles, and notions of tradition, American foodways scholarship has
paid little attention to the ways in which foodways represent gender. Folklorist Thomas
Adler’s useful speculations on sexual provinces in cookery and meal schedule are a
noteworthy exception (cf. Adler [1981] 1983), but they have not inspired further inquiry.
The constant reinforcement of popular stereotypes depicting farmers as men, cooks as
women, and eaters as families may discourage a closer examination of the varied
activities associated with foodways and a more particular look at who does what—and
why.
Food and Locale. “Regional foodways” represents the consummation of the long-sought
marriage of folklore and geography, and the demonstration of functionalist theories about
how culture conserves nature. In theory, at least, it follows (in a backwards sort of way)
that if people are what they eat, and they eat where they are, they are where they are. An
Iowa farm family sitting down to a groaning table of vegetables, fresh from the garden,
and home-cured ham; a warming Maine chowder, simmered from the day’s catch;
Maryland crab cakes; Boston baked beans; a Rhode Island clambake; Texas chili—each
of these images conjures a connection between a place, its native foodstuffs, local styles
of cookery, and—in some cases—social events that encapsulate several of these
elements.
As vernacular culture, the stuff of images and advertisements, this notion of regional
foodways is demonstrably “authentic.” There are more pictures of dancing red crabs on
restaurant marquees in Baltimore than in Phoenix; more log cabin-lettered roadside
billboards advertising barbecue in the Blue Ridge than in the Catskills. But while these
culinary animations do proscribe regions in a somewhat coherent way, their coherence
does not derive from agriculture, horticulture, or aquaculture. Worse, these images often
conceal shifts in what people are actually growing, cooking, and eating.
Food and Occupation. Some of the best folklore research on occupational traditions
belongs under the broad rubric of “foodways” but predates the folklife movement.
Folklorists’ attention to fishermen, farmers, and cowboys begins before the turn of the
century and has been nourished by continued interest in customs, beliefs, worksongs, and
stories that configure the worker, the worker’s peers, a job, and the dangers that bind
them. As the notions of occupation and occupational folklore have diversified, the appeal
of these few occupations has remained strong to scholars. Integrating research about them
into foodways studies requires little more than recognition of the appetites and market
forces that have historically driven these occupations, and willingness (not yet in
evidence) to apply the high standards of prior research to other food-related occupations.
Food and Religion. The range of associations between food and religion is extensive—
from dietary rules that limit what a member of a particular faith may eat, to the symbolic
connection between nutritional and spiritual sustenance, to the frequent use of food
events such as church suppers and bake sales as fund-raisers and social events benefiting
religious groups. Religious communities are seldom formed because of their attitudes
toward foods, but they may come to be known by, and differentiated from, other
communities as a consequence of food-related beliefs, rituals, or other practices. Such is
certainly true for Jewish kosher-food practices, Muslim dietary laws, and Catholic
abstention from meat on Fridays—the source of the derogations “fisheater” or “mackerel
snapper.”
More than anything else, American foodways are characterized by the marketplace—a
plethora of choices and patterns of consumption that respond to impulse, trend, season, or
times. Such whimsy leads many folklorists to look past much of consumer behavior in
search of those aspects of foodrelated culture more deeply rooted in the kinds of
communities listed above, or elsewhere. Table manners seem to survive passing fashions
that affect the foods being eaten. The foods prepared for special occasions—birthday
dinners, Thanksgiving, religious holidays, Fourth of July picnics, and such—also seem
more resistant to change. But to invest too much importance in these seeming constants is
to place too heavy a burden upon them for “carrying on” the broad legacies we assign
them. Important food events have symbolic value because they are important in the first
place, and many, if not all, of the participants are aware of what is symbolically being
“said” when a Thanksgiving turkey is carved or birthday-cake candles are blown out.
The seriousness that anthropologists brought in the late 1930s and early 1940s to the
study of food habits offers an indication of key questions American foodways research
must tackle. What does the term “food habit” mean in a consumerist society? Where is
significance located in the twisted trail from field to table? Tradition is no less active in
decision making about what seed to plant in a suburban backyard garden or the choice of
a pizza venue. The study of American foodways holds the promise of offering an
approach to folklife in its broadest sense and widest reference—a scholarly enterprise that
locates significance in common experience and cultural variety.
Charles Camp
References
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Society, 1983, pp. 45–54.
Camp, Chades. 1989. American Foodways. Little Rock, AR: August House.
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