Eating in Eden: food and American utopias 9780803232518, 9780803217973, 9780803256446

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Illustrations (page ix)
Acknowledgments (page xi)
Introduction (Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch, page 1)
PART I . NEW WORLD UTOPIAS: Cultivating Immigrant Identities through Food (page 33)
1. Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty: Fasts and Thanksgivings in Early New England (Martha L. Finch, page 35)
2. Faith, Flatulence, and Fandangos in the Spanish-American Borderlands (Phillip H. Round, page 54)
3. An Appetite for America: Philip Roth's Antipastorals (Debra Shostak, page 74)
4. You Are Where You Eat: Negotiating Hindu Utopias in Atlanta (Kathryn McClymond, page 89)
PART II . COMMUNAL UTOPIAS: Eating In, but Not Of, the World (page 107)
5. Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys: Debates over Meatless Diets in Nineteenth-Century Shaker Communities (Margaret Puskar-Pasewicz, page 109)
6. Strawberries and Cream: Food, Sex, and Gender at the Oneida Community (Wendy E. Chmielewski, page 125)
7. Food and Social Relations in Communal and Capitalist Amana (Jonathan G. Andelson, page 143)
8. Recipes for a New World: Utopianism and Alternative Eating in Vegetarian Natural-Foods Cookbooks, 1970-84 (Maria McGrath, page 162)
PART III . STRATEGIC UTOPIAS: Cooking Up Values for a New World (page 185)
9. "This Fatal Cake": The Ideals and Realities of Republican Virtue in Eighteenth-Century America (Trudy Eden, page 187)
10. "The Chafing Dish and the College Girl": The Evolution and Meaning of the "Spread" at Northern Women's Colleges, 1870-1910 (Priscilla J. Brewer, page 203)
11. Revolution in a Can: Food, Class, and Radicalism in the Minneapolis Co-op Wars of the 1970s (Mary Rizzo, page 220)
12. Veggieburger in Paradise: Food as World Transformer in Contemporary American Buddhism and Judaism (Ellen Posman, page 239)
13. The Pixel Chef: PBS Television Cooking Shows and Sensorial Utopias (Monica Mak, page 258)
Contributors (page 275)
Index (page 279)

Citation preview

Eating in Eden

At Table

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Etta Ma Ch a Mart ld L Finc ]

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© 2006 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved. Manutactured in the United States of America.

library of Congress Gataloging-in-Publication Data Eating in Eden : food and American utopias / edited by Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch.

p.cm. -~ (At table series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-3251-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8092-3251-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Gastronomy. 2. Food habits. I. Madden, Etta M.,196e- UL. Finch, Martha L. U1. Series.

TxX631.£37 2006 641'.019-——-dc2g 2005030474

Set in Monotype Bulmer by Kim Essman. Designed by A. Shahan.

To Mary Etta Madden, for teaching me many values of food, and to Burton Dale Guion and Daniel Pike Guion, for motivating me to pass on some of those. BE. M.M.

For Gretchen Finch Mahoney, who taught me to cook, and in memory of Peter Sutton Finch, who taught me to think. M. L. F.

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Contents List of Illustrations 1x Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1 Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch

PART I. NEW WORLD UTOPIAS: Cultivating Immigrant Identities through Food — 33

1. Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty: Fasts and Thanksgivings in Early New England 35 Martha L. Finch

2. Faith, Flatulence, and Fandangos in the Spanish-American Borderlands 54 Phillip H. Round 3. An Appetite for America: Philip Roth’s

Antipastorals 74 Debra Shostak

4. You Are Where You Eat: Negotiating Hindu

Utopias in Atlanta 89 Kathryn McClymond

PART IT. COMMUNAL UTOPIAS: Eating In, but Not Of, the World 107 5. Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys: Debates over Meatless Diets in

Nineteenth-Century Shaker Communities 109 Margaret Puskar-Pasewtcz

6. Strawberries and Cream: Food, Sex, and Gender at the Oneida Community — 125 Wendy E. Chmietewske

7. Food and Social Relations in Communal and Capitalist Amana 143 Jonathan G. Andelson 8. Recipes for a New World: Utopianism and Alternative Eating in Vegetarian Natural-Foods Cookbooks, 1970-84 162 Maria McGrath PART ITIL. STRATEGIC UTOPIAS? Cooking Up Values fora New World 185

g. “This Fatal Cake”: The Ideals and Realities of Republican Virtue in Eighteenth-Century America 187 trudy Eden 10. “The Chafing Dish and the College Girl”: The Evolution and Meaning of the “Spread” at Northern Women's Colleges, 1870-1910 203 Priscilla 7. Brewer ui. Revolution in a Can: Food, Class, and Radicalism in the Minneapolis Co-op Wars

ofthe 1970s 220 Mary Rizzo

12. Veggicburger in Paradise: Food as World Transformer in Contemporary

American Buddhism and Judaism 239 Ellen Posman 13. The Pixel Chef: pss ‘Television Cooking

Shows and Sensorial Utopias 258 Monica Mak

Contributors 275

Index 279

Illustrations Following page 142

Title page from A fast of Gods chusing, 1674

Broadside announcing a public thanksgiving, 1677 Advertisement for kosher Pepsi-Cola, 1940 Girls husking corn, Watervliet, New York, 1894 Shaker dining hall, Mount Lebanon, New York, ca. 1880

Visitors at the Oneida Community Mansion House, ca. 1870 Amana Society preparation of cabbages for kraut, ca. 1925 An ideal family in Laurel’s Ketchen Bread Book, 1984

Founders of the Bloodroot restaurant and authors of The Political Palate, 1980 Commensality in the Vegetarian Epicure, 1978 Chafing dish party at Mount Holyoke College, ca. 1906 Chafing dish party at Wellesley College, 1904

Vassar College students demonstrate their culinary ingenuity, 1893

Self-described “eating club” depicted in the Vassarion yearbook, 1898 Cartoon illustrating Minneapolis Co-op Wars, ca. 1974 Cartoon, “Ideas Fell Like Raindrops,” ca. 1994

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Acknowledgments

As with a good communal meal, many have contributed generously to the production, preparation, and presentation of Hating in Eden. We first began sharing our food projects over coffee, after hearing from colleagues of the related and overlapping aspects of each other’s work. The Communal Studies Association Conference in Oneida, New York, in 2002 enabled us to bring together for the first tume the writing and thinking we had been conducting separately. An audience responsive to our CSA panel on food in communal societies encouraged us to proceed with plans for the volume. Senior scholars of utopian societies, Lyman ‘Tower Sargent and Robert S. Fogarty, provided support and advice. Several other conferences fed the project: sessions on food organized by the History of Christianity Section (2000) and the Comparative Stucies in Hinduisms and Judaisms Group (2004) at American Academy of Religion Annual Meetings; the “Second Conterence on the Representations of Food in Literature, Film, and other Arts,” sponsored by the University of Texas, San Antonio (2002); and the NineteenthCentury Studies conference “Feast and Famine” (2003). ‘To the many with whom we discussed food theory and food experience at these conferences, we are grateful.

As the work with the volume progressed, the support of our colleagues and students at Missouri State University was crucial. Victor Matthews in the Department of Religious Studies and George Jensen, formerly of the Department of English, commented on drafts of our original proposal. Other colleagues at Missouri State and elsewhere provided thoughtful criticisms and helpful suggestions regarding our introductory chapter; we especially thank Stephen C. Berkwitz, Amy DeRogatis, Elizabeth De Wolfe, Pam R. Sailors, and Sarah McFarland ‘Taylor. Undergraduate and graduate students in our food studies x1

courses and seminars allowed us to develop and clarify our ideas about American foodways. Among students we thank Rachel McBride, in particular, who did early copyediting of all the essays and then carefully read and provided suggestions for the volume’s introduction. George Welch’s master’s thesis research contributed greatly to our understanding of the role McDonaid’s restaurants play globally. Several audiences invited us to discuss our work, thus furthering the project: the Institute for Mature Learning, Drury University; Missouri State English Department colloquia for faculty and the public; and Angela Allen of the Columbian, Clark County, Washington. The critical feedback we received from publishing house editors and their anonymous readers helped us to refine the content and shape the volume. We are indebted to Ehzabeth Demers at the University of Nebraska Press, whose knowledge of food studies, both scholarly and popular (she introduced us to the “Julie/Julia Project,” for example), expertise in publishing, immediate interest in our project, and unflagging enthusiasm for it as it evolved made our early, perhaps somewhat utopian, visions of the book a reality. In addition, we appreciate the numerous other people with the press who helped with editing and moving the book through the production process. The Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University generously supported Martha with a Visiting Research Fellowship during the final stages of editing. Missouri State University’s London program enabled Etta some release from teaching and a significant escape from the confines of America, enhancing her view of some of the volume’s claims. Finally, it is to our contributors, who have provided the many-coursed banquet we ofter to our readers, that we owe the greatest debt of gratitude. Each of the authors helped us to think creatively about the numerous ways that food has contributed to meanings and practices of utopianism in American communities, and each worked diligently and in a timely manner to produce the essays collected here. To all who have contributed to Hating in Eden: Food and American Ulopias, we express our deepest appreciation.

xii Acknowledgments

For permission to reprint materials, we gratefully acknowledge the following:

University of South Carolina Press, for permission to reprint from pages 102 and 117-19 of Debra Shostak, Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives (July 2004). Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, for permission to print materials from the Charlotte Leonard Diary, Oneida Community Collection. Museum of Amana History, Amana, Lowa, for permission to reprint trom Bruderrath Beschluss (June 12, 1869). North Country Co-op, Minneapolis, for permission to reprint materials from A History of North Country Co-op, written by Betsy RaaschGilman and illustrated by Kevin Kane.

Acknowledgments xii

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Eating in Eden

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Introduction Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch

In 1986 the activist Carlo Petrini led a band of pretesters armed with bowls of penne pasta in a demonstration against the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant on the ancient Piazza di Spagna in Rome. Petrini and his friends represented the Italian organization Arcigola (archgluttony), which was working “to create awareness of local products and awaken people’s attention to food and wine and the right way to enjoy them.”' For Petrini, American fast food represented all that was wrong with the world: homogenization, industrialization, colonization, globalization, dehumanization—in short, McDonaldization.* Europeans and North Americans, Petrini argued, had lost touch with their gastronomic roots, with their sources of true pleasure and taste. “Fast-food culture”—its corporate economics, its assembly-line mode of meal pro-

duction and consumption, its fat- and chemical-laden Big Macs and fries, and the superficial, frenetic lifestyle it promoted—was destroying authentic human life physiologically and aesthetically. That day, on the Spanish Steps in Rome, the Slow Food movement was born.

Slow Food went international in 1989 and by 2004 had grown to more than eighty thousand members in more than one hundred countries, including an American affiliate, Slow Food USA. The organization promotes a global philosophy that is rooted locally in small convivia— groups that meet regularly in a member’s home or at a restaurant, winery, or farm to learn about “matters of taste.” Convivia hold “food and wine events and initiatives, creating moments of conviviality, raising the profile of products, and promoting local artisans and wine cellars.”’ As qt

Slow Food USA puts it in its Guiding Principles, the members want to “cultivate and reinvigorate a sense of community and place,” as well as promote “global collaboration.”* The Slow Food Manifesto, approved by delegates to the “International Slow Food Movement for the Detense of and the Right to Pleasure” conference held in Paris in 1989, outlines the organization’s global philosophy. The manifesto rejects “industrial civilization” for it has “enslaved” us to “Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes, ... forces us to eat Fast Foods,” and threatens the environment and humanity itself with extinction. The manifesto defends “quiet material pleasure” as the only effective antidote to “the universal folly of the Fast Life.” Sensory pleasure derives from the “slow, long-lasting enjoyment” experienced when family and friends gather “at the table with Slow Food.” Those hungering tor authenticity can “rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food,” as well as participate in “virtuous globalization”—an “international exchange of experiences, knowledge, and projects.” Slow Food has generated an expanding international network of heir-

loom food producers, distributors, and consumers, among them the likes of the renowned Berkeley chet Alice Waters, and retailer of highend gourmet products Williams-Sonoma. Among the organization’s numerous projects, a primary one has been building the Ark of Taste,

based on The Noah Principle: to “save” the world from the “flood” of the homogenizing excesses of the modern world. Countering McDonald’s official One Taste Worldwide mission, Slow Food celebrates regional uniqueness and global diversity. Into the conceptual ark go endangered species of wild and domesticated plants and animals, endangered artisan techniques of food and drink production, and endangered practices of social civility, conviviality, and commensalism in order to build “a more human and highly developed society.”

The Slow Food movement captures in a nutshell (or a snail shell, since the slow-moving snail is the emblem of the organization) the themes of this volume. ‘Taken together, the essays explore an American “culinary triangle.” to borrow a familiar term from the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.’ Rather than the raw, the cooked, and the 2 Introduction

rotted, however, the essays here bring together three central themes that weave their way throughout American culture and history, contributing to a distinctly American ethos: the role played by food and foodways within communities that hold ufopran aspirations for bettering themselves or the world at large. Foodways, according to the folklorist Lucy M. Long, include “the network of behaviors, traditions, and beliefs concerning food, and involve all the activities surrounding a food item and its consumption, including the procurement, preservation, preparation, presentation, and performance of that food.”* Shared foodways, as the Slow Food movement demonstrates, contribute to the successful construction of any community of like-minded individuals. However, communities are complicated entities, particularly in our postmodern global society. Reviving “the kitchen and the table as centers of pleasure, culture, and community,” a Slow Food convivium’s leisurely, intimate gatherings around food paint a familiar picture of a community as a group of individuals who physically meet, talk, and enjoy the pleasures of eating together.” Participants intend these convivial gatherings to connect the grassroots-embodied local community with a diffuse but active global community of members who likely never will meet face to face and sit down to a meal together. Yet they are linked meaningfully not only by participating in an innovative economic sys-

tem of food production, distribution, preparation, and consumption that spans the globe but also by sharing their ideas, stories, and values about food through print publications and the Internet. Utopianism, like community, is also a complex notion. The Slow Food movement offers a clear instance of a community with utopian ideals and goals. Petrini claims they are “without nostalgia,” but members want to bring from the past into the present, and from rural locales into industrialized society, an idealized time and place when people grew their own vegetables, made their own cheese, baked their own bread, and sat down with family and friends to enjoy a meal produced and prepared by their own hands.’ They want to access real or imagined “taste memories” and “rescue” unique regional foods and foodways~-the Andean root yacon, Indian mustard seed oil, British Somerset cheddar cheese, American heritage turkeys, for example—from extincMadden and Finch 3

tion caused by such “evils” as agricultural industrialization and biogenetic modification, typified by fast-food culture. Slow Food is typical of many utopian groups, for it looks to an ideal past in order to promote its distinct vision of a better present and future, one in which human beings are “saved” by learning to slow down, develop taste memories, experience true pleasure, and live authentically, with deeply felt connections to each other and a more humane, “civilized” world. America has provided an environment particularly conducive to our culinary triangle’s three elements—foodways, communities, and utopianism-—-coming together in a dynamic generation and exchange of meanings and practices. Especially since the publication of Eric Schlosser’s popular exposé, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meat (the subtitle of the UK edition is What the All-American Meal Is Doing to the World), the global spread of American fast-food restaurants represents to many the displacement of local values and practices by U.S. cultural imperialism.'' And yet for others, whether in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, or Capetown, consuming a Quarter-pounder with Cheese means symbolically ingesting all they see as positive about the United States: political and religious freedoms, military superiority, educational opportunity, technological advancement, economic power, material luxury, and the abundance of natural resources that have made these possible.’* This real and imagined American cornucopia of natural and cultural products, symbolized and enacted through American food and foodways, provides the setting for the diverse communities explored in Eating in Eden: Food and American Ulopias. Yet contradictory interpretations of America—as both a utopian land of abundant resources and possibilities and, because of that abundance, also a fallen nation of consumers who fret over their diets, health, and apparent cultural poverty—complicate meanings of America-as-utopia. In response, communities have developed distinct food practices to promote their own visions of how lite should be lived in America.

A Brief History of American Abundance The seeds of American fast food, the cultural meanings it symbolizes, and the contradictory responses it has elicited were planted more 4 Introduction

than five hundred years ago by the earliest European explorers, who exclaimed at their discovery of a marvelous “New World” overflowing with unimaginable riches. From early travel narratives that described in vibrant detail the discovery of exotic new foods, to recent accounts that have presented the United States as “breadbasket to the world,” food has served as a primary symbol of American abundance. Utopian images of America as the land of plenty were shaped by the first explorers, who often used biblical language to rhapsodize about America as a millennial land, the New Jerusalem foretold in the Bible. Christopher Columbus imagined he had found the Garden of Eden and claimed that

God had shown him where to find this “new heaven and new earth,” where a richness of natural resources awaited harvesting.'’ Later voyagers promoted American riches to Europeans hungry for economic profit, religious or political freedom, and other opportunities. Captain John Smith described Virginia in 1612: “The mildnesse of the aire, the fertilities of the soile, and the situation of the rivers are so propitious to the nature and use of man as no place is more convenient for pleasure, profit, and man|’|s sustenance.” Other travelers in the 1600s compared the abundance of American commodities with their lack in Europe, claiming that the “savage” Native people they encountered were unable to take full advantage of the land’s riches. Indians simply took what they needed with ease, said these writers, and celebrated with feasts during which they ate “until their bellies stand forth, ready to split with fullness.”'!” Numerous colonial promoters provided long and detailed descriptions of indigenous fruits, fish, and game, hoping to attract more settlers, with technologies

supposedly superior to those of “indolent” Native people, to harvest American resources, creating wealth for colonial investors.'° Many of those who did settle in America believed that they had been led by God out of Europe into the “land of promise” and a “new paradise.” Plymouth’s William Bradford imagined Christ inviting his people in New England to “eat...and drink freely” of the banquet of wine, milk, sweet spices, and honey spread before them in the wilderness garden."’

Proponents of the myth of American abundance held up both the land and the “New World” societies established there as physically, Madden and Finch 5

morally, and spiritually more healthy and pure than those left behind in Europe. Thomas Jeflerson’s agrarian ideal for the New Republic was reflected in the “new man,” the American farmer, about whom Hector St. John de Crévecoeur wrote in 1782. In Europe men were “mowed down by want, hunger, and war.” In America the “precious soil . . . feeds and clothes us; from it we draw even a great exuberancy, our best meat, our richest drink; the very honey of our bees comes from this privileged spot.” In America, Crévecoeur’s imaginary farmer proclaimed, a Euro-

pean immigrant experiences a “sort of resurrection.” He “involuntarily loves a country where everything is so lovely,” where there is “room for everybody,” where “instead of starving, he will be fed.”’* In 1817 the

English visitor William Cobbett perpetuated this vision: in America “vou are not much pressed to eat and drink, but such an abundance is spread before you . . . that you instantly lose all restraint.”"”

Crévecoeur and earlier colonists did express some fears about the detrimental physical and moral effects that consuming foods grown in the “savage” American wilderness might have on their “crvilized” minds and bodies, and many immigrants, of course, encountered far more hardships than those who glorified American abundance had described.*® Nevertheless, the glowing rhetoric prevailed. It has shaped the expectations of the millions of immigrants who have arrived here since the early nineteenth century. In the 1800s eastern European Jews, encouraged by letters from relatives and friends who had already participated in the “New Exodus” to the New World, were lured by the “land of milk and honey” and “of mystery, of fantastic experiences, of marvelous transformations.”*' In her study of nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants’ foodways, the historian Masia Diner has noted that pangs of hunger drove the immigrants out of their countries of origin and promises of plenty powerfully drew them to America, “a place where | they] could find work,” and work “meant being able to feed oneself and one’s family.”**

Visionary ideals of American abundance continued to shape discourse at the national level throughout the twentieth century. Writing in the 1950s, the historian David M. Potter argued that a primary factor influencing “the American character” was “the unusual plenty of avail6 Introduction

able goods or other usable wealth which has prevailed in America.” For Potter, the land’s physical resources and political freedoms had generated a “politics of abundance,” which “fused ... these two ingredients—

freedom and abundance— ...in American democratic thought.” This fusion, in practical terms, meant a higher standard of living, including better nourishment, for Americans than for the rest of the world.”’ More recently, however, Harvey Levenstem has pointed to the cultural revolutions of the 1960s as initiating a “crack” in the “facade” of the American abundance myth as Potter had described it, a crack noticed by proponents of Slow Food. Industrialization of agriculture, biogenetic modification of foods, continuing malnutrition and obesity, and obsessions about health, dieting, and thinness have challenged former meanings of America as the land of plenty, creating the “paradox of a people surrounded by abundance who are unable to enjoy it’”** Nevertheless, not unlike colonial travel narratives that served up a cornucopia of American fruits, fish, and game to a European readership hungry for the exotic and for profit, it is still primarily food products—now Coca-Cola and McDonald’s restaurants—that serve as the most potent emblems of the inherently conflict-laden myths of American abundance and consumption to the rest of the world.

Utopianism, Communities, and Foodways Throughout American history visionary ideals of abundance and the paradoxes they have generated have been articulated by communities of like-minded individuals and enacted in those communities’ foodways. We refer to such visionary ideals as “utopian” —a term that extends beyond the religious connotations of Eden and paradise to other discourses of social reform and improvement. Since Thomas More’s Utopia was published in 1516, many people have used the term utopia to signify “an imaginative vision of the ¢elos, or end, at which social life aims.”* More cleverly coined the word utopia from the Greek eutopia, which means “good place,” and outopia, which means “nowhere.” In their discussions of utopia, scholars often consider two basic types: “fictional” utopias such as More’s—appearing in print as political or philosophical treatises, religious manifestos, or novels—and “commuMadden and Finch 7

nal” utopias—actual groups of people who live together, sharing property and labor, with the intentional purpose of creating “good places” in specific locales.*° For some utopias, this familiar classifying scheme works, but for oth-

ers, including many of the utopian communities described in this volume, attempting to place them in one of these two categories—either fictional or communal—reveals both the problematic and limiting nature of the classifications.”’ Examples of American fictional utopias abound, but some have transgressed the boundaries of the printed text. Etienne Cabet’s Voyage to Icaria (1839), for example, has been called a fictional novel.*° Yet Cabet’s Icarians existed both in the world of print and as

an American communal utopia, in which people shared property and living quarters. Formerly a political leader in France, then exiled and living in England, Cabet imagined Icaria, a community “better” than the country in which he had lived. Through the voices of characters such as Eugene, who writes home to his brother, Gabet described this “good place.” Writing of its food practices, for example, he explained that members of the Republic produce and consume “what is necessary ... what is useful ... and what is agreeable.” Likewise, everyone in Icaria has “an equal share of all foods without distinction.” The meals consumed in a common hall “present a great economy,” “induce the masses to fraternize|,| and . . . simplify the housework for women.” Although Cabet wrote initially for a limited audience, his fictional utopia was a success. Five editions appeared between 1840 and 1848, and its popularity prompted some readers to attempt living according to the pattern Cabet created; believers in Cabet’s vision sailed to America to live out their dreams in Icarian communities established in Texas, Illinois, lowa, Missouri, and California between 1848 and 1881.” Cabet’s lcaria not only makes blatant the values of specific food practices in utopian communities but also demonstrates the difhculties of classifying utopias as either fictional or communal. The Icarians, clearly,

were both. Thus, the boundaries between utopias described in writing and those experienced in communal sites are often blurred.”' Labeling utopias as one of these two traclitional types is problematic not only because of the blurred boundaries between them; it 1s also limS Introduction

iting when we complicate meanings of “community.” Benedict Anderson asserted many years ago that sharing idealized images, promoted through particular technological innovations and economic relations, creates a community.’* Thus, limiting utopian communities to communal utopias—consisting of people who, because of common intentions, choose to live communaily by sharing living quarters, property, and labor—excludes two kinds of utopian groups. First, these categories do not include those people who hold a common vision and live in close proximity to one another but do not live together “in community,” as do members of communal utopias. However, because their members attempt to achieve shared idealized visions by living near each other and sharing some practices, such as foodways, they are utopian communities. We refer to them as “local” utopias. The Puritans in early New Engiand, for example, attempted to establish orderly villages with intentions of fostering moral and spiritual improvement. In the eighteenth century members of the all-male Tuesday Club, influenced by More’s Utopia, gathered weekly to discuss the shape of the New Republic. And throughout American history, immigrant groups have arrived with dreams of what America would offer and have established religious and ethnic enclaves in which to share their clistinct identities, visions, and experiences. In addition to excluding these local utopias, another limiting element of previous understandings of utopia arises from Anderson’s claims about communities. While some might only consider as “community” those who live in close proximity to one another, Anderson and many others have acknowledged since his Imagined Communities was published that even geographically dispersed individuals can be meaningfully connected by idealized values and practices circulated through various media.” Prior categories of utopias have not considered people who might gather with small groups of others to promote their ideals but never meet face to face all the members of their widely dispersed community. We refer to these as “global” utopias.°4 Not only Slow Food USA but also the Weigh Down Workshop, a twelve-week program designed by the Protestant evangelical Gwen Shamblin to improve body and spirit and lead its followers, according to R. Marie Grifhth, into Madden and Finch 9

“the Promised Land of thinness,” exemplify this type of utopian community. Begun in 1986, the Weigh Down Workshop is now “the largest devotional diet program, by far,... offered in as many as thirty thousand churches, seventy countries, and sixty different denominations.” Bound by various communication means as well as by practices intended to materialize their visions of perfecting self and society, these new American utopian communities are products of an increasingly globalized culture. In addition to members of Slow Food USA and the Weigh Down Workshop, people who buy cookbooks by celebrity authors, follow vegetarian diets, or view televised cooking shows each share visions of a “good place”—a world where people appreciate the

quality of the food produced and consumed, eat foods nutritionally beneficial to them, or want food production and consumption to be environmentally friendly. Such utopian communities fully illustrate the

ways in which participants are unified by their idealized visions and practices of foodways, in spite of their diffuse geographic locales. Adding the categories of “global” and “local” to the more common “fictional” and “communal” utopias acknowledges the ways that the nature of American utopianism and understandings of community have

changed over time, and such changes can be demonstrated by a single utopian community. For example, founded by the visionary Joseph Smith and a few family members and friends in central New York in 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, is today one of the world’s largest religious organizations. Based on what he understood to be divine revelations, Smith established many new practices intended to effect physical and spiritual purity among his followers, including dietary regulations.°° While some might see Smith’s visions and The Pearl of Great Price, in which he described them, as fictional, the group that followed him west trom New York was a communal utopia. Over time the tps Church grew into the locally based but geographically diffuse utopian society it is today, exemplifying the combination of global and local, or “glocalization,” that characterizes recent understandings of the global community.” Scholars include Mormons in studies of American utopias because

Latter-day Saints have sustained Smith’s visionary ideals through10 Introduction

out their remarkable growth and achievement of social prominence, which has been supported by technological inventions. Missionaries now travel more rapidly than ever before and disseminate Mormon beliefs not only by word of mouth and in print but also via radio, television, and the Internet. Believers may draw support from one another through many of the same means missionaries employ. Other groups that depend on technological advances in communication and travel to promote their visionary ideals and for their creation, networking, growth, and sustenance deserve also to be considered among American utopias. America has provided the ideal setting for utopianism to flourish. Besides the Mormons, almost six hundred other communal utopias existed in America between 1663 and 1970. Several social factors early

on shaped this distinct utopian spirit in America: the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance emphasis on exploration, and the secular, individualistic spirit that accompanied the Enlightenment.’* Such influences and the resulting optimistic visions spurred on the explorers, colonists, and later immigrants who chose to travel to America. Utopias are created, according to the German sociologist Karl Mannheim, when people move “against what was in order to produce something new.” And America—the “new world”—was seen as the ideal place to accomplish such innovations. For many of those who arrived, Robert S. Fogarty has explained, “religious perfectibility and secular progress” were wedded.*” In addition, as Paul S. Boyer has summarized, the “comparative lack of hierarchy, freedom from the weight of tradition, and open-

ness to social innovation” in America have “provided a... congemial environment” for utopian visions and their implementation.” These scholars echo the claims Potter made a half-century ago, when he argued that the economic system and democracy in the United States offered opportunities to people not available elsewhere and contributed to American idealism. As Potter explained, abundance is not merely natural resources—many “third world” countries have vast natural resources, but their people do not maintain hope of improving their lives. Rather, North America’s social environment promises upward mobility to those who are able to work hard and wish to be successful. This Madden and Finch

promise of accessible abundance and the social and economic mobility associated with it are unique to the United States, making America particularly conducive to the development of communities with utopian aspirations.** The zdeas of abundant material resources, democratic political institutions, and free-market capitalism have offered people in America opportunities not only to voice their complaints about the present and their dreams about the future—ecither aloud or in print or via other media—but also to maintain a hope that those dreams might be realized. ‘The imagined future of a community is as significant to its formation as the economic systems and political and social situations within it.”

For a utopian community's hopes and dreams to be fulfilled, they must be enacted in concrete ways as members struggle to translate their visionary ideals into daily activities. Thomas More’s etymology suggests, however, that these “good places” called utopias are, in fact, nowhere. Indeed, a group’s practices invariably fall short of its initial visions; the perfect societies imagined and promoted by their founders can never, finally, be achieved, at least not without continuous adyustments and alterations in visionary ideals. As Furaha Norton has noted, the “seed of its own destruction” is sown along with the generating forces of a utopia.“ That is, when we shift our gaze from the utopian ideals officially promoted by a community to the ways those ideals are enacted in actual practices, such as foodways, we are drawn into the complex, often conflicted, very human realm of daily lite, of members’ individual opinions, experiences, and activities. To access that realm, in which foodways are debated and practiced,

this volume draws on the work of cultural theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. According to Bourdieu, societies that “seek to produce a new man” do so through processes of “deculturation” and “reculturation,” which attend to the seemingly insignificant activities of daily life, like dress, bearing, manners, and foodways. Such an embodied “pedagogy” is effective in instilling a new worldview because members are often unaware of its presence and effects as they go about their daily lives. ‘Through this process, members of a society learn

specific values, or “tastes.” These pedagogies, Foucault reminds us, 12 Introduction

do not flow only from the top down, from authorities to members. Because social meanings are so deeply embedded in everyday practices, any individual, by virtue of participating within the community's habefus, has at his or her disposal the tools and know-how to reshape those practices according to personal tastes and desires. This reshaping often creates conflict among members, which, if it does not cause the community to self-destruct, can generate broader change within it.” Thus, studying lived practices such as foodways allows us to observe how power flows and is challenged within utopian communities. Within the group, practices themselves shape beliefs, and even members at the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy are agents of change, altering communal identity. Furthermore, the most rigidly bounded communities nevertheless exist within a larger world with which members interact, also generating changes in communal values and practices. In Shaker communities, for example, influences from and exchanges with the world continuously occurred, causing conflict at times, sustaining the communities at others, and constantly asking members, even at an unconscious level, that they consider the ideals of their communities and how they should be embodied. Shakers discussed the sale of their communally produced goods, such as apple cider, to the world, and the benefits and potential dangers of sending traders out from the communities’ supposedly safe havens in order to gain a profit and, perhaps, converts to the faith. They also argued about whether to adopt popular, middle-class practices from the world, such as vegetarianism and abstinence from alcohol. ‘These aspects of daily food activities revealed the groups’ interactions with the outside world even as they affected the communities’ unity and unique utopian vision.” As these examples trom Shaker life suggest, food has the capacity to “absorb and reflect a host of cultural phenomena,” although we generally remain unaware of food’s many meanings or the impact those meanings have on us as we go about our daily lives. “We are defined by our relations to the food we eat,” writes the philosopher Deane W. Cur-

tin, but “we live ina dominant culture which does not... understand them as defining.” Utopian communities, however, frequently recognize the power food carries to define and shape self and culture, and Madden and Finch 13

foodways often explicitly take center stage in social groups with clearly defined and intentionally promoted ideals. Regulating activities around food and investing those activities with specific meanings enable members to achieve their ideals and display those ideals to themselves and outsiders. ‘Their foodways, in fact, help members continuously create a particular world and define their relations to the larger world in which they live. In such utopian communities food functions in at least four interrelated ways: symbolically, as a means for representing and communicating group values; functionally, as a primary factor in the construction of bonds within and boundaries around a community and as a means of material and ideological negotiations with the outside world; mnemonically, as a memory device connecting past, present, and future; and dynamically, as a means for enacting and reflecting changing social values.

The semiotician Roland Barthes sees food as “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior.” A culture’s food system constitutes a symbolic language that transmits information about the underlying values, the ethos, of a society. In his Empzre of Signs, for example, Barthes explores Japanese aesthetics by analyzing Japanese foodways, which, he argues, produce a “grammar” that communicates the Buddhist value of “emptiness” or “nothingness” at the heart of Japanese culture.’’ Likewise, other social groups explicitly invest certain foods with a potent symbolism that conveys “specific meanings ... in specific contexts.””* Thus, the heritage Narragansett turkey, ordered from a small farm in Rhode Island to grace the Thanksgiving table of Slow Food proponents in Southern California, communicates to those gathered around the table a distinct set of meanings. Such symbolic foods constellate and magnify specific values for a group, continuously reconstituting and reinforcing the group’s identity and existence. The anthropologist Mary Douglas also is concerned about how food communicates social structures and values, allowing us to consider how food functions to construct social bonds and boundaries. Douglas’s investigations into food regulations and practices within small social groups, from the ancient Israelites to the modern British family, are 14 Introduction

particularly helpful for understanding foodways in utopian communal groups.” The “natural body” or individual human body, she claims, is a potent symbol of the “social body” or communal group that has erected clearly defined boundaries around itself. Communities particularly concerned about sustaining distinct, visionary values strive to maintain clistinct lines between insiders and outsiders, order and disorder, purity and pollution by carefully monitoring individual members’ bodily practices, especially those that pertain to the body’s boundaries and its openings.” Dietary restrictions and other foodways that regulate what goes into one’s body—for example, the kosher laws of kashrut in Orthodox Jewish communities—reflect a primary concern with regulating the social boundaries around the community, enclosing and containing members and clearly differentiating them from outsiders, with whom they do not eat. Individuals within such a community can undermine communal values and construct alternative identities, however, through eating differently—when the child of a Jewish immigrant breaks kashrut and eats a cheeseburger with his non-Jewish American friends—and sutter the consequences, such as rejection by the community. Other communities are less concerned about maintaining distinct boundaries. When 1970s vegetarian communal restaurants fed their customers and marketed their cookbooks to “outsiders,” for example, their exchange of food and foodways represented the permeability of group identity.

Thus, food practices create and reflect not only the boundaries around but also the bonds within a community and between communal members and outsiders. As David Bell and Gill Valentine put it, food serves as the “social glue.””? Commensality, or “eating, the sharing of food,” writes Anna Meigs, “is a means by which to establish physical commingling, interdependence, and oneness.” An “eating-induced unity,” a kind of “mystical sharing,” is generated and experienced when people sit down to a meal together.” Commensality withina geographically and ideologically constrained social group, like an Orthodox Jewish community or a Puritan New England church, binds together individual members and allows them to engage and materialize their idealistic values. But meaningful sharing of life-shaping values Madden and Finch 15

can also occur when like-minded individuals share foodways through media such as cookbooks, television, or the Internet. Therefore, members of a more diffuse global community—Slow Food proponents, those who created a “virtual community” by participating in the online weblog the “Julie/Julia Project)” or those who are dedicated to viewing a particular celebrity television chef’s cooking show—also can be connected meaningfully by sharing discourses—practices, experiences, values—about food.

While utopian groups want to create new and “better” social worlds and frequently orient themselves toward the future, in which members envision an ideal world coming into being, they nevertheless often draw their values from the past. The social bonding that occurs while sharing food and foodways connects participants not only with each other but also with a shared history. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls these complex meldings of “sensory and social experiences” through food exchange “edible chronotopes,” in which experiencing particular foods creates “space-time convergences.” In other words, specific foods have the capacity to work mnemonically, to “hold time, place, and memory” and elicit particular deeply felt meanings.” Some communities, for example, long for the foodways of an idealized agrarian past. Americans

throughout the last two centuries, have reminisced about what they have construed as simpler and healthier ways of eating, as the historian

Rachel Laudan has noted. The nostalgic reminiscences mushroom into myths, often draw attention from the larger public, and become social reform movements reacting against “unnatural” or “processed” foods. Culminating in campaigns like vegetarianism, food cooperatives, or Slow Food, these food-centered utopian movements teach taste and create communal boundaries, albeit permeable ones, for they envision the entire world adopting their foodways and values. In other groups, such as immigrant communities, food also serves a mnemonic role, as they struggle to maintain ties to their homelands and sustain their visions of distinct ethnic and religious life, as Hasia Diner has noted. Eating specific foods elicits visceral memories that provide feelings of familiarity, comfort, and continuity—but for some eating traditional foods can elicit feelings of limitation and constraint. As immi16 Introduction

grants access the benefits that drew them to America, they soon learn that maintaining all of their traditional food practices is dithcult and, for many, undesirable. Bringing familiar foodways with them, they also embrace the abundance and variety of foods the new land has to otter, thus creating uniquely American, “creolized” foodways, as Donna R. Gabbacia has discussed in her study of ethnic food’s role m the shaping of American culture.’ Such alterations in an immigrant community’s foodways redefine communal life. When Indian Americans in Atlanta, for example, prepare and eat dishes of fragrant vegetarian curry and basmati rice during a Hindu temple potluck meal to which non-Hindu visitors have been invited, they are enjoying the viscerally familiar tastes of ethnic and religious identity—they are, in fact, reproducing Mother India in America. But by performing a distinctly American food prac-

tice, the potluck, and sharing their food with non-Hindu Americans, they mark and embrace their new identities as American citizens. Food’s ability to link the old and familiar with the new and innovative allows it to function effectively in furthering utopian ideals, for toodways, like other lived practices, are dynamic, continuously enacting familiar continuities as well as new alterations that often challenge the familiar. Many groups attempt to maintain a rigid adherence to ideals and practices once they are established, but contestation and change are inherent forces within utopian societies—atter all, they have been established with the explicit purpose of challenging the status quo and

creating something new. In his analysis of ceremonial meals, for example, the historian of religion Bruce Lincoln refutes the notion that food rituals serve only to maintain the status quo: “If such banquets ...serve|d| to catalyze, confirm, celebrate, and thereby perpetuate the established order, there existed other possibilities as well: By rendering the social order visible, these same exercises also opened it up for possible contestation.” Thus, as Lincoln’s argument suggests, members who want to challenge their community’s leadership or alter its values and goals can do so by challenging specific food practices. Administrators’ understandings of the ideal middle-class female were challenged, for example, by students’ food practices in women’s colleges in the nineteenth century. Madden and Finch 17

Within communities, tensions and conflicts ensue over which practices to maintain, which to reject, which to adapt, and which from the outside cultural environment to adopt. For a group and its ideal visions to survive, it must hold on to enough of the familiar to sustain continuities, but it must also be flexible enough to adjust to changing circumstances. The dynamic nature of food practices reminds us that the American culinary triangle is also a dynamic model. Each of the three elements— foodways, communities, and utopianism—continuously reshapes the others. For groups with distinct visions of their goals and of how their toodways contribute to achieving those purposes, conflict and change signify to some members the threat of group dissolution and to others the promise of freedom and access to America’s bounties.

About the Essays This volume’s essays are clustered to represent three ways that individuals and communities have incorporated ideals of American life and experience through their foodways: as first- and second-generation immigrants constructing new identities as they engage the natural and social environments in America; as relatively small, distinct social groups attempting to perfect their communal lives and distinguish themselves trom American society at large; and as communities, often composed of geographically disparate individuals, that envision the improvement of national or even global society. Within each section essays are arranged chronologically in order to suggest ways that Americans have both sustained and altered understandings of utopia over time and how food has functioned to materialize those ideals within specific historical moments.

Part 1, “New World Utopias: Cultivating Immigrant Identities through Food,” includes essays that investigate ways recent arrivals anticipated America as the ideal place in which to reproduce religious and ethnic identity and achieve economic success, yet they also discovered that these two impulses—to sustain original identity and achieve new success—could be at odds with each other. Each group envisioned itself as constituting a community organized around specific ethnic and i8 Introduction

religious values, and each used food both to enact those values and distinguish its members from outsiders, as well as to embrace the utopian

promises of New World abundance. But each also learned that geographical change required alterations in communal ideals, identity, and toodways. The first two essays of the collection employ historical methods—one cultural and the other literary—to explore foodways within English and Spanish colonial immigrant communities. Seventeenth-century English Puritans arrived in New England with the expectation that they were

entering the Promised Land, but also with visions of building God’s “city on a lll” by gathering tightly knit, godly communities in the wilderness. Martha L. Finch investigates the ways New Englanders’ ritual cycle of fast and thanksgiving promoted not only the well-known Thanksgiving feast but also a moderate diet and frequent days of fasting in order to sustain their communal covenants with God and each other and to differentiate themselves from the “corrupt” English society they had left behind. Also viewing foodways as a means of cultural differentiation, the Spanish Franciscan Father Pedro Font bemoaned the “savage” foods and “heathen” peoples his group encountered in upper California during the Anza expedition of 1775~76. Phillip H. Round’s essay details the physical and ideological conflicts that ensued among members of the party when another Franciscan padre suggested by his behavior that participation in the Natives’ lively celebrations, or fandangos, of feasting and drinking was crucial to a successful mission to plant an ideal Christian society in the desert. More recent immigrant groups also have struggled to negotiate old

and new identities through their foodways. Debra Shostak’s literary analysis of Philip Roth’s mid-twentieth-century novels reveals that second-generation Jewish immigrants’ desires to erase difference and embrace American culture~commonly known as “passing” and often symbolized through eating taboo foods such as lobster and cheeseburgers—are almost always vexed by metaphorical indigestion. Consumption of these foods by Roth’s characters indicates successful assimila-

tion into the culture of American abundance, yet the novels, argues Shostak, ultimately suggest that those who consume them are hollow, Madden and Finch 19

lonesome, or self-deluding. The differences maintained through traditional food practices in Jewish American communities, by contrast, provide stabilizing and healthy concepts of identity. Similarly, Kathryn McClymond’s ethnographic study of the contemporary Hindu Temple of Atlanta investigates food as a primary vehicle by which Indian immigrants transplant the utopian meanings of Mother India into American soul. Food sustains temple members’ connections to their Hindu deities through devotional rituals of prasad, or eating fruit and other foods that have been offered to the gods, and to their Indian identity through cultural events durig which Indian foods are consumed. Yet food also

provides Atlanta Hindus a way to engage American society and embrace their identities as Americans, McClymond argues: temple members prepare and clistribute peanut butter sandwiches to those who are homeless, and they contribute to several urban food banks. Within each immigrant group in part 1, encounters with unfamiliar natural and social environments expose both the possibilities and the difhculties of immigrants maintaining their distinct visions and intentions through food practices. The ability of foodways to promote and sustain difference becomes more explicit in part 2, “Communal Utopias: Eating In, But Not Of, the World,” which explores food meanings and practices among groups more familiarly utopian. These communities intentionally drew clear boundaries between themselves and the surrounding American social culture, often by sharing property, labor, and living quarters; most significant to this volume, they ate differently from other Americans, if not by consuming all their meals together then at least by purposefully using food and its symbolic meanings to distinguish the group from outsiders and to promote the physical and moral improvement of insiders. But such groups were also members of the larger American social culture, often negatively labeled “the world.” Exchanging values with the world, which 1s exemplified in these essays by food exchange, incited alterations in the communities’ original visions and foodways. The first three essays in part 2 are historical studies of foodways in three of the hundreds of communal utopias that flourished during the

nineteenth century, located primarily in rural areas of New England, 20 Introduction

central New York, and the Midwest: the Shakers, the Oneida Pertectionists, and the Amana Society. Each group regulated cultivation, cooking, and eating activities that explicitly revealed its beliefs about achieving earthly perfection. Nonetheless, as Margaret Puskar-Pasewicz’s analysis of the Shakers shows, the ideals often were disrupted by heated debates and shifting visions, as male leaders introduced practices such as vegetarianism and female members resisted changing years of cooking habits. Images of eating often corresponded to images of sexual practices among Oneida Community members, as Wendy Chmiclewski argues in her essay. With Oneida, as with the Amana Society, food practices marked a difference from the world, even as communal members offered food to the world as a means of communion with it. The Onelda Community, Chmielewski reveals, offered strawberries and cream, a markedly sensual food, to visitors in order to demonstrate their willingness to be good neighbors. Visitors, however, may have read the offering as a sign of the communities’ notable sexual practice of “free love.”

Jonathan G. Andelson’s essay follows the Amana Society from its nineteenth-century origins into the twentieth century, when community organization changed in response to outside social pressures and internal desires of members. Moving from living in community to living in separate family households, members shifted from cooking and eating meals together in communal kitchens to cooking and serving “authentic” midwestern German-style food in privately owned commercial

restaurants. The restaurants’ meat-and-potatoes meals provide tourists a taste of an idealized earlier world of American agrarian life. In the late twentieth century, other utopian communities also used food both

to distinguish themselves from the outside world and to share their values with the world, sometimes through restaurants and particularly through cookbooks. Maria McGrath’s essay analyzes the content as well as the social context of popular natural foods cookbooks published by countercultural communities of the 1970s and 1980s. Located in places as intimate as Laurel Robertson’s family kitchen and as public as the Moosewood Restaurant, these communities attempted to construct ideal social groups oriented around back-to-the-land, feminist, or religious vegetarian values. ‘The decisions to produce and market cookbooks of Madden and Finch 21

utopian foodways indicate the communities’ desires to effect larger social change.

The desire to share idealized visions with the world is more fully developed in the essays in part 3, “Strategic Utopias: Cooking Up Values for a New World.” With far-reaching visions of a better world for all, some of these communities are more geographically delimited local utopias, while others are more diffuse global utopias. All, however, have attempted to reshape significant social categories such as citizenship, gender, or socioeconomic class, with food as the primary vehicle for promoting local, national, or global change. Yet the very act of implementing particular food practices as overt or subtle strategies to further larger social improvement agendas, the essays demonstrate, can generate highly charged conflicts regarding appropriate foods and their production, distribution, preparation, and consumption.

Such “tood fights” emerged among elite republican men in eighteenth-century dining clubs, for example, as they debated whether to serve plain or elaborate foods at their meetings. In her study of the ‘Tuesday Club, the historian Trudy Eden argues that the accompanying labor and expense of hosting a meeting, as well as how these practices might produce manly citizens of the New Republic, were at the heart of the debate. Again, in the late nineteenth century, as Priscilla J. Brewer’s historical essay explains, gender andi liberal ideals were at the center of discussion, as students at northern women’s colleges began to indulge in dorm-room “spreads.” ‘The display and consumption of rich delicacies—welsh rarebit, fudge, nuts, and cakes—-created tensions between students and college authorities. Administrators, who upheld progressive, liberal education for the shaping of upper middle-class young women, resisted the late-night food fests, while students wrote home begging for money and cooking umplements to support ther ideals of progressive female behavior. In the twentieth century foodways’ ability to reflect tensions between competing values regarding socioeconomic status occurred in 1970s

Minneapolis. The social historian Mary Rizzo argues that idealistic members of food cooperatives argued about whether the co-ops should stock their shelves with more expensive “whole” and “natural” foods or 22 Introduction

with cheaper processed foods. Thus, even as the co-ops tried to minimize class differences among Americans, their heated debates explicitly reflected arguments based on social and economic class distinctions. Connections between class and foodways have been disseminated more subtly, yet eflectively, through public television. According to the media studies scholar Monica Mak, although those who sit at home watching gourmet cooking shows do not consume literal foods produced in the television studio, the shows’ celebrity chefs define, demonstrate, and promote contemporary North American ideals and practices of elite taste. The shows’ viewers participate in the imaginary utopian world of gastronomic experiences and disparate “foodie” communities being mediated on pps, Mak argues. As they consume specific interpretations of American abundance and taste, they distinguish themselves trom those who are titillated by fast-food commercials on other stations. While the intention of pss cooking shows is to open a world abounding with exotic foods to their viewers, some contemporary vegetarian Jewish and Buddhist groups want to close the door on the consumption of certain foods, namely animal flesh. ‘The religious studies scholar Ellen Posman reveals in her essay that these religious groups draw their explicitly utopian visions of transforming the world from sacred texts. They promote an ethical vegetarian lifestyle in order to heal the earth and create a spiritually, morally, and physicaily enlightened global community. Collectively, these essays reiterate that because food is a primary element of daily lived experience and, therefore, a potent symbol of social organization and tensions, it provides a crucial means of identification and “improvement” of self and society. Although many Americans have realized that reentry into Eden is impossible, and the term “utopia” suggests by definition that a perfect society 1s nowhere to be found, people have continued to dream of and attempted to construct such places of perfection. A community’s visions of the meanings of food and its relationship to other communal ideals—regarding ethnicity, religious affiliation, gender roles, socioeconomic class, or involvement with or exclusion from the surrounding society—-motivate, create, and sustain its toodways. Yet, as they enact their beliefs through food practices, tenMadden and Finch 23

sions often emerge among group members, causing them to redefine communal boundaries in an ongoing construction of the meanings of self, community, and utopia in their American context. These essays, then, provocatively illustrate the ways in which American ideals—of en-

ticing abundance and individual freedom on the one hand, and of collective, communal visions and identity on the other—are often at odds with one another, especially when food is the lens through which these relationships are examined. Throughout the interdisciplinary discussion of the linkages among utopia, communities, and foodways in this collection, we have depended on the richness of the abundant scholarship in food, utopian, and communal studies that has proliferated during the last decade. Several have considered already food in religious communities, food in ethnic communities and, more generally, food practices in America, and we are grateful to those who have done the difficult work of preparing the forests and fields for our foraging and reaping. In spite of this abundance, however, studies of food in utopian communities are relatively few, as

are studies that emphasize the idealism reflected in American foodways. Because we believe the utopian nature of American food practices is their most pervasive aspect, we offer this collection and the new culinary triangle it invokes. Bringing together the utopian character of American foodways and the ways in which many Americans have built their communities, this volume illustrates how lived food experiences both emanate from and contribute to ideas of perfection and improvement in American culture.

Eating in Eden also suggests the possibilities available for further fruitful work on food in the American and utopian contexts. Studies in the volume not only serve as models, demonstrating applications of contemporary food theory, but also put forth several “new” utopian communities meriting further analysis. Many more studies of American communities’ food practices might have been included. For example,

numerous fictional utopias, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, include references to foodways. Many communal utopias, such as the Latter-day Saints, have dietary regulations that offer rich material for analysis. Local utopias might be further understood through 24 Introduction

study of an African American church’s or a Chinese immigrant community’s foodways. And global utopias—a significant new area within utopian studies—could be explored through consideration of dieting communities such as South Beach and Body for Lite. Additionally, the collection’s interdisciplinary nature enhances the possibilities for further stucies of food in utopian communities. Because readers may be more familiar with the methodological lenses commonly used in one discipline than with those used in another, they may have ideas about how to employ different approaches to develop other interpretations ofa utopian group already included here. Indeed, each essay may be viewed as a kaleidoscope; when it is turned ever so slightly, or considered from a different angle, an array of new ideas appears, inviting further investigation and analysis. Because utopia is still very much a part of American discourse, the potential subjects for studies of food and utopias increase daily. As Edward J. Rothstein has noted, the quest for utopia is “an imaginative precondition for achievable change in the here and now.”” The thought ofa world without conceptions of utopia is, like the thought of a world without food, disturbing. Material resources in the United States continue to combine with the sociopolitical values of freedom, democracy, and mobility to create an environment in which food plays a central role both to embrace and to critique American culture. Symbolically, functionally, mnemonically, and dynamically, food and foodways nourish a group’s understanding of its relationship to the American setting, which offers ideological possibilities and material aplenty for pursuing visionary ideals. Notes 1. Carlo Petrini, Slow Food: The Case for ‘Taste, trans. Witham McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 4. 2. Many scholars, journalists, and others have discussed the “McDonaldization” phenomenon. See, for example, George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Newbury Park ca: Pie Forge Press, 1993); George Ritzer, ed., AfcDonaldization: The Reader, 4th ed. (Thousand Oaks ca: Pine Forge Press, 2004); David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat

(London: Routledge, 1997); and Elspeth Probyn, “Feeding McWorld, Eating Madden and Finch 25

Ideologies,” in Probyn, Carnal Appetites: FoodSexidentities (New York: Rout-

ledge, 2000), 33-57. 3. “The Movement,” Slow Food, http://www.slowfood.com (accessed July 26, 2004). 4. “Our Guiding Principles,” Slew Food USA, http://slowfoodusa.org (accessed July 28, 2004). 5. “The Official Slow Food Manifesto.” in Petrini, Slow Food, xxii—xxiv. Also at

http://www.slowfood.com. 6. On the Noah Principle, Ark of Taste, and foods and foodways being saved, see Petrim, Slow Food, 85-90; Carlo Petrint, ed., Slow Food: Collected Thoughts on

laste, Tradition, and the Honest Pleasures of Food (White River Junction vr: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2001); http://www.slowfood.com. On the problem of Americans lacking “memories going back over generations of food with actual flavor, food that’s carefully raised,” see interview with Corby Kummer, author of The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors, and Recipes (Chronicle, 2002), in “The Values of Good Food,” The Atlantic Online, Nov. 14, 2002, http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2002~-11-14/htm (accessed October 18, 2005). 7. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Culinary Triangle,” in Pood and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Estenk (New York: Routledge, 1997), 25-35. 8. Lucy M. Long, Culinary Tourism (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2003), 8. g. “Live Slow!” Slow Food USA; Michael Pollan, “Cruising on the Ark of Taste,” Mother Fones (May/June 2003): 75. 10. ‘The historian Rachel Laudan has argued that the current belief that premdustnial “natural” and “traditional” foods were tastier and healthier than those

bought off the modern supermarket shelf represents a nostalgic yearning for a past that never was. Ancient peoples avoided eating fresh, “natural” foods because they were dangerous; early on they developed technologies to process and preserve foods (e.g., cheese, wine, olive oil, salted and dried meats). Nevertheless, wine was often sour, meat rotten, and grain infested with insect larvae (“A Plea for Gulinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New, Fast, Processed Food,” Gastronomica 1, no. 1 | 2001]: 36-44). u. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Houghton Milf, 2001); (UK edition: London: Allan Lane Penguin Press, 2001). 12. See, for example, James L. Watson, ed., Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in 26 Introduction

East Asia (Stantord ca: Stanford University Press, 1997); Constantin Boym, “My McDonald’s,” Gastronomica 1 (2001): 6-8. 13. Christopher Columbus to Dofia Juana de la Torre (4500), quoted in Kay Brigham, Christopher Columbus: Mis Life and Discovery wn the Light of His Prophecies (Barcelona: Libros CLIE, 1990), 136. i4. John Smith, A Map of Virginia (4612), in The Complete Works of Captain Fohn

Smith (1580-1631), ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hil: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 1:159. 15. Willam Wood, New England’s Prospect (1634), ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 87. 16. See, for example, Wood, New England’s Prospect; John Josselyn, ‘we Voyages to New England (1674), in John Fosselyn, Colonial Traveler, ed. Paul J. Lian-

holdt (Hanover nu: University Press of New England, 1988); Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, ed. Jack Dempsey (Scituate MA: Digital Scanning, 2000); John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (1709), ed. Hugh Talmage Lefler (Chapel Hull: University of North Carolina Press, 1967).

17. Wilham Bradford, “A Descriptive and Historical Account of New England in Verse.” in “Governor Bradiord’s Letter Book,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections 3 (1794): '79-

i8. J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert .. Stone (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 69, 54, 81-82.

19. Quoted in David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 7920. See, for example, Trudy Eden, “Food, Assimilation, and the Malleability of the Human Body in Early Virginia,” and Martha L. Finch, “Civilized Bodies and the Savage Environment of Early New England,” both in A Centre of Wonders: The Body im Early America, ed. Janet Moore Landman and Michele Lise Tarter (Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press, 2001), 29-59. 21. Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917; repr., New York: Harper Colophon, 1966), tio. 22. Hasia R. Diner, Wungering for America: Halian, frish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1. 23. Potter, People of Plenty, xix, 126-27, 84. 24. Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social Mistory of Hating in Modern America, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), quotation Pp. 255.

Madden and Finch 27

25. Northrop Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” in Ulopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank LE. Manuel (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 25.

26. For examples of “fictional” utopias, see The Utopian Reader, ed. Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Bredesh and American Utopras (Eutopias, Dystopias, and Satirical Utopias), 15160-1974, comp. Lyman Tower Sargent (St. Louis: University of Mis-

sourt, 1974). Included in The Utopian Reader are also “communal” utopias, as well as in the following: Donald E. Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Robert S. Foearty, Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History (Westport cr: Greenwood, 198a); and Arthur E. Bester, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phases of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1063-1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950). For definitions and etymologies, see Claeys and Sargent, Utopian Reader, 1-2. In addition, Utopian Studies, the journal of the Society for Utopian Studies, manifests a variety of applications of the term. 27. In addition to “fictional” and “communal,” scholars sometimes employ other

labels and categories for utopias, such as religious or spiritual, political, and economic. See Fogarty, Dictionary, xv-Xvil, XX. 28. Robert P. Sutton, “An American Elysium: The Icarian Communities,” in Pitzer, American Communal Utopias, 280. 29. Quoted in Marie Louise Berneri, Journey through Utopia (Freeport ny: Books for Libraries Press, i969), 228-30. 30. Berneri, Journey through Utopia, 222. 31. Illustrating the converse movement, from “communal” experience to “fictional” account, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blethedale Romance (1852) provides a critical vision of the author’s experiences at the utopian Brook Farm. Notably, Hawthorne comments on food practices. 32. Benedict Anderson, lmagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 33. Anderson, Dnagined Communities, 36. See also Bell and Valentine, Consuming Geographies, 94.

34. Our choice of both “local” and “global” emerges from Bell and Valentine, who use these terms to discuss the impact of food on communities. On the complexities of globalization, see Consuming Geographies, 190-207. 35. R. Marie Grithth, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christtanity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1; Griffith, ““Don’t Eat 28 Introduction

That’: The Erotics of Abstrnence in American Christianity,’ Gastronomica 1 (2001): 36-47.

36. Mormons believe that in 1833 God gave Smith the “law of health,” known as the “Word of Wisdom,” which details the substances to avoid and those that

contribute to physical and spiritual health: alcohol, cottee and tea, tobacco products, and illegal drugs must be avoiced; all vegetables, fruits, and grains may be consumed; and meat and poultry may be “used sparingly ... during times of winter, ... cold, or famine” (Doctrine and Covenants 89:1-21). For contemporary Mormon interpretations and applications of the Word of Wisdom, see “Nutrition and Health,” The Official Website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, http://www.providentliving.org/content/ list/0,11664,2411-1,00.html (accessed Aug. 6, 2004).

37. Elspeth Probyn has defined glocalization as “the foldings and imbrications of local and global cultures that are producing supposedly new experiences of the local in the global” (“Feeding McWorld,” 38). 38. On American utopias, see Fogarty, Dicteonary, and Pitzer, American Communal Utopias. Anderson’s insightful work does not use the term “utopia” but discusses the impact of these three elements on the imagining of “new” nations imagined Communities, 37-46). See also Norman Cohn, The Pursutt of the Millennium (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957); Ernest Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of Utopia and Progress (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949); and Manuel, Ufopias and Utopian Thought. 3g. Quoted in Fogarty, Dictionary, xv (emphasis added). 40. Fogarty, Dictionary, 236. See also Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia, as well as his Redeemer Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (Middletown cr: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); and Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise (Urbana: University of [ilmois Press, 1961). Al. Paul S. Boyer, foreword to Pitzer, America’s Communal Utopras, xi. 42. Potter, People of Plenty, go-110. 43. Anderson, lmagined Communities. 44. Furaha D. Norton, introduction to Visions of Utopia, ed. Edward Rothstein, Herbert Muschamp, and Martin E. Marty (New York: Oxtord University Press, 2003), vil. 45. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 94; Bourdieu, Distinction: A SoMadden and Finch 29

cial Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press, 1984). 46. Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews

and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colm Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 78-108; Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Herbert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuratasm and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208~26. 47. Folk music and American hymnody, “New Light” theology and worship, and

shifts in American pedagogy and literacy practices, for example, influenced the Shakers. See Damiel W. Patterson, The Shaker Spiritual (Princeton NJ Princeton University Press, 1979); Stephen Marini, Radical Sects of Revolufionary New England (Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press, 1982); Etta M. Madden, Bodies of Life: Shaker Literature and Literacies (Westport CY: Greenwood, 1998); Etta Madden, “Cider as a Sign: Shitting Interpretations of Shaker Spirits and Spirituality,’ Communal Societies 23 (2003): 45-62; John Brenton Wolford, “The South Union, Kentucky, Shakers and Tradition: A Study of Business, Work, and Commerce” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1992).

48. Carol M. Counthan, The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1999), 6. 49. Deane W. Curtin, “Food/Body/Person,” mn Cooking, Hating, Thinking: Trans-

formative Philosophies of Food, ed. Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 11-12.

50. Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” in Counihan and Van Esterik, Food and Culture, 21. 51. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 15-26.

52. Counthan, Anthropology of Food and Body, 20.

53. On ancient Israelite dietary laws, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and ‘Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966;

repr., 1994), 42-58. On family meals in modern Britain, see Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” in Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 231-51.

54. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 5-40. 55. Bell and Valentine, Consuming Geographies, 15.

56. Anna Meigs, “Food as a Cultural Construction,” in Counihan and Van Estenk, Food and Culture, 104, 103, 95. 30 futroduction

57. The “Julie/Julia Project” was created by New Yorker Julie Powell, who, from

August 2002 to August 2003, cooked her way through Julia Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Throughout the year Powell maintained an almost daily online weblog (or “blog”) in which she described her culinary failures and successes as well as events in her personal life. Visitors to her blog posted comments and cooking tips, commiserating with her failures and celebrating her successes. The online discussions that ensued created a virtual community around the problems and meanings of reproducing the culinary ideals promoted im Child’s cookbook. See http://blogs.saion. com/0001399/2002/08/25.html. Powell quickly negotiated a book contract based on her blog. Julie Powell, Fulee and Fulta: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny

Apartment Kitchen (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). 58. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, foreword to Long, Culinary Tourism, xii. 59. Seen. 10.

60. Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press, 1998). 61. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxtord University Press, 1989), 81.

62. Noted by Norton, introduction, vu.

Madden and Finch 31

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1. Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty Sooo Sooo

s Soot Martha L. Finch

In March 1629 the plantation at Plymouth was just two and a half years

old, its survival still tenuous as the colonists struggled to adapt to an unfamiliar “wilderness” environment. The meager spring found them “half naked” and “full of sadness,” scavenging for food and finding only lobsters—-considered “garbage fish,” fit only for swine—to sustain

them. Then a two-month drought from mid-May to mid-July further threatened their survival, as the young corn, planted in recently cleared fields, withered. Believing that God “seemed in his anger to arm himself against us,” colonial leaders called for a day of fasting and humiliation, and the people “assembled themselves together nine hours im prayer.”

Throughout the “parched” day, hour after desperate hour, they sat in the close, still air of the meetinghouse in fervent supplication, while outside “it was clear weather, and very hot, and not a cloud nor any sign of rain to be seen.” Yet, in the evening, as they returned to their homes, “ait began to be overcast, and shortly after to rain, with such sweet and gentle showers” that “the earth was thoroughly wet and soaked therewith, which did so apparently revive and quicken the decayed corn and other fruits, as was wonderful.”! We can imagine the cooling touch of raindrops and sharp, fresh scent of dampened soil that greeted the godly folks as they gathered outside 35

the meetinghouse, overcome with relief and joy. “Their drooping affections,” like the drooping corn in the fields, were “most revived” at what they perceived to be a providential answer from a merciful God. Prolonged prayer as a communal body seemed to have elicited this sign of “God’s favor and acceptation,” so that even nearby Native people, also suffering from the drought, were “astonished to behold” the divine response. Hobomok, a Pokanoket Indian staying with the English at Piymouth, acknowledged that “ ‘the Englishman’s God is a good God, for he hath heard you, and sent you rain. ” For fourteen days it rained, and throughout the rest of the summer the weather alternated between showers and warm weather, so that “instead of famine now God gave them plenty,” and in the autumn they were able to gather in a “fruitful and liberal harvest.” Rather than “smother|ing|” their gratitude, the devout colonists agreed that the proper response to God’s benevolent care for his people was to observe a “day of thanksgiving unto the Lord.” Throughout this drama of hunger and survival, anxiety and relief, humiliation and rejoicing, the Plymouth planters performed their personal and communal relations with the divine, with each other, with the environment, and with food in distinct ways. During the seventeenth century churches and civil courts across the New England colonies spontaneously called for literally hundreds of days of fasting and thanksgiving in response to external and internal threats and blessings. The saints at Plymouth saw themselves as divinely chosen to constitute the body of Christ, self-consciously separated from the “abominations” of the Church of England and the “corruptions” of English society and in a contractual, or covenant, relationship with the divine. To maintain the covenant, devout New Englanders read events in the natural world as divine providences—signs of their standing with God—and any event could serve as a providential message. Breaking the covenant by disobeying divine laws, they believed, elicited God’s anger, which he expressed through ominous divine providences—such as sickness, war, religious persecution, and agricultural dangers like drought, flooding, and insect infestation. Dangers also arose from within covenanted communities themselves; ministers mterpreted the sinful behavior of individual members—drunkenness, forni36 Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty

cation, murder—and internal conflicts that divided the church body as signs both of personal and corporate pollution and of God’s displeasure with his chosen ones. The appropriate response to these divine providences, which indicated the presence of sin and threatened the social body’s moral and physical survival, was to call for a day of public fasting, humiliation, and prayer. Ideally, they believed, God recognized the heartfelt desires of his people to repent and purify themselves through their fast-day activities. He responded accordingly by answering their prayers and sending merciful divine providences: healing of physical sickness and of divisions within the church, success in war, rain during a drought, or a good harvest. In turn, the community called for a day of public thanksgtving to express their gratitude to God for his “wonderful favor and mercy,” the crucial sign that they remained his covenanted people.’ Among the rituals observed by early New Englanders--such as baptisms, the Lord’s Supper, and election days—tasts and thanksgivings

are the ones most frequently noted in church and court records and personal journals. In its ability to respond immediately to providential events in the natural and human worlds, the cycle of fast and thankseging days served as the primary strategy Puritan communities employed to maneuver their tenuous physical and moral existence in the American wilderness. Implementing particular foodways on these days, participants elicited clivine tavor, distinguished themselves from corrupt English society, and reinforced their sense of divine chosenness and exclusivity. Through fast and thanksgiving practices, godly colonists attempted to embody their utopian visions of building what Plymouth’s original pastor in England, John Robinson, termed “the house of God which you are and are to be” in America, or what Massachusetts Bay’s first governor, John Winthrop, imagined as a “city upon a hill,” to produce a visible community of God’s people.’ While colonial records note the frequency and significance of these days and the reasons for which they were called, they are almost silent about the activities the days entailed, particularly regarding food. However, recent food studies theory, prescriptions for observing fast and thanksgiving days brought from England to New England, and the scant information available in Finch 37

colonial records uncover the practices and meanings of Puritan fasting and thanksgiving to reveal food and foodways at the center of social and religious life in early New England. For devout colonists, fast and thanksgiving practices worked in several interconnected ways. They believed that ritually avoiding or consuming food literally produced alterations in members’ bodies and souls, communal morality, and divine attitude, thus invigorating their covenants with God and with each other. The anthropologists Mary Douglas and Anna Meigs have noted that shared food practices reinforce social meanings and structures, regenerating the affective bonds within and protective boundaries around communities.* Indeed, an “eating-induced unity,” as Meigs has termed it, was engendered when early New Englanders—already joined in a community intentionally grounded in “common affections for the common good,” as Robinson promoted,

and “knit together ...in brotherly atlection,” as Winthrop anticipated—sat down to share a meal.’ Moreover, the communal avoidance of food on fast days contributed to community building. Like enjoying the pleasures of a thanksgiving feast with family and friends, suffering with others the discomforts of food deprivation also produced intense feelings of social bonding. The historian Stephen Mennell and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu have discussed foodways’ ability to reproduce and communicate shifting cultural values, often unconsciously.’ Devout New Englanders’ food practices displayed to themselves and others meanings about their individual and group identities, such as a member’s social status and the community’s belief they had been chosen by God for a special purpose in New England—meanings that changed over time.

New England Puritans drew on a rich and complex history of fasting and thanksgiving, which extended from biblical Hebrew practices, through medieval Roman Catholic fast and feast days, to the English Puritan instigation of crvil fasts and thanksgivings. Rejecting the lavish, regularized fast and feast days of the medieval church, Puritan reforms of the Church of England in the 1500s looked to the ancient Israelite model of fasting, humiliation, and prayer within a community that understood itself to be in covenanted relationship with a demanding yet 38 Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty

merciful God. Elizabeth ’s parliament spontaneously called for civil fasts in response to national crises and local disasters, and Puritan ministers published the first Protestant treatises on “the Holie exercise ofa true Fast.” These condemned the “Popish Fast,” which proscribed meat eating but allowed for fish as well as rich and elaborate concoctions of sugars, spices, eggs, nuts, and fruits molded into the shapes of peacocks and haunches of beet. Written against such “fleshy” self-indulgence and

“prideful” display, the treatises explained why a “true” fast required total abstinence from all food intake and should be done quietly, without advertising one’s devotional expertise. Fasts linked “outward” and “inward exercises,” bodily and spiritual activities; physical self-denial produced a strong sense of one’s moral “unworthinesse.” One’s body was to be “brought down” so that the mind, likewise, might be humuiliated and divine mercy engaged.’ In his Holy Exercise of Fasting (1604), the English Puritan Nicholas Bownde detailed the proper activities and meanings of fasting and thanksgiving and set the standards for their practice, which the Rever-

end Thomas Thacher reiterated seventy years later in a fast-day sermon at Boston’s Third Church in the Bay Colony. Bownde described a fast’s physical and spiritual activities: “The outward appertaineth to the body, and is called a Bodily exercise, as to abstaine from meat, drinke,

sleepe, and such like; ... the other is belonging to the soule, and consisteth in the inward vertues and graces of the minde holpen |helped| forward by this bodily exercise.” Outward and inward activities immeciately linked providential afflictions of the community (such as Plymouth’s 1623 drought) with corresponding afflictions imposed on one’s body during fasting, which in turn afflicted one’s soul.® At the heart of fasting and its primary driving force was food, or rath-

er its lack—above all, a godly fast required utter abstinence from all meat and drink from one evening to the next. Additionally, a fast entailed four other self-denying activities: limiting one’s sleep in order to pray; not wearing “costly apparell ... which might puffle up the body with pride”; abstaining from sexual activity; and avoiding all worldly labors and recreations in order to dedicate the day to God’s worship and service.” In practice, surely there were many like the Harvard lecturer Finch 39

Michael Wigglesworth, who, wearied by the long hours spent listening to sermons and prayers, found himself “hanckermg in my thoughts after creature comforts as of meat and drink &c when I should be |wjhollely intent to gods worship in religious services.”'” Nevertheless, in denying themselves the pleasurable fulfillment of natural desires for food, sleep, fine clothing, sex, and secular activity, participants understood that they were separating themselves from “the world” and its comforts and purifying themselves of bodily and spiritual sin. Each individual, then, carried responsibility for maintaining the moral and physical integrity of the entire godly community on fast days; in order to purify the church as a whole, each member purified his or her heart, or moral soul, by purifying his or her body. New England ministers taught the doctrine of “visible sainthood,” which posited direct linkages among soul, body, and community. ‘hey mmagined the individual godly person as an integrated moral being who was, furthermore, an integral participating member—a “leg,” a “mouth,” or a “hand”—of the church body.'' Each member visibly displayed inward sinfulness or saintliness in his or her outward behaviors, either undermining or supporting the godly community. When the heart required repentance and purification, one treated one’s body in rigorous ways intended to produce physical and mental weariness and feelings of self-abnegation and humiliation. Indeed, ‘Thacher argued, ifa person’s emotional state during a fast were appropriately saddened by recognition of personal sin, he or she lost all desire to consume food. “Extream grief,” he observed, “takes away the appetite to eating and drinking.” Proponents like Thacher believed that such emotional grief in the face of sin and the physical weariness that came from denying oneself sustenance during a fast denoted an appropriately humiliated—but also empowered—soul. Self-eflacement placed one in proper relationship to the divine and generated the sense of urgency necessary to elicit God’s attention. The Plymouth pastor John Cotton Jr. apparently avoided at least food, drink, and sleep on fast days, for they caused him great fatigue. In 1688, for example, the church at Plymouth held a fast “for the awfull hand of God in the measles this winter, that God would in mercy recover us |and| blesse our labours by sea & land, our seed time & har40 Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty

vest.” The next day Cotton penned a short note to his brother-in-law Increase Mather, revealing a rare moment of lethargy: “This day past our congregation kept a fast, with reference to the present visitation |of measles |, so that lam too weary now to write.”'’ Without a full belly, when the wearied body was weakened and “pinched with hunger,” claimed Bownde, one’s prayers of supplication became more potent— they took on a “sharper edge” and were “more piercing” of the divine ear." John Winthrop discovered similar eftects when controlling his appetite. He despaired that his “fleshe” was repeatedly tempted by “variety of meates,” “gluttonie,” and other “lusts and follies” of the world. But Winthrop found that when “the fleshe had gotten head and heart againe and beganne to linger after the world,” through prayer and fasting he was able to recover “life and comforte.” For Winthrop, body, mind, and soul were inextricably conjoined: by keeping “a strict watche over my appetite” and “hould|ing| under the fleshe by temperate cliet,” he discovered that he could control the “ordinary wanderinge of heart, and am farre more fitt and cheerfull to the duties of my callinge [as an attorney and governor of the Bay Colony and other duties.” The extravagant eating habits of the upper classes in late-sixteenthand early-seventeenth-century England, exemplihed by their consumption of rich foods on fast days, significantly shaped Winthrop’s and other Puritans’ views on the moral and social meanings of food. English social critics such as the infamous Philip Stubbes railed against those who were “given to daintie faire, gluttony, belly cheere ... drunkennesse and gourmandize,” for such “nice fare hath altered our bodies & changed our nature.”'® The historian Bryan S. Turner has noted that Puritan critics considered widespread obesity among the wealthy a “physical manifestation of the social flabbiness of the social system,” and pious cletary treatises intended to remedy the situation were popular, but their effectiveness questionable—much like dieting books today. Meanwhile, sumptuary laws, enacted to control the public display of wealth and status by regulating clothing styles and food consump-

tion, attempted to reinforce distinctions among social classes.'’ For Winthrop and other New England Puritans, controlling one’s appeFinch 43

tite for conspicuous consumption and sharing the resulting “supertluities” with the poor produced a society that functioned as God intended. In America, Winthrop believed, this ideal society, this “city upon a hill’—tree from the corruptions of England’s immoral excesses and selfish desires, which allowed the poor to starve rather than be fed by the wealthy—would thrive. When he put down his prideful “flesh” by ingesting a modest diet, Winthrop lived as a visible saint, cheerfully, humbly, and generously contributing to the godly political and moral structure of his community. The church deacon Robert Cushman made a similar argument soon after the Mayflower’s arrival, when hungry colonists were grumbling about the hardships of wilderness life at Plymouth. Cushman recognized that one of the greatest difficulties of their venture in New England was leaving behind “the satiety of bodily delights.” But, he argued, that they could eat only meager, simple fare was precisely why they were physically and morally superior to those who selfishly overindulged their appetites in England. “Nature 1s content with little, and health is much endangered by mixtures upon the stomach,” he warned. “The delights of the palate do often inflame the vital parts as the tongue setteth afire the whole body.”' In a sermon delivered in Plymouth in 1621, Cushman proclaimed the recent founding of the plantation as “the dawning of this new world” but warned that the settlers’ “self-love”— that is, being more concerned with “serving their bellies” than serving the common good—would precipitate the downfall of the still tenuous plantation. He vividly differentiated between “‘a temperate good man, and a belly-God” who craved “belly-cheer”: “A good man will not eate his morsels alone, especially if he have better then other|s|, but if by Gods providence, he have gotten some meat which is better then ordinary, and better then his other brethrens, he can have no rest in himself, except he make other|s| partaker|s| with him. But a belly-God will stop all in his owne throat, yea, though his neighbour come in and behold him eate, yet his grip|p|le [grasping] gut shameth not to swallow all.” Cushman believed that selfishly filling one’s own belly with a surfeit of rich foods, especially when others went hungry, caused a “dangerous 42 Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty

disease,” both physical and spiritual, that was contagious, infecting the entire social body." Like Winthrop, Cushman imagined that physical deprivation could enhance one’s godliness: “See whether thine heart cannot be as merry, anc thy mind as joytfuil, and thy countenance as cheertuil, with cola |rse fare, with poulse | pulse; legumes], with bread and water (if God ofter thee no better, nor the times afford other) as if thou hadst great dainties.” This period of early settlement, when so much was at stake, was “no time for men to looke to get riches, brave clothes, daintie fare... no time to pamper the flesh, live at ease, snatch, catch, scrape, and pill |pile|, and hoord up.” It was a time to function as a spiritual and communal body “jointed together and knit by flesh and synewes” and to “open the doores, the chests, and vessels, and say, brother, neighbor, friend, what want yee, any thing that [ have?” Cushman exhorted, “Let lyour neighbor’s| hunger [be] thy hunger.”*° Cushman, Winthrop, and others believed that a godly life and a thriving, moral society depended on daily controlling one’s appetite and sharing one’s edible resources with others. But the social and spiritual meanings and effects of appetite suppression and food sharing took on greater potency when ritualized—the former on fast days and the latter on thanksgiving days. Although abstaining from and indulging in food and other pleasures were fundamentally individual activities, doing so as a unified social body generated the critical mass required to elicit divine attention. Individuals could and did hold private fasts for personal difficulties and private thankseivings for personal biessings—the diaries of the Bostonians John Hull and his son-in-law Samuel Sewall, for example, note frequent private fasts and thanksgivings for a daughter’s illness, a merchant ship returned safely, and numerous other events of personal import.*' But the most effective kind of fast was public, when individuals acted in unison to heal the corporate body and regenerate the affective bonds within and protective boundaries around the godly community. According to Bownde, others’ physical or moral sicknesses should deeply move a godly individual with pity and compassion

to participate in their distress and “succor them... by our prayers... with fasting and humbling of our selves.” Ideally, when each member Finch 43

denied oneself sustenance, they all felt, physically and emotionally, a corporate suffering.** Upon divine acknowledgment of such physical debilitation and spiritual repentance and providential athrmation that they remained God’s chosen ones, the community responded by shitting from feelings and activities of humiliation and self-denial to those of joyful gratitude and feasting. Because devout New Englanders believed themselves always at risk of moral pollution and, especially early in the colonizing process, physical dissolution, civil and religious leaders paid excessive attention to pub-

lic fast days and the ominous divine providences for which they were called. Throughout the seventeenth century the church at Plymouth, for example, observed at least three times as many days of fasting as it did days of thanksegiving.~’ But the days set apart to express gratitude to God for his benevolent mercies toward his people were important turns in the ritual cycle. Bownde argued that when God answered their heartfelt prayers, it was time for “rejoicing”: now “feasting were more fit for them then fasting.”** Across New England, church and civil leaders spontaneously called for days of thanksgiving in response to such merciful providences as civil and religious “liberties,” health, an ordained

ministry, and victory in wars against Indians and European powers. Public thanksgivings, often announced by broadsides, frequently occurred in the autumn, fusing with the ancient tradition of harvest festivals. Plymouth colonists, for example, observed more than half their recorded thanksgivings in the fall, usually in November but sometimes in late October or early December. These autumnal observances expressed gratitude to God for, among other blessings, “the fruits of the earth” and another year of being “fed by God’s merciful hand.” The most detailed description of an early New England thankseiving harvest festival is of one that occurred in the autumn of 1621, when the plantation at Plymouth was just a year old. Half their company had not survived that initial year, due to illnesses acquired during the Mayflower’s Atiantic crossing and a meager food supply (what historians have immortalized as “The Starving Time”). The remaining souls were deeply thankful, however, for what they believed to be God’s benevolent support of their undertaking, providentially confirmed in a plen44. Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty

tiful harvest. “They found the Lord to be with them in all their ways, and to bless their outgoings and incomings,” exulted Plymouth’s governor, William Bradford, about this time, “for which let His holy name have the praise forever, to all posterity.”*”? Edward Winslow described the joyful celebration in a letter to a friend in England: Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms | weapons], many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.*° Winslow hoped his delightful relation of what has since been mythologized as America’s “First Thanksgiving” would encourage those still in England to support the infant colony in its godly enterprise.” He described the festivities in vivid detail, including open-armed celebrations with the Pokanokets, who contributed to the abundant food supply. Regarding the foods prepared and served during the feast, Winslow mentioned only wild game: fow! (Bradford noted “waterfowl” and “wild turkeys” in his description of that year’s harvest) and deer. The other toods likely eaten were also indigenous to New England, for colonists had not yet transplanted any domestic English plant or animal foods to New England soil. Some were “wild” and others cultivated by the Native people, who had shared their expertise with the English: “Indian corn,” squash, “pease” (legumes), nuts and berries, “groundnuts” (a root vegetable), and, according to Bradford, “cod and bass and other fish,” such as eels and shellfish. Men roasted whole deer and fish over Finch 45

outdoor fire pits, and women baked duck, cel, or venison in savory “pasties,” or meat pies, as at the wedding celebration of Bradford and Alice Southworth in 1623.*° Colonists preferred their cornbread sweetened, by mixing ground and sifted parched corn with water and dried

wild strawberries or cranberries, maple syrup, or honey; housewives baked the thick batter in the bottom of an iron pot set into the coals. Meanwhile, both Indians and English boiled legumes, corn, and squash together into a “mess of pottage,” or “succotash.”” Not all thanksgivings were recreational autumn harvest festivals, but all apparently involved some form of feasting. The days spontaneous-

ly called throughout the year in grateful response to divine blessings brought people together in the meetinghouse for several hours of worship, prayer, and a sermon, after which participants dispersed to members’ homes to share a meal. Colonial leadership shunned Christmas observances, but on December 22, 1636, the church at Scituate in Plymouth Colony kept a day of thanksgiving. At eight o’clock that winter morning, members gathered in the meetinghouse to pray, sing psalms, and listen to a sermon. Because of the cold weather, they cut the service short after four hours to “mak|e| merry to the creatures, the poorer sort beeme invited of the richer,” exhibiting the communal generosity promoted by Cushman and Winthrop. Three years later, on another “very cold” day in December, the nearby village of Barnstable held a day of thanksgiving “for God’s exceeding mercye in bringing us hither Safely

land) keeping us healthy & well in o|ujr weake beginnings & in our church Estate.” Not yet having a meetinghouse, they gathered instead “att Mr. Hulls house” to hold public “praises to God.” Afterward, they “devided into 3 companies to feast togeather, some att Mr Hulls, some att Mr Maos, some att Brother Lumberds senior.” During these early years of settlement and im rural areas, where colonists were often on the edge of survival, such winter feasts likely were

not the abundant feasting of annual harvest thanksgivings, nor were they England’s excessive, “gluttonous” feasting, condemned by those who abhorred the carousing and overmndulgences of Anglican thanksgiving days. And yet sharing even simple foods to display gratitude to God for abundant blessings, to draw the community together in cel48 Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty

ebration, and to redistribute resources by providing a meal for those less prosperous was a powerful ritual gesture, both symbolic and practical. Seventeenth-century dining etiquette wove more tightly the complex social threads among members while it communicated one’s place in the social schema. Scituate’s and Barnstable’s thanksgiving “feasts” were, perhaps, simple one-cish meals of corn, legumes, and, in recognition of the special day, a jomnt of meat or some fish, all boiled together for several hours into an undifferentiated “mess.” At the hearth the

mistress of the house spooned the pottage out of the iron cooking pot into a few wooden trenchers, pewter porringers, or earthenware bowls trom which two or more diners ate, while also sharing mugs of beer or water.” Consuming homogeneous foods—like a pottage eaten out of a common trencher with the fingers, a piece of corn bread, or, less frequently, a spoon, or like a roasted haunch of venison from which diners sliced off pieces of charred flesh and ate with their hands—reinforced one’s sense of identity as a member of a larger corporate body. But a common code of table manners disallowed lower-ranked family members and guests putting their fingers into a dish or their lips to a cup before the household adults had taken their first portions.’”* Indeed, when “the poorer sort | were] invited of the richer,” those of lower economic status were cared for while simultaneously reminded of the social superiority of their wealthier neighbors, even as they all “made merry” together. As the seventeenth century unfolded, conceptions and practices of fasting and thanksgiving changed. Physical survival in New England became less tenuous, the population grew and diversified, some colonists accumulated a fair amount of wealth, and those who subscribed to Puritan ideals, while they maintained their positions of colonial leadership, were outnumbered by those who avoided participation in church activities. Over time fasts and thanksgivings became less spontaneous in response to divine providences that threatened or blessed the community and more regular, with fasts usually held in the spring, when food resources were at their lowest and illness more common, and thanksgivings in the autumn after the harvest, when foods were most abun-

dant and varied and communities could indulge in celebratory conFinck 47

sumption.”’ Furthermore, despite Winthrop’s promotion of “common affections” and “familiar commerce” among all members of the godly community, the governor’s vision of the ideal society did not include equal ranking among its members. Rather than erasing class differences, Winthrop hoped to motivate those blessed with worldly goods to help those in need by proclaiming that God ordained some to be rich and others poor, “some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in sub[j]eccion.””* Indeed, over time social divisions based on economic and religious distinctions became more clearly defined in New England. A shift away from the relatively egalitarian nature of early thanksgiving meals, when wealthy and destitute church members ate together, was reflected in social gatherings that became more stratified and exclusive according to socioeconomic class. ‘The Boston merchant and selectman Samuel Sewall, for example, recorded frequent fasts and thanksgivings observed in his home and the homes of his elite friends. ‘Twice, he mentioned food. In 1685 Sewall noted that a day-long fast in his home with other magistrates and their wives ended in the evening with the distribution of “some Biskits, and Beer, Cider, Wine.” In 1692, upon the Boston merchant Elisha Cook’s safe return from a voyage to England, a day of thanksgiving among twenty-seven illustrious friends at Cook’s home entailed psalm singing and a sermon. Then, they “ate

dinner.” Sewaill’s simple statement suggests an entire world of social practices and meanings not accessible to most New Englanders. A dinner for twenty-seven of Boston’s religious, political, and economic leaders was undoubtedly an elaborate affair. English foods by then domesticated in New England—wheat bread; cow’s milk, butter, and cheese; a joint of beef or perhaps a roasted pig; apples and other fruits and vegetables— might have been prepared over several days by Cook’s indentured or enslaved kitchen help, served by his housemaids on individual dishes of fine ceramic or pewter, and consumed by his guests, each with his or her own place setting of spoon, knife, perhaps even a fork (a utensil that had only recently found its way onto the tables of the upper classes in England), and a silver cup of beer or imported wine, at a long table 48 Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty

covered with white linen.”” Meanwhile, heady conversation about important happenings at home and abroad flowed. The entire event, both religious and gustatory, bound participants together in common as they displayed to each other (and Cook’s servants) their provincial gentility and social influence, as well as their elite late-seventeenth-century Bostonian godliness. Much changed during the seventy years between the “First Thanksgiving” in Plymouth Colony, when rich and poor, Indians and English shared “wild” and “native” foods and rigorous recreation in a rustic, outdoor setting, and Elisha Cook’s refined thanksgiving dinner, pro-

duced by servants and consumed by Boston’s pious upper crust. At both, however, people who understood themselves as covenanted with God to obey his laws and receive his blessings ritualized their thanksgiving-day activities, hoping to elicit divine approbation and ensure the survival of their communities. Early in the seventeenth century, those who fled the prideful display and immoral excesses of England expected to see the dawning of a new world, the establishment of God’s society, in America. And they explicitly understood their food practices as a crucial means for creating that society—a society bound by common affections, in which those blessed with worldly goods controlled their appetites in order to give to those not so blessed and, in turn, to receive divine support of their enterprise. But the potency of that utopian vision declined over time as social distinctions became progressively more clearly defined in gatherings around food, colonial desires to define themselves as clistinctly different from their friends in England diminished, a growing number of detractors questioned God’s support of the Puritan endeavor, and even ministers believed (and feared) that New England had failed to live up to the moral intentions of its early visionaries.

Nevertheless, throughout the seventeenth century, fasts and thanksgivings placed food at the center of religious and social life in New England. Abstaining together from bodily pleasures on days of fasting, humiliation, and prayer and celebrating together by sharing worship, a meal, and recreation on days of thanksgiving served to create a sense of kinship and unity among particrpants. Even at the end of the century, Finch 49

these days reminded the devout of their original, self-ascribed identity as God’s people, chosen to establish God’s society in the American wilderness. Perhaps they also remembered, in the words of Wilham Bradford: Famine once we had—

But other things God gave us in full store, As fish and groundnuts, to supply our strait, That we might learn on providence to wait. ... But a while after plenty did come in, From his hand only who doth pardon sin.”’

Notes 1. The arrival of rain immediately following a fast day during the 1623 drought was apparently a remarkable event in early New England history, for several authors described it. The narrative in this and the following paragraph 1s drawn from Nathaniel Morton, New Engiands Memoriall (4669), ed. Howard |. Hall (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1937), 37-39; John Smith, Advertisements for the Unexpertenced Planters of New-England (London, 1631), 18; Edward Winslow, Good Newes from New England (1624; repr.,

Bedford ma: Applewood Books, n.d.), 54-55; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Ehot Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 130.

2. See Richard P. Gildrie, “The Ceremonial Puritan: Days of Humiliation and Thanksgiving,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 136 (1982):

3-16; W. DeLoss Love Jr., The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (New York: Houghton, Miiflin, 1895); David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of fudement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred F. Knopf, 1989), 166-72; Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan

New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 124-27; Horton Davies, The Worshep of the American Puritans, 1629-1730 (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 58-67; R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 27-32. 3. [Edward Winslow,| A Relation or lournall [fournal) of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Setled at Plimoth in New England 50 Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty

(1622), in Mourt’s Relation: A fournal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, ed. Dwight

B. Heath (Bedford ma: Applewood Books, 1963), 10-13; John Winthrop, “A

Modell of Christian Charity,” in The Puritans, ed. Perry Miller and Thomas Johnson, and ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 195-99. 4. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 115, 121, 126-27; Anna Meigs, “Food as a Cultural Construction,” in Counthan and Van Esterik, Food and Culture, 95, 103.

5. “The Rev. John Robinson’s Farewell Letter to John Carver, July 1620,” in Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 368; Winthrop, “Modell of Christian Charity.”

6. Stephen J. Mennell, Ali Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in Engiand and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, and ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory. 7. Patricia Curran, Grace before Meals: Food, Ritual, and Body Discipline in Convent Culture (Urbana: University of Ilmois Press, 1989), 51, 103-4; Susan Hardman, “Puritan Asceticism and the Type of Sacrifice,” in Monks, Hermits, and the Ascetic Tradition, ed. W. ]. Sheils (Great Britain: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 288-89; Winthrop 8. Hudson, “Fast Days and Civil Religion,” in Winthrop 8. Hudson and Leonard J]. Trinterud, Theology in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (os Angeles: University of California, 1971); C.J. Kitching, “’Prayers Fit for the Time’: Fasting and Prayer i Response to National Crises in the Reign of Elizabeth I," in Sheils, Monks, Hermits, and the Ascetic Tradetion, 241-50; Mennell, AN Manners of Food, 20-39.

8. Nicihjolas Bownde, The Holy Exercise of Fasting (Cambridge, 1604), 28; Thomas Thacher, A Fast of Gods Ghusing (Boston, 1678). g. Bownde, Holy Exercise of Fasting, 39-40, 45-46, 50-51, 56; Thacher, Fast of God's Chusing, 4. Vhose who were very young, old, or ill were allowed to eat

and drink as necessary on a fast day. 10. Michael Wigglesworth, The Diary of Michael Wigelesworth, 1653-1657, ed. Edmund 8. Morgan (Gloucester Ma: Peter Smith, 1970), 18.

ul. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963); see, for example, John Robinson, The Works of Fohn Robinson, Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, ed. Robert Ashton (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1851), 2:167~70, 267.

12. Thacher, Fast of God's Chusing, 22.

13. Plymouth Church Records, 1620-1859 (New York: New England Society, 1920), 1:260; John Cotton Jr. to Increase Mather (Mar. 8, 1687/8), “Letters Finch 51

of John Cotton,” in “The Mather Papers,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections 38 (1868): 254. 14. Bownde, Holy Exercise of Fasting, 112.

15. John Winthrop, “Experiencia,” in Wenthrep Papers (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929-1947), 1:167-68, 190-215, esp. 193-97. 16. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1595), 69~70. 17. Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Soctal Theory, ist ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 166-67. 18. Ri obert] Chushman], “Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawtulness of Removing Out of England into the Parts of America,” in Heath, Mourt’s Relation, 95. 19. Cushman,| 4 Sermon Preached at Plimmoth in New-England, December 9, 1621 (London, 1622), 15, 6-7, 2.

20. |Cushman|, Sermon Preached at Plammoth, 1, 15, 18. 21. John Hull, “The Diaries of John Hull” American Antiquarian Society, Transactions and Collections 3 (4857); Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1973).

22. Bownde, Holy Exercise of Fasting, 338-49, quotation from p. 349. 23. Plymouth Church Records; Records of the Colony of New Piymouth in New Eng-

land, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, 12 vols. (Boston: William White, 1855-61). For a virtually complete record of all fasts and thanksgiings held throughout New England during the 1600s, see Love, Fast and Thanksgiving Days. 24. Bownde, Holy Exercise of Fasting, 190.

25. Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 89-90. 26. Edward Winslow, “A Letter Sent from New England” (1621), in Heath, Mourt’s Relation, 82.

27. Some scholars have argued that the event Winslow described was not a religious thanksgiving but a secular harvest festival (see, for example, Andrew F. Smith, “The First Thanksgiving,” Gastronomica 3 |2003|: 79-85). Others have noted the tendency of New England Puritans to infuse traditionally secular events with religious meanings and practices, making harvest festivals also days of thanksgiving, particularly by the end of the seventeenth century (see, for example, Gudrie, “Ceremonial Puritan”; Ann Blue Wills, “Pigrims and Progress: How Magazines Made Thanksgiving,” Charch History 72, |2003]: 198-58). 28. Bradtord, Of Piymouth Plantation, 90; Emmanuel Altham, “Letter to Sur Edward Altham, September, 1623,” in Three Visetors to Early Plymouth, ed. 52 Pinched with Hunger, Partaking of Plenty

Sydney V. James Jr. (Plymouth: Plimoth Plantation, 1963), 29. ag. See Sarah F. McMahon, “A Comfortable Subsistence: The Changing Composition of Diet in Rural New England, 1620-1840," Witham and Mary Quarter-

ly 42 (1985): 26-65; Sarah F. McMahon, “Provisions Laid Up for the Family: Toward a History of Diet in New England, 1650-1850,” Hestorecal Methods 14 (i981): 4-21; James W. Baker, “Seventeenth-Century English Yeoman Foodways at Plimoth Plantation,” in Foodways in the Northeast, ed. Peter Benes, (Boston: Boston University Press, 1984), 105-13; John Winthrop Jr., “Indian Corne” (ca. 1662), in Fulmer Mood, “John Winthrop, Jr., on Indian Corn,” New England Quarterly 10 (1937): 125-33.

30. | John Lathrop,| “Scituate and Barnstable Church Records,” New England Historical and Geneatogical Register 10 (856): 37. 31. James Deetz, In Smali Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American

Life (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 50-56; Sara Paston-Willams, The Art of Dining: A History of Cooking and Eating (London: National Trust Enterprises, 1993 and 1999), 184, 190. 32. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Citves (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 40-42; Norbert Ehas, The Hestory of Man-

ners, vol.1, The Civilizeng Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 89, 92.

33. Gildrie, “Ceremonial Puritan,” 4; see also Love, Fast and Thanksgiving Days.

34. Winthrop, “Modell of Christian Charity,” 195. 35. Sewall, Diary, 1:63, 300. 36. McMahon, “Comfortable Subsistence”; McMahon, “Provisions Laid Up”; Bushman, Refinement of America, 74-78; Daniel A. Romani Jr, “Our English Clover-grass sowen thrives very well’: ‘The Importation of English Grasses and Forages into Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Plants and People, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1996), 25-37; Peter W. Cook, “Domestic Livestock of Massachusetts Bay, 1620-1725,” in The Farm, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Press, 1988), 109-25. 37. Wiliam Bradford, “A Descriptive and Historical Account of New England in Verse,” in “Governor Bradiord’s Letter Book,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections 3 (4794): 77.

Finck 53

2. Faith, Flatulence, and Fandangos in the SpanishAmerican Borderlands Phillip H. Round

Armies, as Napoleon once famously observed, travel on their stomachs. The same can be said of European settlers in the New World. In 1620 the survival of the Plymouth Pilgrims’ utopian dreams for New England

hung in the balance—could they get enough to eat their first winter? Poorly provisioned and unused to farming, they were so weakened by hunger that half died during the first few months of settlement. Editors of Wilham Bradtford’s History of Phamouth Plantation always label the opening chapters of his narrative “the starving time.” Yet food held not only the key to the Pilgrims’ physical survival but also their cultural connectedness to the mother country. They discovered, as Sidney Mintz has observed of humanity in general, that “consumption is always conditioned by meaning” and is “at the same time a form of self-identification and communication.” Once they had enough to eat, they performed a harvest festival that harkened back to English village rituals they had known back home, long before they emigrated to Holland and then on to the New World. That harvest festival has be-

come Thanksgiving, the one shared mythic celebration of food and nationhood in modern American culture.

Food, conquest, and the settlement of America have gone hand in hand in ritual and symbolic ways since 1492, and the Pilgrim story 1s sunply the most well-known and well-worn example. But many other stories can be told about food and the American “experiment.” ‘Thou54

sands of other emigrants to the New World-—Portuguese, Spanish, and French—came bringing foodways that differed starkly from their Pilgrim counterparts, shaped in large measure by the sacramental rituals of Ca-

tholicism and their immersion in a Mediterranean food world dom1nated by olive oil, wines, spices, plants, and herbs virtually unknown to English men and women. An especially illustrative case in point is the experience of the nearly two hundred emigrants from New Spain who traveled overland from San Miouel de Horcasitas in Sonora to Monterey in upper California over the fall and winter of 1775~76. Under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Baptista de Anza, this group—consisting mostly of families of the solciers who accompanied the expedition—went on to found the settlement of Monterey. Together they traversed a total of some sixteen hundred miles, including the Lower Colorado River Desert, a sixthousand-square-mile, below-sea-level valley of sand dunes, no pasturage, and little water. Despite the obstacles and the challenges of the first overland route from Mexico to California, only one life was lost on this journey, a mother who died in childbirth just a few days out of Horcasitas. The rest of the party, including three children born during the excursion, would serve as the nucleus of a community of people who would be known as Californios, and whose hybrid culture would dominate Euro-California life from 1775 to 1848.

‘This was Anza’s second trip from Sonora to Monterey. In January 1774 Bucareli, the viceroy of New Spain, had asked him to establish a reliable land route for settlers and provisions to stock the missions then springing up along the California coast. With seven presidios and missions stretched out along five hundred miles of upper California, the viceroy was worried that Spain’s toehold in North America was slipping. The handful of soldiers and friars who occupied the makeshilt settlements of tule-covered log huts could not be considered “settlers.” Lacking agricultural produce and manutactured goods, they relied on ships for their provisions—ships that took from fifty to one hundred days to travel from Mexico to California. In the four years between Father Junfpero Serra’s founding of the mission in San Diego and Anza’s first overland excursion, the Spaniards in upper California had experiRound 55

enced two “starving times.” It took Anza four and a half months to travel from Sonora to Monterey and back in 1774. He took only about forty men and enough pack animais and beef cattle for the journey. When he returned to Mexico City, the viceroy immediately ordered him to assemble a party of settlers and set out to realize Father Serra’s dream of a California where “the conquest might be notably increased and souls won for heaven.”

The second Anza expedition offers an especially useful application of food studies theory to our understanding of the colonization and settlement of North America from a cultural viewpoint (Spanish and Catholic) and a historical period (the late eighteenth century) that is only now beginning to be explored in the literature of early American cultural studies. The diary of Father Pedro Font, the Franciscan missionary who traveled with the expedition, has been called by Herbert Bolton, the dean of Spanish borderlands stuclies in the first half of the twentieth century, “one of the best in all Western Hemisphere history.’ Ethnographers and historians in the last century have praised Font for his keen eye and precise reporting on the native inhabitants of the regions he explored. However, few literary or cultural studies have looked at his diary as a record of a Spanish Catholic whose utopian vision would come face to face with the harshest desert environment and perhaps most intractable Native people he and his countrymen would encounter in the eighteenth century. Most importantly, no one has noted how Pedro Font employed the disyunctions between Spanish and indigenous foodways, and sacred and secular consumption, as indices of his community’s distance from his utopian vision of what the Spanish borderlands ought to be once New Spain had colonized this final frontier of its American empire. My essay takes its title from a triad of food-related semiotic categories

that Font employs to shape the otherwise quotidian events of the settlers’ journey into a struggle between good and evil. Faith is represented in Font’s diary as the ritually purified meal of the Mass. As a priest, Font was required to celebrate this ritual—and to ingest symbolically the blood and body of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist—daily. His narrative of Anza’s expedition contains countless pages that detail these ritual feats. 50 Faith, Flatulence, and Fandangos in the Borderiands

The Mass’s obverse is “flatulence”—the unpurified residue of “unholy” meals eaten by the Native people. As common as his descriptions of the Mass are Font’s equally persistent use of olfactory imagery to characterize the Native people he encounters. ‘Vhese descriptions are almost always negative and usually function to signal the fundamentally indigestible, “nasty and dirty” local foods. “Fandangos” complete the text’s

semiotic triad by epitomizing the loose morals and social disorder of the Spanish emigrants, mostly soldiers and people of the poorer classes. As with his shorthand use of the Mass to symbolize purified eating and social order and of Native flatulence to epitomize Indian “bestiality,” the Franciscan’s fascination with the bawdy songs and dances and heavy drinking of the lower orders serves to provide narrative form to a diary whose ofhcial purpose was much more tame: to record “the latitucles and directions on the way.” A close examination of the historical context in which the Anza ex-

pedition was mounted shows that Font’s food-related fixations were by no means peculiar to the Jesuit missionary, but rather reflect deep structural changes in the social order of New Spain itself. As the noted anthropologist Mary Douglas has observed, “If food is treated as a code, then the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed.”° In late-eighteenth-century New Spain, food encoded the complex social ordering of soldiers, settlers, aristocrats, missionaries, and Native people. During the last decades of the eighteenth century, Mexican secular authorities increasingly sought to limit the power of the clergy by managing the popular festivals themselves. In allowing strong drink and “lewd songs,” they both made themselves popular with the common people and wrested the maintenance of social order from the church.° Font’s cllary, written in retirement at the Sonora mission at Tubutama, represents a highly crafted literary rendering of the “Short Diary” that he kept daily on the actual journey. Throughout the longer literary work, Font attacks the secular rule of Anza and the other soldiers in such a way that the ethical appeal of the diary becomes clear. “I note these things down,” Font reports, “in order that they may serve as light by which it may be seen that im such journeys and with such lords it is Round 57

necessary to arm oneself with patience” (156). In essence, Font’s diary is intended to fight a rear-guard action against the secularization of New Spain in general, and its final frontier in particular. In addition, Font’s triad allows the narrative to situate the Native people of the Pomeria Alfa and upper California firmly within the battle between secular and sacred he has outlined for the Spanish themselves. Since the sixteenth century, priests in New Spain such as Father Sahagtin, the famous author of the Florentine Codex, had been telling the Native people to “eat what Castilian people eat, ... because they are strong and wise, you will become the same way if you eat their food.” Christian conversion became a “crvilizing process” that employed both the secular and religious foodways that held throughout the rest of New Spain. That Father Font remains profoundly ambivalent about this aspect of his enterprise will become clear in the reading of his cliary that follows.

As a matter of course, the foodways of the emigrants in the Anza expedition were set up to reinforce the existing social order of New Spain.

Anza took along about one hundred cattle so that the common people might have a barbecue each day. His provision list included “thirty pack loads of flour for tortillas, sixty bushels of pmole (corn meal), sixty bushels of beans, six boxes of chocolate, and sixteen arrobas—four hundred pounds of sugar.”* These foodstuffs are consistent with Jeflrey Pilcher’s descriptions of the dietary practices among everyday people in Mexico City during the eighteenth century.? Because wine and olive oul never became attordable in New Spain and were never produced locally with much success, Mexican Criollos relied heavily on pork lard

and aguardiente (sugar cane alcohol). They adopted maize to some extent, but insisted on wheat flour when they could have it. Anza’s provision ledger shows a similar preference for flour tortillas over the Native corn tortillas, and a heavy reliance on beef and beans. He also re-

quested “three barrels of brandy,” reflecting the community’s desire for strong drink, the aguardiente that fueled so many village fandangos across eighteenth-century Mexico. ‘Two other significant items of culmnary interest appear in the ledger--chocolate and sugar. Chocolate, which Pilcher terms the “most popular drink” in New Spain, was so 58 Faith, Flatulence, and Fandangos in the Borderlands

seductive a New World stimulant that it had apparently led to addiction in some and was thus supervised by the Hold Office of the Inquisition. Likewise, sugar, the companion of chocolate and, as Sidney Mintz has pointed out,“a major factor in the transformation of the European palate and in transatlantic power politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, makes an appearance in what seems to be the staggering quantity of four hundred pounds. For a projected one-hundred-day trip with nearly two hundred people, however, Anza had in fact planned for a mere two teaspoons of sugar per person, per day. A second list of provisions, this one for the officers (and, evidence in the diary suggests, for Father Font), shows how social status was sharply

distinguished and enforced by food consumption. The ofhcer’s mess reads like a continental gourmet’s wish list compared with that of the regular citizens: “175 pounds of hams; 25 pounds of sausage, six boxes of biscuits, and 175 pounds of fine chocolate, a barrel of wine, six ar-

rabas of cheese (450 pounds) four pounds of pepper, halfa pound of sattron, four ounces of cloves, four ounces of cinnamon, a jar of olive oul, and ajar of vinegar.”” Where the Creole lower classes eat a hybrid cuisine of Native and local “American” products, the officers eat a peninsular Spanish diet, replete with hard-to-get wines, olive oil, and even sattron.

From the outset of the expedition, then, it is clear that food was one important method by which the ruling elites managed social order and maintained social boundaries. The rituals of the Catholic faith were

another method the party employed to keep order. Font’s diary opens with images of Catholic rituals explicitly reinforcing the social order: “Friday, September 29 ... I sang Mass for the success of the journey in the presence of the people. After the gospel | made them a talk concerning the matter of the expedition, ... exhorting every body to have patience in the hardships of the journey and above all concerning the good example which they must set for heathen, as a mark of Christianity, without scandalizing them in any way” (5). The moral pressure of Font’s sermon falls on the performance of social and religious order before the “heathen” backdrop of Native people and an inhospitable desert landscape. Round 59

Catholic ritual was by 1775 in New Spain intimately bound together with the semiotics of food and social order. As the central ritual, the Eucharist required the sanctified Host, a wafer made from European wheat. In New Spain, however, wheat was hard to grow and Native people disliked it, so the eating of the Body of Christ became a profoundly conflicted act that underscored the essential difference between Euro-

pean and American foodways. As Jeftrey Pilcher reports, “Priests stationed in the abandoned, desolate north frequently complained of their inability to say Mass for lack of Altar breads.” ‘The desolate north is exactly where Father Font found himself with Anza in 1775. The lack of wine in New Spain created another problem for the prelate seeking to celebrate a proper Mass. Early in the expedition, Font records, “it was not possible to say Mass because |the wine] was so bad it did not resemble wine either in color or taste” (86). Soldiers were dispatched to Caborca for better wine to complete the father’s ritual larder. The other rituals involved in the Mass—the singing of the various chants, the

numerical repetitions of special prayers, and the burning of incense in the censer—all served to make sacred space out of secular geography and sinful bodies. Father Font even carried with him a psalterio, a musical instrument that other missionaries had recommended for pacitying the Native people, especially the Yumas (Quechan), who were said to be “very festive” (14). The psalterio would cleanse the sound space of both the “lewd songs” of the common people of New Spain and the “silence,” “harangues,” and “harsh” languages of the Native peoples. As the expedition leaves behind the last permanent settlements of the frontier, Font describes how the long train of emigrants reflects an idealized image of New Spain’s social order: “Leading the vanguard went the commander, and then | came. Behind me followed the people, men, women, and children, and the soldiers who went escorting and caring for their families. The lieutenant with the rear guard concluded the train” (24). Each day, when the campsite was reached, the group of tents “looked like a town,” and Font’s description of the early campsites makes them sound like cities of God: “At night the people said the Rosary in their tents by families, and afterward they sang the Alabado, the Salve, or something else, each one in its own way, and the result was a 60 Faith, Flatulence, and Fandangos in the Borderlands

pleasing variety” (25). The pious encampments are knit together with the harmony of the diverse hymns sung by individual families. Font’s utopian vision soon breaks down, however, as the expedition reaches the Gila River valley in present-day Arizona and encounters Native people who resist his faith’s ordering rituals and his culture’s culinary niceties. The good padre treats the Gila River people (known in Font’s day as Gilefios) roughly: “They ... are very ugly and black, especially the women. And perhaps because they eat so much péchita, which is the mesquite pod ground and made into atole|,) ... when they assemble together one perceives in them a very evil odor” (44). Here be-

gins a persistent theme in the narrative that is carried straight through to the emigrants’ successful arrival at Monterey: Indian people smell, and the smellier they are, the further from God they must be. Font’s logic rests on two principles, secular and religious. The first is apparent in his deduction that the Gilefios’ indigestion results from cating mesquite pods. As Father Sahagtin had declared two centuries earlier, the more European the food, the stronger and more moral the eater. But the second, theological rationale for Font’s fixation with the smell of the Pimerta Alta is more complex and is developed over the course of the next few weeks’ entries.

When he first encounters the Yuma people along the banks of the Colorado River, some one month’s ride from the Gila, Font confronts his hosts in a rather ungracious scene that deserves to be quoted at length for the way it elaborates this second, theological point in his reasoning:

We halted in a plain with plenty of pasturage.... Many Indians came to the camp, bringing calabashes, beans ... and making their

trades with the soldiers for beads.... Near the tent of the commander a beef was killed for today, to give rations to the people, as was done every six days. I was seated with the commander near the beef, taking chocolate. The Indians became such a mob and were so filthy, because of their vile habits, that we could not breathe. ... So I stood up and, asking an Indian for a long stick... [took hold of it at the bottom and with it gently and in good nature, as if | were Round 61

laughing, made them get away from me and behind me. Thereupon an Indian immediately appeared offended, and ... again pushed in and others followed his example. Then the owner of the stick took it from my hands, and the one who was offended assumed a haughty air, and kept his eyes on me until | went into my tent (92).

Aside from the obvious ethnocentrism this passage reveals, a reading based in food theory exposes some deep-rooted anxieties in both the priest’s actions and in his recording of them. The scene begins, significantly, with Font allying himself with Anza and the officers, eating near their tent, consuming beef and chocolate. The scene is, quite literally, pastoral, as the party has found grass and water enough to rest themselves, their horses, and their herds. In a reflection of New World plenitude, the Yuma people offer a bountiful harvest of melons, squash, and beans—fresh native foods that the common folk eagerly barter for as a supplement to their own limited provisions. But when the Yumas close in to get a better view of these strange outsiders, they invade what Font considers his personal space, not only as a Spaniard, but also as a member of the upper class. ‘Taking a stick, he feigns a humorous air as he waves them off. His obvious assumption of class superiority ummediately offends the Native people, however, and they turn the tables on him, assuming social superiority of their own, taking back the stick with “a haughty air.” The conclusion Font draws from the scene underlines the close relationship between faith, foodways, and social order that structures Font’s utopian vision: “Their affability might easily be converted to arrogance whenever an attempt is made to reduce them to the catechism and to obedience, especially if we take into account their mode of living, of which I shall speak later on” (92). Before Font can come to terms with this Native intrusion into his ideal city of God, his own flock creates a similar disturbance. As a “treat” to the emigrants for having successfully reached the other side of the Colorado (and perhaps in anticipation of the dificult desert crossing ahead), Anza gives the group a large quantity of aguardzente. The result, Font reports, “was a great carousing and noise making among the rabble” (96). When confronted about his contribution to public drunk62 faith, Flatulence, and Fandangos in the Berderiands

enness, Anza insists that his intention was not to get people drunk, but merely to allow them a good time. Font, never one to give his secular superior the last word, lectures the colonel on the sin of inebriation, maintaining “anyone who gets drunk sins, and anyone who contributes to the drunkenness of others also sins” (96). Font records that Anza controlled his temper and took this criticism silently. We cannot know Anza’s thoughts on the matter, but from Font’s concluding comment, it is clear what purpose his narrative version of the events is meant to

serve: “I note this down not through il will... merely in order that it may be inferred from this what caution and patience it is necessary to show these absolute lords” (97). Given this minor victory over the aristocratic elites, Font now turns to the examination of Yuma flatulence he promised a few pages earlier. Herbert Bolton, the twentieth-century translator of Font’s diary, left portions of the friar’s comments here in their original Spanish, thus obscuring them to most American readers (Bolton’s edition remains the only full-length version in English). The passage that follows thus becomes doubly significant to an exploration of foodways and Spanish colonization in the northern borderlands because it clearly contains materials that both Font and Bolton find worrisome. The eighteenth-century priest is frank about the sounds and smells he encounters among the Yumas and draws attention to them in order to dramatize the Natives’ “mode of living,” which he felt would probably inhibit their easy

conversion to Christianity. Bolton, for his part, apparently felt these passages were too earthy for his twentieth-century audience. Again, a somewhat lengthy quotation (with the untranslated Spanish passages intact and in italic type) will give the present-day reader a sense of what

is at stake for both the eighteenth-century prelate and the twentiethcentury historian: We saw some Indians wearing blankets of cotton, and black ones of wool which come from El Moqui, which they have been able to acquire through the Cocomaricopas and Jachedunes. ‘These they wear around their bodies from the middle up, leaving the rest of the body uncovered, y las partes mas indecentes, porque dicen a las Round 63

mujeres no les quadra que les tapan. But as a rule they go about totally naked, and they are so shameless that they are always con las manos in las partes vergonzosas, jugandose y alternadoes la naturaleza. And they are so brutal that if they are reprimanded they make it worse and laugh about it, as I experienced. And if les vience gana de ormar, whether standing still or walking about they do so like beasts, and even worse, que estas se paran para mear. Asimismo quando les vienen sus flatos, los echan detante de todos con mucho

frescura, and since they eat so many beans and other seeds they are very offensive with their flatulency. And if they are seated on the ground they do no more than levantar la nalga por un lado, y como echan los cuescos tan largo, redondos, y recios, con el soplo le-

vantan el polve de la terra. (103-4) The untranslated Spanish passages reveal Font’s obsession with the Native body as a site of social disturbance. They scratch their “indecent

parts” (more vigorously and with more effrontery the more he complains), they urinate and defecate when and where they please, and when they fart, they do so with a gusto that inspires Font to some of his most vivid prose. When called by indigestion to break wind, the Native people “lift a cheek a little to one side and thus produce a fart so generous, round, and long, that it raises a small dust cloud with its wind.” As Sidney Mintz has pointed out, such scenes of discomfort at “indigestion’s consequences and its accompaniments, noises and smells” reflect “the propensity [in the West] to expunge and suppress our animal need to eat” and are the result of “uncomfortable manifestations of our animality.”® The Yumas’ failure to discipline and control their bodies leads Font to speculate briefly about “freedom” itself. That is, they lead him to think about the connections between food and power. “I don’t know

whether this freedom,” Font muses, “is to be attributed to their ignorance, innocence, and candor, or is the result of great brutality” (104). Like his secular categorization of European food as morally superior to Indian food, Font’s emphasis on the “stench” of Indian digestion turns on another trope of European food culture, this one as old as the medieval Catholicism from which it derives. Along with the general 04 Faith, Flatulence, and Fandangos in the Borderlands

belief that the pleasant smell of spices came from the Garden of Eden, medieval theologians believed in something they called “the odor of sanctity.” It was “a mystical fragrance, thought by Christians to signal the presence of the Holy Spirit. When manttested by an individual, this fragrance was not only a sign of divine favor... but also a mark of the individual’s exemplary holiness. Whereas the ambrosia of the classical cults had been closely linked with sensual fulfillment, the Christian odor of sanctity was clearly a sign of spiritual rectitude.” Although the scene of flatulence Font describes in great detail might seem somewhat sensational to the modern reader, somewhat taken out of context, it underscores for the author a question he and many theologians struggled with throughout the Spanish conquest of the New World. As Font phrases the question, “Since the Apostles asked Christ that question concerning the man who was blind from birth ...|“Rabbi, who hath sinned, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?” (John EX, 2), [might inquire what sin was committed by these Indians and their ancestors that they should grow up in these remote

lands of the north with such infelicity and unhappiness, in such nakedness and misery, and above all with such blind ignorance of every thing?” (110). Font then recites what had been the stock answer tor Catholic theologians over the last two centuries: “I know the answer is ‘Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents; but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” That is, the Yumas are “unsanctified” in their bodily habits net so much as a result of their inherent sinfulness, but rather as part of God’s divine plan to have people and parts of the world available to make manifest his light and grace through the work of missionaries like Pedro Font. Without such a backdrop of “innocence, and candor, and ... great brutality,” the works of God might not shine nearly so brightly. Food 1s at the center of Font’s understanding of the Native people’s need for salvation: “It seems as if they have hanging over them the curse which God put on Nebuchadnezzer, like beasts eating the grass of the fields, and Irving on herbs and grass seeds” (110). The problem is, Font is not disposed to help the works of God become manifest in the Native people. He cannot eat their “dirty” food, Round 65

and he cannot stand their smell. There was, however, another Franciscan among the Anza group who could. Font’s description of Father Garces, who had traveled in the region before, provides a striking contrast to Font’s own personal fastidiousness and utopian vision. Watching Garces one night at the fireside among the Yumas, Font makes these remarks:

Father Garces is so well fitted to get along with the Indians to go among them that he appears but an Indian himself. Like the Indians he is phlegmatic in everything. He sits with them in the circle or at night around the fire, with his legs crossed, and there he will sit musing two or three hours or more, talking with them with much serenity and deliberation, and although the foods of the Incians are as nasty and clirty as those outlandish people themselves, the father cats them with great gusto and says that they are good for the stomach and very fine. In short, God has created him, as I see it, solely for the purpose of seeking out these unhappy, ignorant and rustic people. (121)

Although somewhat sarcastic and critical, Font’s description is consistent with the logic of the narrative as a whole. The indices by which he judges Garces, and by which he grudgingly admits Garces’s potential success as a missionary, are those of foodways, temperament, and bodily deportment. Perhaps the single most significant stretch of the narrative, and of the journey itself, follows hard on these lengthy reflections on the Yumas. At this point in the diary, the settlers face the Lower Colorado Desert, a land Font calls simply “a deadly place.” When Anza first crossed this desert the year before, he and his men got lost. They wandered for days between waterholes toward present-day Mount Signal, a jagged peak

that juts up out of the otherwise flat desert landscape. In their wearied state, confused by the desert’s optical tricks, the group dubbed the mountain Cerro Imposible, because it seemed that the harder they marched toward it, the farther it receded into the distance. Northeast of this mountain stretched an expanse of sand dunes nearly impassable 66 Faith, Matulence, and Fandangos in the Borderlands

with pack animals. Having learned his lesson on the first expedition, on Font’s expedition Anza was careful to hug the sparse trail of waterholes marked out by Native people like the Kumayaays and the Cahuillas. Although plagued by snow and rain, the party safely reached the foothills of the Santa Rosa Mountains on December 17. In all, the desert crossing lasted only a week—just seven days out of the 165 that it took to journey

to Monterey. Like the ocean crossing for the English settlers to New England, however, Font and his fellow Catholic pilgrims viewed this part of the journey as the roughest and the most spiritually challenging. The party lost more than fifteen horses and mules over this stretch of lands; eight cattle and a few more mules froze to death the first night in the foothills. The people themselves were “half dead with thirst and cold” (438). From Font’s point of view, a Mass of thanksgiving 1s in order for the morning following the settlers’ safe arrival. Yet Anza and the people override the good padre’s pious plans: At night, with the joy at the arrival of all the people, they held a fan-

dango here. It was somewhat discordant, and a very bold widow who came with the expedition sang some verses which were not at all nice, applauded and cheered by all the crowd. For this reason the man to whom she came attached became angry and punished her. The commander, hearing of this, sallied forth from his tent and reprimanded the man because he was chastising her. I said to him, ‘Leave him alone, Sur, he is dome, just right,” but he replied, ‘No Father, | cannot permit such excesses when I am present. He guarded against this excess, indeed, but not against this scandal of the fandango, which lasted very late. (138) As in the case of the fiesta that followed the Colorado River crossing, Font and Anza are at odds over the management and meaning of such celebrations. Anza hands out the aguardzente but draws the line when a woman is beaten. The priest, appalled by the drinking and bawdy behavior, applauds the beating. Pious bodily discipline trumps paternalism and secular social order. Predictably, Font’s sermon the next Round 67

morning, delivered no doubt to more than a few hangover victims, rails against “the performance, saying that instead of thanking God for having arrived with their lives, and not having died from hardship, as the animals did, it appeared they were making such festivities in honor of the devil” (439). As in his previous response to Font’s moralizing, Anza refuses to acknowledge the priest’s words: “I do not think that the commander liked this very well, for he did not speak to me once during the whole morning” (139). For the remaining 395 pages of the diary, and the five hundred miles of the journey, Font’s narrative efforts at controlling the bodies of the

settlers and the social authority of the aristocratic commander turn again and again on the axes of faith, flatulence, and fandangos. Font himself says after his second clash with Anza, “I suppose he was oftended at me a good many times, for I spent most of the journey in this way” (199). The diary bears this out, as the civility of Indian tribes is continually measured by the degree to which they smell and by the sort of food they eat, while the settlers are judged according to their participation in “lewd songs” or sacred Alabados. Beyond the Santa Rosa camp, Font’s pilgrims have a much better time of it, marching from mission to mission, taking im the pleasures of central and upper California in springtime all the way to Monterey. Looking north from the Santa Rosas, Font sees “the Sierra Madre de California totally different—green and leafy, with good grass and tree

... whereas in the distance looking toward the California sea [to the south] itis dry, unfruittul, and arid” (160). Throughout the rest of the narrative, this new California becomes in Font’s imagination much like the old country of his youth. On December 31 he discovers shells along the trail “like those which grow in the woods of Spain, things which do

not exist in the interior of this America and are unknown” (168). On the first day of the new year, after delivering a Mass of great hope, Font reports to his diary that “this country is entirely distinct from the rest of America which I have seen; and in the grasses and the flowers and the fields, and also in the fact that the rainy season is in winter, it is very similar to Spain” (171). “In short,” Font writes, “this is a country which, as Father Paterna says, looks like the Promised Land” (178). Except for 68 Faith, Matulence, and Fandangos in the Borderlands

a brief detour to San Diego, where Font finds the Kumayaays to be “the

Apaches of this region” and their butchering of whales “so malodorous that with the bad scent which they exude they are a veritable pest” (206), the trip north shows Font another, more positive side of Native life. Even though they are universally given to thievery (in Font’s view), Indians have suffered unjustly the depredations of the Spanish soldiers, so much so that Chumash women will now no longer leave their houses for fear of being raped. Although he never quite gives in to the humanity of the Native people of upper California, when he arrives at the Mission San Luis, Font is met by priests waving censers and singing Te Deums, and surrounded by Indians who are so clean, he calls them “little Spaniards.” The final arrival at Monterey is a bit of a letdown. The few soldiers who man the presidio have not built anything so beautiful, odiferous, or melodious as the Mission San Luis. Their “lack of effort” has left trmbers and other building materials lying around and forced Anza “to lodge in the storehouse” and the good padre “in a dirty little room full of lime” (290). Font treats his arrival and final celebratory Mass as the sanctifying ritual that will transform the dirty and disorganized settlement of Monterey into a city of God: “We sang the Mass, then, as an act of thanksgiving for our successful arrival. I sang it at the altar, and the five fathers assisted, singing very melodiously and with the greatest solemnity pos-

sible, the troops of the presidio and of the expedition assisting with repeated salvos and volleys of musketry, all this together causing tears of joy to flow” (291-92). Secular and religious order are finally harmonized in this Mass, triggering a spontaneous outpouring of emotion that unites the formerly divided colonists. Font follows this scene with a verbatim transcription of the sermon he delivered that day. The harrowing crossing of the Lower Colorado figures most prominently in the homily, as does a typological parallel with the Israelites. Singled out for greatest praise, the Virgin of Guadalupe becomes the centerpiece of Font’s talk, and it is from her inspiration that the priest digresses into a bizarre numerological interpretation of the expedition, observing that in “the one hundred and sixty-five days exactly which we have spent on the way ... our patrons are depicted. Round 69

... And to whom might this number more appropriately be likened than to our principal patroness, the most Holy Virgin of Guadalupe?” (295). Here Font reveals himself to be a man of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, not of the eighteenth. Font’s numerology is common enough in Christian mysticism, but when one examines the physical properties of the manuscript itself, it becomes clear that the diarist has a pathological need to control the societies and the landscapes he has encountered on the Anza expedition. The completed diary that he penned at Tubutama served as a ritual in its own right. The 336-page manuscript is inscribed with exacting precision, each page comprised of forty lines with fortyfive characters to the line.

Font makes the idealized utopianism that is implicit in the numerology explicit in the penultimate paragraph of the sermon: And for what purpose have we come? To gain Heaven by suttering trials in this world, and assisting in these lands by setting a good example of Christianity in the conversion of the heathen, whose souls are the precious pearls sought by that celestial merchant, Je-

sus Christ.... Now you will understand what Christ says to us in the gospel... that the kingdom of Heaven is like unto a net which He casts into the sea... . Notice what happens to the net, for it is all very applicable to this expedition. ‘The fisherman casts the net into the sea and immediately many fish begin to enter it, but with different motives, some drawn by the bait, others by curiosity, some to follow the example and to be in the company of others, some perhaps moved by their evil nature to disturb and break the net, some, finally, because they are naturally good.... And so itis with this expedition. ‘The commander, in the name of the king our Lord, cast the recruiting net in Sinaloa. [ have no doubt that you entered the net and enlisted with the good intention of serving God on this journey. But who knows how many were moved by the wax of weaith and advantages ... ? Who knows whether some joined the expedition drawn, perhaps, by bad example and by bad company, with the intention to destroy more than to build up, seeking liberty of conscience? ... Let it not be that in the day 90 faith, Flatulence, and Fandangos in the Borderiands

of Judgment there be found fish rejected by God after having taken the trouble to come to a land in which suffering is the chief advantage (298-99).

The sermon both reveals Font at the height of his art as an orator and exposes his and his community’s innermost fears about the nature of the “Promised Land” they had come so far to settle. From his characterization of Indians as “pearls” and Christ as a “celestial merchant” to his extended explication of the fishing simile, Font reveals his anxieties surrounding mercantile exchange, secular goals, and individual motivations. His economic imagery overwhelms the final charge that “suftering is the chief advantage” of the California landscape. Fearful that New Spain’s final frontier will inspire “liberty of conscience,” the friar has tried desperately in his sermon and throughout the narrative to curb consumption, control the various hungers that motivate his flock, and make sacred a landscape that at every turn seems to resist his efforts. Although Font’s diary goes on for another two hundred pages, detailing the exploration of San Francisco Bay and his continued bickering with secular authorities and the military, the moral climax of the diary is here, with the sermon at Monterey. Font’s diary reverts to its theme one last time on the final pages of the manuscript. Upon his return to san Miguel in June 1776, a jubilant village proposes a fandango in the expedition’s honor. Font, now wearily predictable, proposes a church fiesta and Mass instead. Overruled by Anza and the commissary, Font is left to stew about this slight. “I cid not think it best to go to the fandango,” he grumbles, “lest my presence should sanction this worldly merrymaking, when Sefior Ansa did not approve the Church fiesta which should have come first” (530). And so the diary ends in protest, with Font once again excusing his rage against secular authority by claiming to have recorded such events “solely that they may serve for enlightenment in similar cases, to me or any other person who may happen to read this diary, and in order that we may understand that Nehel sub sole novum |*Nothing under the sun is new’ |” (534). The new world of upper California is not new after all, but merely repeats the failings of the old. The foul odors and “nasty” food of the desert tribes are almost to Round 71

be preferred to the Edenic, fruitful land to the north. At least in the desert, among the Indians, suffering can be realized and hunger employed as a constant reminder of the believer’s struggle to achieve sanctity in an increasingly secular world.

Notes i. Sidney Mintz, Tasting Food, lasting Freedom: Excursions into Hating, Culture, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 7, 13. 2. Quoted in Herbert Eugene Bolton, ed., An Outbost of Empire, Anza’s California Expeditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1930), 1:59. 3. Pedro Font, Font’s Complete Diary, in Bolton, Anza’s California Expeditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1930), 4:1. 4. Font, Font’s Complete Diary, xiu. All further citations in the text refer to Bolton’s edition of Font’s diary. I have also consulted the new Spanish language version of the text, Diarto Intimo, ed. Juilo Cesar Montané Marti (Paza y Valdes: University of Sonora, 2000). 5. Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” in fmplicet Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 1999): 231-451.

6. See Sergio Rivera Ayala, “Lewd Songs and Dances trom the Street of Kighteenth-Century New Spain,” in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Pubitc Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. Wiliam H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and Wilham E. French (Wilmington pe: Scholarly Resource Books, 1994), 27-46; and Cheryl English Martin, “Public Celebrations, Popular Culture, and Labor Discipline in Eighteenth-Century Chihuahua,” in Beezley, Martin, and French, Rituals of Rule, 95-114. 7. Quoted in Jeffrey Pilcher, Que Vivan Los ‘Tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 35+

8. Bolton, Outpost of Empure, 1:223.

g. See Pilcher, Que Vivan!, 25-43.

10. | use the term Criollo here as it is used in Latin American studies, not so much to describe mestizo or mixed-blood people, but to distinguish Spaniards born in America from those born in Spain. The contemporary term for European Spaniards at the time of Font’s writing was “Peninsulares.” Font was himself Catalan. u. See Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (New York: Viking, 1985). 12. Bolton, Outpost of Empire, 223-24. 72 Faith, Matuience, and Fandanges in the Borderlands

13. Pilcher, Que Vivan!, 35.

14. The Spanish passages, translated, read as follows: “and the most indecent parts exposed, for they say of the women that they are less becoming if they are covered”; “always with their hands in their private parts, playing | with themselves] agaist nature”; “| And if | they must urmate ... the same is true when they stop to shit”; “Likewise, when they go to fart, they make them before everyone with much impudence . .. lifta cheek to one side, and thus produce a fart so generous, round, and long, that they raise a cloud of dust with its wind.” In the next paragraph, Font describes in great detail how the Yumas’ leader, Captain Palma, though on his way to secular and religious “ci-

vility,” still insists on farting loudly in public, even when chastised by Anza himself, because “the people expect it of him.” 15. Mintz, Tasting Food, 6. 16. Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnot, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (New York: Routledge, 1994), 52.

Round 73

3. An Appetite for America

Debra Shostak

When I was a child, my parents, both first-generation Jewish-Americans, told me stories of the work they had performed, with some resentment, as children. My father’s mother, a widow, operated a little Jewish bakery on Chicago’s south side. From a very young age, my father would sit at the table in the attached living quarters eating his meals or doing his homework, required to leap up to wait on customers whenever the bell rang in the shop. My mother’s parents ran a mom-and-pop grocery store, also in Chicago; my mother recalled how she sat at the cash register reading books from the public library whenever she wasn’t ringing up sales or filling orders at the soda fountain. My parents were asked to contribute to their families as my grandparents took advantage of their immigrant Jewish culture to sustain themselves with the small incomes they could earn purveying food to other Jews. As Hasia Diner has pointed out, the demand for “Jewish” food was a significant binding agent for immigrant social life, causing Jews to live together where they could buy Jewish food and, in turn, offering to some Jews an “obvious occupational choice” in the culinary business.’ As my parents’ experience of the immigrant food business attests, however, the relationship to this central social function, whereby food helped to make communities out of Jews who had emigrated from various European regions, was nevertheless disturbed by the tensions between familial obligation and group identity, on the one hand, and the pull of assimilation, on the other—my father wanted to do his homework, my mother to read her books, all surely in English. 74

Like many immigrant Jews, my eastern European grandparents came to the United States at the turn of the century because, as in Mary An-

tin’s aptly titled account of Jewish immigrant experience in Boston, it seemed to be the Promised Land.* Immigrants with vivid memories of scarcity and want in Europe stepped into a country marked by abundance of meat, grain, and produce. For centuries Jews had regulated their consumption according to prescriptions for the “good life” in which, as Diner writes, “food embodied a palpable manifestation of Jewish conceptions of divine will” as detailed in “texts considered the word of God, and buttressed by law.”’ Faced with the vastness of American stores, Jewish immigrants and their offspring reconceived the “good life” increasingly in terms of the bounty before them rather than the regulation of their appetites. Their nostalgia for old country foods

and respect for traditional practices began to dim as they challenged the long-standing food taboos of kashrut, the rules of kosher eating.* This new home, seemingly the land of milk and honey, instilled in the immigrant Jews an image of a new Eden, conflating (and confusing) the spiritual satisfactions of the Promised Land—ancient Israel—with the physical satisfactions of a fertile agricultural landscape, a New World

pastoral offering to erase the hardships of the past. As consumption became central to the process of Jewish acculturation,’ however, it was perhaps inevitable that a shift in identity would accompany shifts in the guiding myths of Jewishness and in the fulfillment of appetites. Across his writing career, Philip Roth has traced the consequences of such cultural changes in the lives of Jews. In particular, he has explored the ambivalence to which such shifts opened Jews like my parents, who simply wanted to get on with the business of being Americans, as well as the guilt that for some Jews attended the loosening of

tribal ties as they hungered for a place amid the gratifications of the American landscape. For anyone familiar with Roth’s work, the first appetite that comes to mind in connection with his name is probably not the appetite for food. Instead, another basic and insistent hunger—for sex~-has figured far more flagrantly in many of his more than twenty books. Like Roth’s representation of the sexual appetite, however, his view of the appetite for food advances the exploration of the meanings Shostak 75

and forms of postimmigrant Jewish-American cultural identity. Appetite is key for Roth, whose characters act so as to claim their share of the plenty of the United States—to participate in the utopian dream of consumption and satisfaction offered by a mythic America viewed from the perspective of immigrant privation. Roth’s portraits disturbingly expose the desires that have motivated American Jews and the ways in which they have enacted those desires in the world, notably in relation to the underlying ideology of American consumerism. His fiction sheds light especially on the middle classes in the middle decades of the twentieth century, a time when the compelling ideal for many JewishAmericans of the first and second generations was to disappear into the Promised Land of gentile America. The nostalgia that caused Jews to cling to Jewishness for their cultural distinctrveness opposed this ideal, and it was in any case often unattainable because individuals were indelibly stamped by the beliefs and practices that preceded and even enabled their entry into the United States. In Roth’s fiction, the meanings attached to the desire for food illuminate the midcentury JewishAmerican’s conflicted desires for cultural assimilation. In Roth’s hands, in fact, the Jewish protagonist’s relation to food revives the dead metaphor of assimilation so that it regains its physiological connotations of digestion and consumption. At the same time, Roth enfolds his Jews in distinctly antipastoral narratives that belie the assimilative process. If the pastoral myth implies a lack of ditterentiation—in Eden before the Fall, nakedness caused no shame because Adam and Eve had no consciousness of differences--Roth forces the postimmigrant Jew, driven by his appetites, to encounter the intransigence of differences. In doing so, his fiction demonstrates the usefulness of a close reading of the details of Jewish-American food consumption in relation to the two influences described above and, at times, operating in opposition to one another: first, the historical memory of immigrant hunger, and second, the dietary laws that had governed Jewish eating for centuries. A case in point appears in passing in Roth’s autobiography, teasingly titled The Facts (19g88).° Roth recounts an agonizing early marriage to a non-Jewish woman, undertaken when she used another woman’s urine specimen to “prove” that she was pregnant. After describing the storm "6 An Appetite for America

of that marriage and its crippling aftermath, Roth concludes the narration of his life’s events with a declaration of renewed independence that involves a brief summary of why he had been disastrously drawn to a woman so different from him. It was his “exhilarating, adventurous sense of personal freedom” as an innocent young instructor of composition at the University of Chicago that caused him to “handily pick up on a Chicago street the small-town blond divorcée with the two little fatherless children, the penniless ex-waitress whom he’d already spotted serving cheeseburgers back in graduate school, and who’d looked to him like nothing so much as the All-American girl” (Facts, 160). The

symbolic equivalencies in the details are intriguing: the midwestern, small-town, gentile blond—in derogatory Yiddish, the shiksa, as opposed to Roth, urban Jew from Newark—equals the all-American girl, an Eve who first appears in order to seduce him with that all-American tood, cheeseburgers. And why, in the cultural economy of the narrative, cheeseburgers rather than the more obvious hamburgers? The cheeseburger would be a prohibited food in a kosher household, where Jewish dietary laws forbid the mixing of milk products and meat. The cheeseburgers signify the young man’s temptation to throw off the restrictions of traditional Jewish culture in his embrace of America. ‘To eat cheeseburgers is to marry a shzksa. And perhaps, in turn, to be digested into America, leaving behind no trace of his difference. Roth’s autobiography implies that he did not go unpunished for such a gesture of independence. Implicit in the catastrophic developments of his marriage is that his impulse to escape Jewishness by pursuing an inappropriate mate—mixing milk and meat, as it were—must be punished even as it is satished. Indeed, the very pursuit of the shzksa might be seen as a self-punishing act, triggered by the complementary mechanism of transgressive desire and repression. According to the structuring myth of the immigrant’s assimilation into the Promised Land, then, the antipastoral is inherent in pastoral gratifications. Roth suggests that this paradox has special implications for the American Jew’s experience of cultural identity. Roth 1s guided by the larger determinations ofa set of cultures--the traditionally Jewish, the omniverously American, and the unstable, figuratively hyphenated Jewish-American—that are rich Shostak 77

in the particularities of their own practices and opportunities, and in which the complementary ideas of appetite and consumption are ideologically central and marked by contradiction in these overlapping cultural contexts. In each context, what matters for Roth is not so much the actual practices of preparing and consuming food, but rather the complex mean-

ings that accrue to consumption, which underlie his development of metaphors to represent the American Jew’s experience. In traditional Jewish culture, as [ have suggested, the individual’s relation to food is defined in terms of the ancient dietary laws that distinguish Jews irreversibly from other tribal groups and, by their observance, serve as material proof of the Jew’s covenant with the monotheistic God. In American culture food represents the tension between the sensual satisfactions the Puritans strove to moderate and the capitalist ethos according to which the proof of one’s success is the ability to satisfy—and more than satisfy—one’s hungers. The American context introduces the myth of the Fall, which pivots on the satisfaction of regulated appetites and the punishment of uncontrolled appetites. In the mid-twentieth-century Jewish-American context, however, the wherewithal to indulge one’s appetites signifies a family’s successful entrance into American culture, focusing, if one heeds the old Jewish mother jokes, on the ability of the mother to show her love by drowning her family in the bounty of the table (preferably, while she goes hungry).’ This is the Jewish version of the pastoral myth, in which the American Jew disports not among the sheep but among the fruits of his own labor, and where the only Fall lies in the twin failures to produce and consume. Roth’s exploration of the problem of Jewish-American identity as it encounters these conflicting and intersecting valuations of material desire can be traced by looking at three works that span his career. From his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), to his most notorious, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), and through the first volume of his mature trilogy, American Pastoral (1997), the contradictions and tensions i American Jewish self-definition manitest themselves through food. Roth’s imaginative engagement with the cultural position of the mid-twentt-

eth-century American Jew enables him to construct metaphors that, 78 An Appetite for America

drawing on the symbolic weight given to food and foodways, serve as pivotal devices in the narratives. When Roth’s protagonists encounter tood, their experience signifies simultaneously a promise and a threat to the very process of assimilation that had at midcentury seemed implicit in consumption. The titular novella Goodbye, Columbus otters a sequence of scenes centered around the admiration and consumption of food in order to demonstrate both the romance of plenty for the Jew attempting to de-

fine a place in 1950s American culture and the disillusionment that plenty can cause. Roth focuses especially on the moment in which the transition of the Jewish middle classes into the suburbs shifted the function of the home: it was, as Jenna Weissman Joselit argues, “no longer the site of production,” becoming instead “the site of consumption, a showcase of increased affluence.”* Neil Klugman, Roth’s protagonist, lives in Newark with his Aunt Gladys, who epitomizes the ideal of Jewish-American domesticity whereby the mother’s self-abnegation in the service of her family’s desires confirms their mutual value and enables the family’s success in the world. Gladys serves a different meal, at a different time, to each member of the family, it apparently never occurring to her that she could serve the same meal to all four at once. When Neil

declines the sodas she offers, Gladys makes explicit the link between appetite and the work ethic that drove postimmigrant Jews in America: her husband, Max, she crows, “‘could drink a whole case with his chopped liver only. He works hard all day. If you worked hard you’d drink.’ ”’ Gladys is Roth’s ironic portrait of the balebusta, the housewite charged with holding the Jewish family together, whose devotion to modernizing her family under the sway of American abundance backfires, encouraging their fragmentation instead. Neil’s resistance to Gladys’s ministrations portends his fundamental rejection of both the siren song of American prosperity and its implication of waste, a position he dryly asserts in his account of Gladys’s misplaced offerings of fresh and canned fruit: “Whichever I preferred, Aunt Gladys always had an abundance of the other jamming her refrigerator like stolen diamonds. ... Life was a throwing off for poor Aunt Gladys, her greatest joys were taking out the garbage, emptying her pantry” (ec, 4). Because the JewShostak 79

ish diet at the time of immigration was spare of fresh fruit and vegetables,'’ the embarrassment of riches among Gladys’s fruits signifies this Jewish family’s transcendence of the conditions of privation that came to be associated with Jewish origins. ‘The jammed refrigerator is an emblem of material success in America, a holy vessel that demonstrates the equal importance of gathering and spending material wealth. Neil’s ideological resistance 1s tested when, in a summer romance, he becomes sexually involved with Brenda Patimkin, the pampered daughter of an affluent Jewish businessman. [fin Gladys Roth offers a parody of the urban balebusta, in the Patimkins he provides an image of the suburban disintegration of Jewish family life. Where Irving Howe could reminisce about his Bronx childhood in the twenties and thirties that “sometimes the family was about all that was left of Jewishness; or, more accurately, all that we had left of Jewishness had come to rest in the family/’'' the Patimkins of the fifties demonstrate that consumption banishes Jewishness from the family altogether. Brenda’s father is “strong, ungrammatical, and a ferocious eater,” the Patimkin dinner table marked by little conversation and Rabelaisian appetites: “Eating was heavy and

methodical and serious ... the words gurgled into mouthfuls, the syntax chopped and forgotten in heapings, spillings, and gorgings” (Gc, 15). Roth gives Neil a vision of excess that turns the figurative fruits of assimilation into a literal cornucopia: in the Patimkins’ basement, Neil sneaks open another of Roth’s emblematic refrigerators to discover that “it was heaped with fruit, shelves swelled with it, every color, every texture, and hidden within, every kind of pit.” After cataloging the vast stores, Neil apostrophizes, “Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!” (Gc, 31). Whereas Gladys always had the wrong fruits on hand, signifying her failure to leave the Jewish enclave, the Patimkins seem at Neul’s first glance to get it right.

Neil tastes of Patimkin bounty when his repeated lovemaking with Brenda is punctuated by nightly feasts of fruit, including heaps of cherries and watermelon slices, whose pits and seeds they spit out onto the dark suburban lawn. The banquet of fruit is a clear metonymy for their sexual extravagance—the gluttonous cesires, the waste of seed—which So An Afrpetite for America

is, in turn, enabled by an American cultural context that, flush with postwar prosperity, averts its eyes from the transgressions of the rich and the educated. But that their actions are transgressive and may be punished appears in Roth’s choice of representative metaphors. Surely lovers who eat heartily of fruit while they lounge on the grass cannot be seen altogether outside the symbolic structure of the Fall. Ifthe full refrigerator is a bright and humming ‘Tree of Knowledge, then the pits they spit into the dark signify incipient corruption. ‘The Eden that is the Patimkin household on the brink of the Fall is

irretrievably exposed for Neil when he attends the wedding reception tor Brenda’s brother Ron. At the reception Neil meets Mr. Patimkin’s half-brother Leo, who represents the obverse of Mr. Patimkin’s success story. Leo is the “little guy,” a traveling salesman who sells lightbulbs and “wears out three pairs of rubbers every winter” (Gc, 80). Surpassed by the invention of fluorescent bulbs, he recognizes that he is already obsolete because he barked up the wrong American dream. His long, drunken monologue warning Neil not to be a “sucker” is reinforced by the wasteland scene in which he speaks: the leavings of the wedding party, at the center of which 1s the table, “a tangle of squashed everything: napkins, fruits, flowers; there were empty whiskey bottles, droopy ferns, and dishes puddied with unfinished cherry jubilee, gone sticky with the hours” (Gc, 79). Here is the spoilage portending the fate of those other cherries yuicy with promise, and hence of the identity that would form itself around material success as the road to American selfhood. For Neil, the Patimkins’ freedom to define themselves in the Diaspora proves equivalent to their wasteful and precarious consumerism. He perceives the fallen Jewish-American family as self-consuming artifacts of their own desires. In his final rejection of Brenda, Neil rejects the appetite that might have led to assimilation into America by way of

success in the free market economy. In doing so, he rejects the Promised Land of Mary Antin’s immigrant dream. Roth shows the utopia as repugnant precisely for the plenty that had, as Diner writes, “staggered the imagination of women and men who had been hungry.”’* If Goodbye, Columbus uncovers the Jewish appetite for assimilation in relation to consumption, in Portnoy’s Complaint Roth brings appeShostak 81

tite much closer to the terms of fundamental bodily desires and their repression. As David Biale has pointed out, “The historical Judaism of Portnoy is a religion devoid of the erotic: sexual repression . . . is the product of the heritage of Jewish suffering and compulsive legalism.” '’ The notoriously desiring Alexander Portnoy turns food toward its potentially transgressive cultural meanings as part of his desperate effort to “put the id back in Yid” and release himself from the prison of renunciation—the “self-control, sobriety, |and| sanctions” that constitute the “key to a human life” according to the dietary (and other) laws that traditionally regulate Jewish behavior and identity.”* It is the peculiarly Jewish habit of renunciation that he feels inhibits him from attaining the liberty and sensual gratification that the gentile American context seems to offer. That Portnoy experiences his Jewish identity as mescapable physical renunciation—even, implicitly, death—appears in a brief paranoid fantasy. He imagines adolescent peers jeering at how his nose has grown “kid,” one says, “you have got J-E-W written night across the middle of that face”—and he thinks in his panic that “a couple of years and I won’t even be able to eat, this thing will be directly in the path of the food? (ec, 168-69). That is, the indelible physicality of his Jewishness—which is implicitly the mark of circumcision displaced upward for all to see on his face—threatens to prevent the satisfaction of his most basic physical desires. Literally, the nose (and figuratively, the circumcised member, hence Jewishness itself) stands in the way of consumption and bars his access to the fruits of American prosperity. But in Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth focuses on the symbolic power of meat, not fruit, as an index to the Jew’s evolving ambivalence toward his inherited cultural identity. Meat was another abundance available to the American Jew who had strong memories of the hunger before migration.'” In the novel’s most notorious incident, Portnoy uses food to rebel agaist renunciation during his adolescence, when he masturbates into a piece of liver destined for the family table. In an attempt to detach himself from the dense obligations he feels to his family, which represent, in microcosm, his tribal obligations to the Jews, he has the liver, as he puts it, “rolled round my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty-—-and then had [it] again on the end ofa fork at five-thirty, along with the oth82 An Appetite for America

er members of that poor innocent family of mine.” It is “the worst thing I have ever done,” he admits. “I fucked my own family’s dinner” (vc, 150). Portnoy’s indulgence of the id offers a two-pronged transgression against his Jewishness: he challenges a conventional sexual taboo—fortified by the ancient proscription against the wasteful spilling of seed— and he invents a highly imaginative, ironically secret offense against the family, for whom nourishment normally serves as a binding force.

Food signifies a particular kind of transgression against Portnoy’s Jewish identity, since, as Biale suggests, Roth represents the repressive legalism of Judaism in terms of food taboos.'? Roth explores how deep seated are such cultural prohibitions and how ill equipped we are to resist them as the ineradicable basis of identity. In one example, Portnoy’s older sister and her fiancé have treated him to a dinner, at which they order lobster for him. On his way home alone on a bus, he finds himself masturbating next to a drowsy young shzksa in the seat beside him, and, expressing later his horror at the risk he took, he observes that “maybe the lobster is what did it.” Because shellfish are prohibited by the dietary laws, he concludes that the ease with which he broke one taboo may have released “the whole slimy, suicidal Dionysian side of my nature” (pc, 87). As one critic has remarked, “Portnoy’s pursuit of shiksas is a pursuit of Sunk’ sex, unkosher goods,”'’ and so the girl Roth chooses for him to masturbate beside simply replicates the transgres-

sion he has already performed at the dinner table. Portnoy raves that the purpose of dietary laws is “to give us little Jewish children practice in beimg repressed” as a reminder from their God “that life is boundaries and restrictions if it’s anything” (pc, 88). In the end he distinguishes Jews from non-Jews in relation to appetzte itself: “A diet of abominable creatures well befits a breed of mankind so hopelessly shallow and

empty-headed as to drink, to divorce, and to fight with their fists... . They will eat anything, anything they can get their big goy hands on! And the terrifying corollary, they will do anything as well” (Pc, 90; emphasis in original). In reaffirming his Jewish difference as a way to slow his own free fall, Portnoy paradoxically returns to the tribal fold he has renounced. Roth makes him reinstate the special status of the Jew not just in relation to the God who has “chosen” him but also to the notion Shostak 83

of crvilization, which limits ethically the Jew’s possibilities for autonomous self-definition. If Portnoy’s Complaint provides a snapshot of the Jew poised in per-

petual torment over his ability to assimilate, the more recent Amertcan Pastoral exposes the illusions that, according to Roth, deceive the American Jew into believing that it is possible to complete the assimilative process. In American Pastoral Roth details the fall from innocence of an apparently fully “American” Jew, Swede Levov, whose pas-

toral dream is destroyed by his attempt to create a future fattened on the pleasures of his idealized America. As in Goodbye, Columbus, Roth represents the desire for a midcentury archetype of assimilated identity in the heavily freighted image of fruit. The Swede’s attempt to realize his fantasy of unending prosperity as a sign of his Americanization begins in his golden adolescence as an athlete, continues during his suc-

cesstul running of his father’s glove-manufacturing business and his purchase of a revolutionary-era stone house, and is dashed when his teenage daughter blows up a local post office in protest against the Vietnam War. His assimilative fantasy is epitomized by his dream of himselfas Johnny Appleseed: “Johnny Appleseed, that’s the man for me,” he thinks. “Wasn’t a Jew, wasn’t an Irish Catholic, wasn’t a Protestant

Christian—nope, Johnny Appleseed was just a happy American. ... Had a big stride and a bag of seeds and a huge, spontaneous affection for the landscape, and everywhere he went he scattered the seeds.”” The Johnny Appleseed fantasy speaks to both the abundance of food offered by America and the immigrant’s labor and husbandry that allow him to participate in that abundance—the capitalist virtues to which the Swede commits himself. Yet the Swede’s is a dream painfully innocent of history or difference, a dream whereby he can not only take from the

land’s bounty but return it in kind, and where the scattering of seeds is productive, without waste, and innocent of erotic menace. Roth refers to no real apple, of course, but rather to the fruit of the overarching American myth of consumption, with all its doomed and contradictory undercurrents of promise, temptation, and fall.

The Swede’s view of himself as Johnny Appleseed, a figure of prelapsarian harmony, ultimately offers Roth’s most tronic “American 84 An Appetite for America

pastoral.” The titular notion is made more concrete in the narrator’s account of two ritualized occasions in which food bears a weight of cultural meaning. First is the description of the annual dinners when the Swede’s Jewish family 1s brought together with his wife’s Catholic family “on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff—no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey

for two hundred and fifty million people. ... A moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity.... A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments” (4p, 402). This “American pastoral par excellence” centers on food that is inflected not with the tastes and prohibitions of tribal identity but with the signs of a singular or primal Gf specious) “American” culture, one that goes back before the immigrations that made contemporary American iclentities multiple and indeterminate. If gefilte fish is an iconic Jewish food, then to abandon it, to eat of the same turkey as the non-Jew, is, for a brief moment, to be the same.'”

But the Fall, the failure of this pastoral dream of nonditlerentiation, is evident not only in the violence that the Swede’s daughter, Merry, commits--a daughter first grown fat im explication of her parents’ yearning tor the pleasures and trappings of prosperity, and then grown gaunt in renunciation of all material signs of identity in the worid—but also in the novel’s long concluding episode, a tragicomic dinner party. The party represents the Swede’s attempt to reconfigure the ritual Jewish meal in wholly American terms so as to confirm his cultural transition. Practically speaking, this harvest dinner party is the Swede’s Americanized seder. It represents his fond if futile hope that a ritualized meal can signify and thereby install family unity, providing material proof that, in its pursuit of American domesticity, the family has been “passed over” by vengeful historical forces. The Swede offers his guests the new icons of bountiful American modernity: grilled steak, corn on the cob, beefsteak tomatoes from the garden, imported wine. Amid the hearty fare of the party, however, the Ulusions represented by the Swede’s innocent hopetulness for an uncompromised American identity are all stripped away, as if to suggest that such apparently solid nourishment is insubShostak 85

stantial. If the covenant implicit in the Passover seder is the Jew’s return to the Promised Land, then the Swede learns instead on this night that he and his family are forever cast out of paradise. He discovers the infdelity of his wife, a former Miss New Jersey, whom he had married as if to wed gentile America. He learns of the deception of a former mistress, who had, unbeknownst to him, harbored his daughter after the post office bombing. He imagines the visitation of that daughter, crashing into his disintegrating world like an avenging angel of history. And he witnesses his father, a Jewish patriarch and the source of all the Swede’s midcentury assimilationist energies and optimism, nearly blinded by a non-Jewish drunk.

This final affront occurs in specific relation to the consumption of food, posing the hostility of the non-Jew against the misplaced optimism of the Jew. Lou Levov has taken under his wing a desperate alcoholic, a “Philadelphia heiress, a finishing-school girl” with flaxen braids, flawless skin, and a vast well of disappointment (4p, 328). Lou takes away her drink and tries to make her eat, to nourish her and the culture she represents as he has his own family, by force of wall—like his son, to return his own Jewish bounty to America. When Lou feeds her forktuls of her strawberry-rhubarb pie and praises her as a “good girl,”

he articulates the moral dimension of consumption that has defined his own efforts toward prosperity, reflecting midcentury postimmigrant Jewish-American ideologies that conflated moral and material fulfill-

ment. The disillusioned heiress takes the fork and aims it at his face, mussing his eye by an inch, implying that he is in a sense already blinded by his aspirations. Her refusal of the healing power of that all-American pie, in an absurd act of violence, exposes the futility of all hopes for an

idyll of consumption to harmonize American social organization and to make disparate and conflicting American identities coherent. The final scene of American Pastoral discloses Roth’s antipastoral interpretation of the mythic American Eden. The wounding of the coarse but well-intentioned Jew by the figure representing the hollow dream ofan elite Protestant America, a dream that guided innocents such as Lou and his son, confirms in plot terms the long-standing critique of that origimary, prelapsarian cooking metaphor from early in the centu86 An Appetite for America

ry: the melting pot. Roth gathers together the symbolic strands of the novel—and indeed of all three works | have treated here—in this scene. The Jew’s appetite for the good things in what he construes as American life and his acceptance of the ideology of consumption as the path toward beng American are counterbalanced by irrevocably Jewish compulsions toward renunciation. By implication, the very objects of appetite are misplaced and mostly indigestible, and the “assimilated” identities thus demarcated are mere phantoms. By confronting his American Jews with foods that fail to satisfy their hunger for an uncompromised cultural identity, Roth demonstrates the signifying power of apparently innocuous foods as an index to cultural transition. His plots uncover the illusory mechanism driving the habits of the midcentury Jew: to eat American is not to become American nor to erase the tribal definitions ofidentity. In Roth’s view, cheeseburgers, cherries, lobster, turkey, and strawberry-rhubarb pie may in the end compose a menu not for a feast but for a large, lonesome, self-deluding Jewish bellyache.

Notes 1. Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Halian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways en the Age of Immigration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 190-97. 2. Mary Antin, The Promised Land (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1912). Antin’s highly successful autobiography, first published in 1901, affirmed the possibilities of attaming the “American dream.” 3. Diner, Hungering for America, 151. 4. Diner, Hungering for America, 191. See also Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Fewish Culture, 1880-1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 172-74. Joselit argues that American Jews began to respect the rules of kosher eating selectively, often “following the dictates of convenience rather than those of tradition” (173). 5. Andrew R. Heinze makes an excellent case for examining the consumption (rather than production) of material goods as a guide to Jewish acculturation into the United States. See Adapting to Abundance: Jewish lmmigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 4. 6. Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988). Hereafter cited as Facts in the text. Shostak 87

7. See Diner’s description of Jewish parents’ “obsession with their children’s consumption, the belief that food indicated love and ensured health” (Aungering for America, 193). 8. Jenna Weissman Joselit, ““A Set Table’: Jewish Domestic Culture in the New World, 1880-1950,” in Getting Comfortable in New York: The American fewish Home, 1880-1950, ed. Susan L. Braunstein and Jenna Weissman Joselit (New York: Jewish Museum, 1990), 48. g. Roth, Geodbye, Columbus (igh; repr., New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 3. Hereafter cited as Gc in the text. 10. Joselit, “A Set Table,” 30. u. Irving Howe, “A Personal Reminiscence,” in Braunstem and Joselit, Getting Comfortable in New York, 16.

12. Diner, Hungering for America, 229. i3. David Biale, Eros and the fews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 2. 14. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969; repr., New York: Fawcett, 1985), 236, 89. Hereatter cited as pcin the text.

15. See Diner’s description of the symbolic desirability of meat among Jews (Hungering for America, 164). 16. Biale, Hros and the Jews, 2.

17. Hermione Lee, Philip Roth (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), 15. 18. Roth, American Pastoral (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 316. Hereafter cited as 4P in the text.

19. Donna R. Gabaccia argues for the central significance of Thanksgiving as an entry for immigrant populations into American culture: “No other eating event so symbolized the changing eating habits in ethnic enclaves as an immigrant family’s frst American Thanksgiving celebration. ... Many immigrant mothers prepared the feast when children requested it after studying the Pilgrims in school” (We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of

Americans |Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press, 1998], 178).

88 An Afbpetite for America

4. You Are Where You Eat

Kathryn McClymond

Ona busy Monday morning in late May 2009, the kitchen of the Hindu Temple of Atlanta is abuzz with activity. More than a dozen volunteers— women in saris and men in shirts and slacks—move im and out of the lower-level kitchen, working under the supervision of the temple cook. They prepare tamarind rice, fresh fruit, and vegetable dishes, served buffet style to an ever-changing sea of devotees standing or sitting in small groups in the crowded cafeteria-like dining area. This particular morning food is needed in abundant quantities, as visitors have come not only to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of the temple but also to mark the ground-breaking ceremony for the Shiva complex, one of several additions planned for the next few years. Celebrations such as this one pepper the American landscape with increasing frequency as Hindu communities establish temples across the country. In American Hindu temple life, food is one means by which members negotiate multiple utopias. That is, food brings “there”—traditional India~—“here”—to the United States. By maintaining traclitional observances in temple life, Hindus who are otherwise thoroughly American maintain religio-cultural ties to the mother country. ‘They create a kind of “deferred utopia” by replicating (or, in some cases, translating) Inclian activity, creating a tangible tie to the auspicious land of India, which, in turn, links devotees to the means of liberation. Hindu communities construct an idealized world in the United States by 39

constant reference to life in India, traditionally understood as the concrete representation of the cosmic realm on earth. Thus, at one level American Hindus approach the eternal utopia by re-creating its earthly equivalent. At the same time, adaptations in food preparation, practices, and clistribution reflect communities’ embrace of life in the United States, what many see as the land of economic and educational opportunity. American Hindus constantly negotiate maintaining traditional Indian practices and values while pursuing improved lives in America. While cdevel-

oping a better material life, American Hindus pursue the best spiritual life through food interactions with the gods, with other devotees, and with outsiders. Multiple utopias—earthly and spiritual—come together, constantly at play with one another.

The study of food and utopias in American Hindu communities draws together several fields of study: American religions, Hindu temple practice, utopian studies, and food theory. Extensive literature exists in each of these fields independently, but relatively little work has been done specifically on food practices in Hindu communities in America. As Pyong Gap Min notes, “Literature on religion and ethnicity is largely based on the experiences of the turn-of-the-century white immigrant groups ... mostly Catholic and Jewish.”* Interest in Asian immigrants, and south Asian immigrants in particular, has developed relatively recently.’ Work in this area is helpful, however, because it highlights a dynamic very different from early patterns of immigration. In particular, studies on south Asian immigrants reveal different understandings of and engagements with food from those of their Western predecessors. Within south Asian studies, food has long been recognized as the means by which ritual and social relations are negotiated. ‘he works of Louis Dumont, R. 8. Khare, and McKim Marriott are classics in this field.* However, these have not considered how food manipulations change as communities develop their identities im the United States. Examining Hindus in America through the lens of food transactions in the temple life of the Hindu Temple of Atlanta (ur) raises broader questions about how the food practices of immigrant Hindu communities challenge peculiarly Western notions of utopia. More specifically, food G0 You Are Where You Eat

functions in three contexts in temple life. First, food is used by devotees in their worship of temple deities. Second, food plays a role in commu-

nity dynamics, as some traditional dietary restrictions and caste distinctions are transferred to the United States and others are not. Third, cooperation with non-Hindu communities to distribute food brings a distinctly American twist to a traditional Hindu value by joming Hindu and non-Hindu communities. Food and Worship The most recent wave of south Asian immigrants came to the United States in the wake of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, searching for economic, educational, and social opportunities believed to be unavailable to many in India. ‘The Hindu Temple of Atlanta was founded and continues to be dominated by families from south India, particularly Andhra Pradesh. The ura can be traced back to a group of Indian physiclans who were part of a growing Hindu community in metropolitan Atlanta in the 1970s.” The community purchased land in the early 1980s, and temple construction began in 1986. As with many other temples built in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, the community modeled its structure on the famous Sri Venkateswara temple in Tirupathi in south India. The first murtzs (statuary images of male and female deities) were installed in May 1993, and regular pujya (worship) began. In the summer of 2002, the community hired a temple cook to meet the demands of the growing numbers of devotees and activities, numbers that were putting a strain on the numerous volunteer cooks. Food plays a central role in the outworking of Hindu identity, both

in India and in America. Dumont has noted that food categorization, manipulation, and restrictions are intimately connected with notions of kinship, purity, and caste in Hindu communities. Food offerings were central to the ancient brahmanical Hindu (Vedic) sacrificial tradition, which scholars have often characterized as an elaborate meal.° Priests presented animal, grain, and liquid offerings to the gods in various ritual settings as part of a complex cosmogony that required regular sacrifice to maintain the ordered functioning of the universe. Over time elaborate sacrifice largely was replaced by domestic and temple-based McGlymond 9h

puja. The current view is that consecrated murtis host the presence of the deities so that devotees may worship and pray to them. While private worship is all one needs to be a practicing Hindu, many Hindu communities in the United States, largely in metropolitan areas, have constructed temples to accommodate public worship, festival celebrations, educational and cultural programs, and social events. At the heart of Hindu worship is the regular honoring of the gods. For example, Krishna, speaking in the Bhagavad Gita, states, “The leaf or flower or fruit or water that he offers with devotion, I accept from the man of self-restraint in response to his devotion” (9:26). Daily activities ina Hindu temple include several food offerings (wazvédya) to the gods, as well as bathing, decorating, and dressing the gods and waving lamp flames before the image. With these actions, the deity is treated as an honored guest. It is important to note that the murtzs are treated as living beings who see and are seen, who give and receive in the act of worship. Food preparation, offering, and consumption play key roles in this activity. Devotees offer food gifts (primarily fruit) to the deities, and temple priests maintain daily, monthly, seasonal, and annual worship through food offerings as well as other activities. Several times throughout the day, priests present various foods to the deities, from morning, when they “awaken” the deities, until they close the deities’ chambers for the night. Traditional food offerings include bananas, oranges, Mangos, coconuts, various rice preparations, and milk. Only a properly trained priest may prepare food for the gods.’ One sign of the growing numbers and prosperity of the Hindu Temple of Atlanta is that it has been able to hire a full-time cook to tend to these responsibilities. Rangachari, the employee responsibie for food preparation at the [Hindu Temple of Atlanta, was trained by his father im

Andhra Pradesh, and he supervised food preparation for several years at a temple in Vizianagaram before he came to Atlanta. He is part ofa large staff of nine full-time priests (pujarts) and two part-time temple managers. In addition to the daily and festival offerings, Rangachari is responsibie for food provided to devotees during the busy weekend activities, which include worship and classes in the Vedas, the Gta, classical dance, and Sanskrit. He determines the type and quantity of food 92 You Are Where You Eat

necessary each week, and a volunteer from the food committee (headed by an executive committee member) purchases the food from a local Sam’s Club and Atlanta’s International Farmer’s Market.* Rangachari prepares the offerings of fruit and rice dishes for the temple gods according to traditional guidelines. In addition to voluntary offerings by individual devotees, the temple priests present required food offerings to the gods as part of regular temple practice. While Rangachari’s position is traditional, the presence of a volunteer staff and the establishment ofa food committee are distinctly American adaptations. Weekly trips to Sam’s Club are also unique to American metropolitan life, but the parallel trips to the International Farmer’s Market serve as a reminder that specific food choices are rooted in Indian tradition. The International Farmer’s Market brings India to Atlanta in the form of toodstutis. One of the most interesting elements of traditional Hindu devotionalism to stucents of religion is the phenomenon of prasdéd, which refers to food that has been offered to temple deities, blessed by them, and then

made available to devotees for consumption. At the ara, Rangacharimakes prasdd balls of Rava Kesari (similar to cream of wheat), ghee (clarified butter), sugar, cashews, raisins, and cardamom. Strictly speaking, prasdd is food that ritually has been presented to and received by the deity. ‘The offering is waved before the murti and sprinkled with water. Vhese sacred food remnants convey the graciousness of the god to the devotee as he or she consumes them. Traditionally, devotees would consume portions of the food that has been placed before the murtzs by the priests. Prasédd is distinctive in that it is not simply a gift to the deity. Rather, it involves giving and receiving, reflecting the dynamic relationship between the gods and their devotees. Arjun Appadurai explains, “In a very real sense, in Hindu thought, food, in its physical and moral forms, as the cosmos. It is thought to be the fundamental link between men and the gods. Men and gods are co-producers of food, the one by his technology and labor (the necessary conditions) and the other by providing rainfall and an auspicious ecological situation (the sufficient conditions). Men assume this cooperation by feeding the gods and eating their leftovers (prasdd),”” McClymond 93

The foodstuff is ritually offered to and consumed by the deity, but then a portion of it is returned to the devotee as a sign of the god’s grace. The intimacy of this food exchange underscores the private dlmension of worship in Hinduism. ‘The giving and receiving of prasad, much like darsan (viewing and being viewed by the deity embodied in the murtz), brings the devotee into close and private contact with the god. For convenience, Rangachari prepares ladus, which are available to devotees throughout the day when they come to worship. In fact, a sign near the temple manager’s office invites devotees to the kitchen to pick up their prasdd on the way out of the temple. As a result, devotees can stop by the wa at their convenience throughout the week and have prasdd available to them.

Devotees, therefore, relate to the gods through food offerings that they bring directly to the temple and place in front of the cleities’ images, through the priests’ regular food offerings to the murtzs on behalf of the community, and through receiving prasdd. In addition, food can link devotees to their gods in a more indirect way. The ura Web site provides a calendar of regular and occasional celebrations. ‘The site also provides a comprehensive list of the elements (such as food) necessary for various rituals, including their costs. For example, Table 1, below, lists the items necessary for the Salyanarayana puja, which is performed to give thanks for success in a new endeavor or to express gratitude for having been brought through a difficult time. Table 1. Items required for Srz Satyanarayana Puja'®

‘Turmeric powder 100 grams Kumkum powder 100 grams

Rice 2 Ibs.

Sandalwood powder i small box

Incense stick (agarbattc) 1 packet

Camphor 1 packet Betel leaves 2h # Betel nuts 1 packet Flowers 2 bunches O4 You Are Where You Eat

Garland 1 5 types fruit Each 5 Banana 3 Ibs. Coconut § Dry coconut 1

Milk 1/2 gallon Yogurt 32 O%.

Ghee i smail bottle Honey ismail bottle Sugar i small packet Juice i smail packet Rose water i smail bottle

Lemons 10

Navadhanyam (9 varieties of natural seeds) Raisins, cashew, dates, almonds, and sugar candy Maha naivedyam (for distribution) Rava Kesari

Havan samagri 1 packet Blouse piece 2 (11/2 meter)

Rather than purchasing and transporting the necessary items to the temple, a devotee can “sponsor” a ritual. While the rites and food items used are traditional, the Web site mechanism is an American innovation, allowing devotees who live far away from a temple to participate in temple life by underwriting the cost of various rituals. Devotees participate in the ritualized food activity of temple life in

three ways. First, when they visit the temple, devotees often present tood offerings (usually fruit) to the deities. Second, at the temple, a devotee may receive prasdd, which has been offered to and then received

back from the deity. Third, a devotee may participate less directly in temple worship by underwriting the cost of the foodstuffs necessary to perform any number of regular or special rites, without necessarily attending the temple itself. Food, therefore, becomes one of the primary vehicles by which regular devotees participate in temple worship, McClymond 95

either directly or indirectly. More specifically, food acts as the medium through which the divine and human realms interact and through which “there” (traditional India) is brought and adapted to life “here” (contemporary America).

Food and Community On the human plane, food also operates as an important element of community dynamics in traditional Hinduism. On one level, most Hindus observe general food guidelines, such as not eating meat. In addition, however, further guidelines are related to caste and subcaste distinctions. Social distinctions can be traced back to the four varnas or “estates” of brahmanical Hinduism, which were laid out in the Vedic period. Brahmins (priests), ksatriyas (warrior-kings), vaisyas (farmers, merchants), and sédras (laborers, servants) distinguished themselves from one another, at least in part, by food practices. Manu Smritz, the first-century law code, notes, “A twice-born man who knowingly eats mushrooms, a village-pig, garlic, a village-cock, onions, or leeks, will become an outcast” (5.19).'' Dumont has argued that, over time, social distinctions that originally played themselves out in ritual activity were replaced by “an opposition between the pure and impure and a hierarchy of castes. Abstention from eating meat became a criterion of purity.”'* That is, hierarchical social relationships were played out in food dynamics: the higher one’s social rank, the more restrictive one’s diet. Brian K. Smith summarizes the relationship between food and social hierarchy: “The hierarchical encompassment of the lower by the higher in society is here articulated in alimentary (and elementary) terms: you are more than the one you eat and less than the one by whom you are eaten.”'” What one can and cannot eat traditionally indicates one’s caste.

Contemporary diaspora Hindu communities in the United States continue to grapple with these dietary restrictions, despite the fact that caste distinctions are generally more relaxed among diaspora Hindus. The temple cook at the Hindu Temple of Atlanta, in addition to preparing food for the deities, is responsible for the preparation of food for community gatherings. On Saturdays and Sundays the temple offers 96 You Are Where You Eat

activities from morning through evening. Many members travel long distances to come to the temple, and they often stay for the full day, so food is provided cafeteria style in the kitchen for devotees. In addition, at special events such as the eleventh anniversary celebration, the cook is responsible for making sure that food is available. Until recently, as in many other American Hindu communities, the ura depended entirely on volunteers (mostly women) to prepare the food for devotees and food offerings for the deities. In this setting, certain differences between traditional Indian practice and immigrant practices become clear. John Y. Fenton has noted that temples in America have to be built according to American building codes. In addition, “Temple buildings are often constructed for multipurpose uses, which result in the central sanctuary being placed over lower floors used for nonritual purposes.”'* Like many other American

Hindu temples, the ura, situated on a hill, has two stories. The upper level is the consecrated ritual space, housing the gods. The lower level includes the kitchen and a comfortable seating area, several entries to the complex, the temple manager’s office, a small area for shoes (which must be removed upon entering the sanctuary), an area tor washing one’s feet, an auditorium, several small classrooms, and the bathrooms.'’ Traditional temples in India, however, are almost invariably one level, and the kitchen is usually not attached. The u7a’s attached kitchen is a largely Western adaptation that allows community members to prepare food offerings and host meals comfortably. Despite this modern architectural adaptation, the Hra attempts to accommodate traditional dietary observances of its members. At the most basic level, Hindus traditionally consider raw foods universally acceptable; hence McKim Marriott refers to these as “gift” foods, since they can be given by anyone to anyone. In addition, most of the HTA members are vegetarians, so no meat is prepared in the temple kitchen." Complications arise, however, when one begins to prepare cooked food for the community at large. Some community members refrain from eating lentils, onion, garlic, and certain leafy greens that are considered unacceptable to higher castes. Rangachari honors these traditional dietary restrictions by offering menus that are acceptable to everyone—that is, McClymond 97

within the most restrictive diet. He has stated that the Hindu temple prepares “Vasistha vegetables,” not “Visvamitra vegetables,” indicating that he follows a more restrictive line of teaching regarding the food-

stuffs that are and are not permitted.'’ Thus, the Ta replicates India by means of the prohibition of certain foods, in accord with traditional guidelines. Dietary restrictions involve not only what is prepared, but who pre-

pares it. Traditionally, an individual may eat only food prepared by someone of his own caste or higher, because food prepared by one’s inferior is considered impure. The ura temple priests, for example, as brahmons, may eat only food prepared by a brahmin. More specitically, they must eat food prepared by a brahman priest. They do not eat food prepared by any of the community volunteers, only food prepared by Rangachari (a brahmin priest himself) or food they have prepared themselves. Rangachari is integral to the temple life, then, not only because he prepares the correct food for consumption but also because he is the correct person to prepare it.

It is interesting to note that devotees generally consider the food, which is prepared and served cafeteria style in the kitchen, as “blessed by the lord,” much like prasdd. Dr. Seshu Sarma, a leading member of the nT, explained that a portion of all the food prepared for devotees is presented to the main deity. This token amount, having been received by the deity, symbolically represents all of the food being consumed that day. As a result, everyone is symbolically eating consecrated food and receiving a blessing from the god." Just as food creates an arena for spiritual exchange (prasdd) in the context of worship, food reflects the boundaries of appropriate social exchanges in the context of community. These exchanges are circumscribed by issues of purity and, to a lesser extent, caste guidelines com-

mon in Indian life but outside the mainstream of modern American lite. Studies seem to indicate that over time Hindu immigrants relax dietary restrictions somewhat, simply out of practical consideration.”” Subsequent generations often relax these restrictions even further. It will be interesting to observe over time how dietary restrictions linked to caste and general Hindu teachings do and do not persist in upcoming generations. 98 You Are Where You Eat

Food and Neighbors Manuel Moreno has argued that traditional Hinduism values “feeding” above “eating”: “Among all classifications related to food, the most important is that which distinguishes between ‘eating’ and ‘feeding’... and valorizes the latter.”*’ Traditional teaching encourages Hindus to feed not only the gods and one’s own community members but also the poor and needy. A desire to fulfill this traditional value in metropolitan Atlanta, however, has prompted HTa members to work through contemporary mechanisms. One way they do this is through participating with other religious communities in a local food bank, donating money to buy toodstutts for the Atlanta Union Mission. In addition, the teacher of the HTA’s teenage Sunday school class involves the teens in a more “hands-on” way. Every other week the teens prepare peanut butter sandwiches, soup, fried beans, or vegetarian chili, which is distributed later to the homeless at Centennial Olympic Park. This program, like the holiday ‘Toys for Tots program, is supervised by the humanitarian activity committee at the temple. Rather than distributing food or money directly to the needy on a personal, individual basis (which is traditionally what happens in India), the Hra community fulfills its humanitarian commitments through urban mechanisms. By distributing tood through community-based nonprofit organizations, temple members implicitly acknowledge their identity as Americans living in Atlanta, home to hundreds of religious, ethnic, national, and cultural communities. At the same time, the nt fulfills traditional Hindu values of hospitality and feeding the poor. By participating in these programs, the HTA community, while maintaining ties to traditional Indian practice, acknowledges that it 1s, in fact, nofin India. “Feeding” occurs in at least three different forms in the uta. Devotees teed the gods, community members feed one another, and the community as a whole feeds the needy in Atlanta. Consequently, close study reveals a complicated negotiation between attempts to replicate the old world and efforts to generate a unique identity within pluralist America in the context of feeding practices. Food brings traditional India to America, while it simultaneously provides opportunities for contemporary American culture to influence the development of Hinduism McClymond 99

and for American Hindus to establish their place in and contribute to American society.

Food, Place, and Identity The societies of the past, most societies, have believed themselves to be based in the order of things, natural as well as social; they thought they were copying or designing their very conventions alter the principles of life and the world.*!

What is a utopia? There are, of course, numerous understandings of utopia, some of which hearken to an ancient golden age, and some of which look forward to or attempt to usher in a perfect future. Theodore Olsen has proposed a general description of utopias as “good patterns of life in an ahistorical cosmos.”** Hinduism traditionally interprets “good patterns of life” through the lens of varndsramadharma, or guidelines for living based on one’s gender, caste, and life stage. Ancient legal codes prescribe how individuals ought to behave, depending on these factors, in order to achieve moksa, liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (samsara). Within this worldview, one understands the body as a temporary “sheath.” This sheath envelops the self in a manifest, or concrete and visible, form. While earthly existence 1s important as a vehicle through which one may attain liberation from samsara, ultimately it is transitory. ‘The transactions that the

body performs and undergoes in saguna brahman (manitest reality) have their most important effects in nerguna brakman (unmanitest reality). Dietary regulations promote a “good pattern of life” in manitest reality by governing what one may or may not eat and from whom one may or may not receive food. Khare goes so far as to say that food in Hinduism “is a dimension of none other than the Creator himself and

is integral to the formation of the cosmos. ... It is a manifestation of Brahman, the ultimate Reality.”*’ Consequently, food plays a crucial role in the working out of one’s ultimate liberation. At one level, then, food practices are a means by which individuals pursue the utopia of release from this world.

On another level, dietary practices centered on the Hindu temple 100 You Are Where You Eat

also help older generations transmit their Indian cultural heritage to younger generations. The temple cook and volunteers prepare food for weekend activities, family celebrations, holidays, or cultural events. In these contexts food 1s olten tied to traditional dress and customs, sacred or regional languages, and mythic or political history. Devotees main-

tain traditional practices, rooted in thousands of years of history and mythology. These specific spiritual and practical disciplines, dietary included, are based on the assumption that activity in the bodily and social realms must resonate with activity on the cosmic, divine, and subtle planes. Only in that resonance can liberation from the karmic cycle of birth-death-rebirth be accomplished. The land of India is the most auspicious place in which to work out this liberation. The gods dwell on her mountaintops, create her rivers, and leave their marks on sites that become places of pilgrimage. Devotees visit the dwelling places of the gods, retrace the footsteps of saints in pilgrimage, and merge with

the murky waters of the Ganges upon death. The cosmos is scribed on the landscape of India, and through sacred temple architecture it is transposed onto American soil. Observance of traditional worship and social practices transports the Hindu immigrant symbolically back to India, maintaiming a thread of contact across the oceans. In an effort to accomplish this transposition, Hindu temple life in America models Hindu worship in India as much as possible and, in so doing, lifts the devotee into ahistorical time. Priests use the sacred language, Sanskrit, during temple rituals; the temple community hires priests with proper lineages from India to reside at the temple; weekend classes focus on instruction im traditional texts, language, and dance. This is the ahistorical utopia, the worid operating as it should, accord-

ing to fixed and predetermined cosmic laws that transcend historic, geographic, and societal contexts. The temple manifests this utopia in concrete form. As Fenton notes, Bhumi-puja (ground breaking or dedication of the land) symbolically creates a temple site with a solid foundation, and by extension, it brings the land in which it is located into existence, thus inducting a local area of America into God’s universe. ... A point McClymond 101

of access, a fording place (tertha), is established between immanent and transcendent reality. That is to say, God who is everywhere, who is universal, and who is in all things and all spaces nevertheless consents to become present, to become incarnate, in the temple in a special way-~-even here in this strange land so far from home.” ‘Temple life links the devotee to the universal and eternal through its architecture, its worship, and the dynamics among gods, priests, and laity. In partnership with these other traditional elements, foodways help connect younger members to their Indian past in the setting of the larger “extended family” of the community. Just as traditional architecture, language, and ritual practice connect the Hindu American with India (and, by that, with the unchanging reality), traditional food practices link temple members to their culture’s birthplace. At the same time that these traditional means of connecting with nzerguna brahman and Mother India are at play, certain elements of food practice are different in America than in India. Specific diflerences— lower-level kitchens and dining areas; food committees and volunteer staff; Web sites that facilitate distant devotees’ participation in devotional life; and urban modes of feeding the needy—reveal cracks in the

foundation of traditional Hinduism. The disparities are traces of the search for another utopia, in the land of plenty and opportunity. This search has been largely successful, as evidenced by the fact that many HTA members are well-educated professionals with sons and daughters

enrolling in top American universities.” One could argue that Hindu Americans have created an earthly utopia here, generating material, educational, and professional opportunities for themselves and their families.

The growing temple-based activity among Hindu communities reflects another kind of utopia. As noted earlier, Hinduism does not require temple practice. That is, one can be a perfectly good Hindu and not participate in temple life at all. This characteristic is in marked contrast to American Christianity, which emphasizes attendance at and participation ina church community, “the body of Christ,” as an impor102 You Are Where You Eat

tant mark of one’s religious commitment. As Hindu communities have grown and established themselves in the United States, they have increasingly developed their institutional identity, offering parallel activities to their Christian counterparts: religious rituals, religious instruc-

tion, youth education, social and cultural events, and humanitarian outreach. This institutional component reflects practical issues, to be sure, but more significantly it reflects the American religious utopia, which emphasizes communal, institutionalized spiritual identity. The dynamism in Atlanta Hindu life comes from the constantly shifting juxtaposition of four different utopias: the manifest utopia of traditional India, transposed onto American soul by means of temple architecture and activity; the unmanifest utopia made available to individual devotees by observance of devotional activity and dietary prescriptions; the economic utopia found here in the United States; and the historical American religious utopia, concretized in institutional structures and activities and focused on community—rather than individual—religious lite. Food practices are part of each of these realms, constituting the material medium through which devotees exhibit loyalty to traditional ways while adapting to contemporary America.

It has become common in food theory studies to argue, “You are what you eat.” And in Hindu studies, it is common to note that you are “from whom you eat.” ‘That is, from whom you do and do not receive food indicates who you are. I would argue that studying food, utopias, and Hindus in America leads to another pithy saying: you are where you eat. Hindu immigrants, who otherwise operate in a modern, urban American world, shift their symbolic locations when they engage in temple-based food-centered activities. Food transactions simultaneously place devotees in traditional India and in contemporary America, straddling two realms. At the same time, food practices litt American Hindus out of both worlds, effectively putting them in intimate relationship with Brahman, the eternal reality that ultimately underpins all places. Notes The well-known phrase “you are what you eat” initially suggested this title, but readers should be aware that other authors have played with this McClymond 103

phrase. Note, for example, Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1998); and David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat (New York: Routledge, 1997).

1. The author would like to thank Aimee Parkhurst, Sasikala Penumarthi, Ellen Posman, Rangachari, P. V. Rao, Ravi Sarma, Seshu Sarma, Brian Schemer, Phan Tummala, and the Hindu Temple of Atlanta for their assistance throughout this project. 2. Pyong Gap Min, “Immigrants’ Religion and Ethnicity: A Comparison of Korean Christian and Indian Hindu Immigrants,” in Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America, ed. Jane Naomi Iwamura and Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2003), 126. 3. See Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, eds., Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuitees and Adaptations in Lmmigrant Congregations (New York: AltaMira Press, 2000); John Y. Fenton, Transplanting Religious traditions: Astan Indians in America (New York: Praeger, 1988); Iwamura and Spickard, Revealing the Sacred; Raymond Brady Williams, Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan: New Threads in the American Tapestry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 4. See in particular Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System, trans. Mark Samsbury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); R.S. Khare, Lhe Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhests, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Food,

Society, and Culture: Aspects in South Asian Food Systems (Durham: Caroli-

na Academic Press, 1986); The Hindu Hearth and Home (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1983); McKim Marriott, “Caste Ranking and Food Transactions, a Matrix Analysis,” in Structure and Change in Indian Society, ed. Milton Singer and Bernard S. Cohn (Chicago: Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology no. 47, ca. 1968); Caste Ranking and Community Structure in Five Regions of India and Pakistan (Poona: Deccan College Monograph Series no. 23, 1960). 5. See Renee Bhatia and Ajit Bhatia, “Hindu Communities in Atlanta,” in Relagions of Allanta: Religious Diversity in the Centennial Olympic Coty, ed. Gary Laderman (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 241-54, for studies of several Hindu communities in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Fenton’s Transplanteng Religious Traditions also discusses the Hindu ‘Temple of Atlanta at some length. Finally, the Hindu Temple of Atlanta chronicles its own history on its Web site, http://www.hindutempleofatlanta.org. 104 You Are Where You Eat

6. See, for example, Charles Malamoud, Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought

in Ancient India, trans. David White (Oxtord: Oxford University Press, 1996).

7. Seshu Sarma notes, “The ura had a non-brahmin cook for a few years. Since not prepared by a priest, the food that he cooked could not be offered to the Lord. He and his wife made food for the devotees on the weekends” (Sarma, e-mail communication, August 7, 2003).

8. Before Rangachari was hired, a volunteer food staff fulfilled these responsibilities. Volunteers, approximately two dozen, continue to help the temple cook on weekends and holidays. g. Arjun Appadurai, “Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia,” American Ethnologist 8 (1981): 494-511.

10. Adapted from the “Items Required for Sri Satyanarayana Pooja” list at http:// www.hindutempleofatlanta.org/PoojaReq3.htm (accessed July 12, 2003). u. Lhe Laws of Manu, trans. Georg Biihler, The Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max Miiller (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 25:172.

12. Quoted in Francis Zimmerman, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1-2.

13. Brian K. Smith, “Eaters, Food, and Social Hierarchy in Ancient India: A Dietary Guide to a Revolution of Values,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58 (1990): 187.

14. Fenton, Transplanting Religious Traditions, 174. 15. See Joanne Punzo Waghorne’s analysis of “split-level” American Hindu tempies in “The Hindu Gods ina Split-Level World: The Sri Siva- Vishnu Tem-

ple in Suburban Washington, D.C..." in Geds of the City, ed. Robert A. Orsi (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999): 103-30. 16. “A twice-born man who knows the law, must not eat meat except in conformity with the law |in the context of sacrifice |; for ifhe has eaten it unlawfully, he will, unable to save himself, be eaten after death by his (victims)” (Laws of Manu 5.33). 17. Rangachari, personal communication, May 26, 2003. 18. Seshu Sarma, personal communication, July 7, 2003. 19. Fenton interviewed one man who admitted to eating beef and pork and then asked anxiously, “You are not going to tell my Mom, are you?” Clearly, generational differences are at play here (Fenton, Transplanting Religious Tradttions, 43). McClymond 105

20. Manuel Moreno, “Pan camirtam,” in Khare, Hfernal Food, 148. 21. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 253.

22. Theodore Olsen, Mellennialism, Ulopranism, and Progress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). 23, Khare, Eternal Food, 5. 24. Fenton, Transpianting Religious Traditions, 172. 25. Note that not all Hindu American communities are as economically well off or as seamlessly integrated in the community at large as members of the uta, and this has led to tensions between different Hindu communities. Generally, however, the median mcome for Indian Americans is higher than the overail national average and second only to the Japanese among Asian Americans.

106 You Are Where You Eat

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5. Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys

Margaret Puskar-Pasewtcz

In the mid-1850s Freegift Wells, an Elder at the Shaker village in Watervliet, New York, reported the “fanatical” and disturbing demonstrations of a fellow Believer, Ephraim Prentiss. Wells recalled a specific event when Prentiss found a small piece of pork in a dish of beans during dinner. [He responded to the discovery with surprising anger and

theatrics: he removed the threatening item trom the dish, processed through the village with it, and finished by ceremoniously burying the scrap of meat.’ Prentiss’s actions and their role in Wells’s writings against food restrictions suggest that the consumption of meat symbolized a critical division in the community. For Prentiss, an adamant food reformer, pork represented a physical threat to the health of the boys under his care and a political threat to his religious authority in the village. In contrast, Wells argued vehemently throughout his tenure as a Shaker Elder that rules against the use of tea, coffee, and pork produced significant confusion and disunion among Shakers. The United Society of Believers, also known as the Shakers, remains one of the longest-running utopian communal societies in American history. ‘The society’s founder, Ann Lee, emigrated from England to New York in 1774 with a small group of believers. Celibacy, industriousness, and simple living as means of Christian sanctification and separation from “worldly” practices represented enduring tenets of Shakerism from the days of Mother Ann. Vegetarianism among the Shakers started 109

in the 1820s and 1830s, when popular interest in health retorm began to emerge in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century Shakers promoted (and opposed) dietary restrictions as an important means of strengthening the communal principle as well as the spiritual development of individual Shakers through greater self-denial. In the tradition of Shaker organization, nonetheless, leaders often accepted laxness in obeying proposed restrictions on food and drink.

The Shakers, similar to other Americans, pursued diet reform because of its implications for controlling unhealthy and immoral impuls-

es.” The notion that abstention from specific foods such as alcohol, condiments, or meat made it easier to withstand the temptations of the flesh was particularly attractive to the Shakers. In addition, Shakers sometimes explained physical sickness and disease as outward signs of a Believer’s inner turmoil or moral decline.’ Prominent leaders, such as Seth Wells at New Lebanon, New York, argued that indulgences in “worldly” foods and practices threatened both the physical well-being of Believers and their effectiveness as witnesses to the outside world.*

For the Shakers as weil as nineteenth-century Americans more generally, experimentation with vegetarianism embodied the quest for physical and moral perfection through diet and health.’ Previous explanations of Shaker diet reform have emphasized the influence of Sylvester Graham—the prominent antebellum health reformer who advocated abstention from a variety of foods, including meat, alcohol, tea, and coffee—at the expense of identifying ways in which food practices also represented issues that were Shaker in and of themselves. The tendency to idealize Shaker life explains, in part, this trend to depict the Shakers’ adoption of diet reform as a generally peaceful transition. Closer analysis of Shaker food practices and consumption reveals a much more contentious narrative. While Shakers favorable to

reform claimed that abstention from specific foods distinguished the Believers from the outside world and ensured the society’s spiritual and corporeal health, members opposed to restrictions argued that the changes too closely resembled “worldly” practices. Rather than another example of Believers’ uncontested acceptance of outside influences, vegetarianism—introduced formally by the Central Ministry as early as 10 Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys

1820--became a battleground for broader disputes.’ Like other utopian groups, the Shakers adopted meatless diets to encourage spiritual purity, to promote simple living and frugality, and to uphold the communal principle, especially among youth and women. Recent scholarship on the connections among food, spirituality, and identity also prompts further examination of food practices and consumption within utopian religious communities.’ In particular, these works demonstrate how historical analysis of food enriches scholarly interpretations of the tensions between “spirituality as preached” and “spirituality as lived.”° The adoption of vegetarianism by nimeteenthcentury utopian groups represented a widespread attempt in American society to implement moral, physiological, and social reforms in daily life. In the process, diet reform raised intrinsic questions about how utopian groups maintain a balance between individual preferences and communal values. From its beginnings, the United Society of Believers offered appealing solutions to contemporary social and health concerns. As the 1820 proposal for restricting the consumption of animal food and the 1821 Millennial Laws demonstrate, arguments for abstention from specific foods emerged in Shaker records a decade before Graham began his career as a popular lecturer. The Central Ministry’s 1820 warning against meat coincided with a tumultuous period of growth and expansion in Shaker history, including the increasing number and prosperity of Believers in the eastern communities and the organization of new communities in the West. With Lucy Wright’s death in 1821, this period also signaled the end of her twenty-five-year leadership as a respected but not uncontested head of the group. Wright had resisted the writing and publication of Shaker rules and laws because of her concerns for continued union among Believers, but both her strong warnings about the growing emphasis on temporal issues and the realities of the group’s expansion led to the first written set of regulations, published as the “Mullennial Laws” in 1821.” In addition to prohibiting several practices, including restrictions on applying to “outside” doctors for medical care, the 1821 Millenmial Laws banned specific foods such as raw or unripe fruit and freshly baked bread. Puskar-Pasewicz U1

One year earlier the Lead Ministry at New Lebanon had drafted a letter to the other Shaker villages for “discussing some changes for the better.”'’ The proposed changes included a reduction in the amount of animal food consumed by Believers and greater attention to habits of healthy living. Unlike the written bans on specific foods and drinks that followed, however, the 1820 letter merely recommended dietary restric-

tions and clearly intended for individual villages to decide for themselves how to address these changes.'’ The Lead Ministry’s proposal, representative of regularly issued recommendations from New Lebanon for all of the villages, presented a thorough and multifaceted argument tor diet reform on the basis of economy, taste, and physical and spiri-

tual well-being. The letter began by questioning the consumption of “high fattened meat especially swine’s flesh as favorable to our healths [sec].”'* The Lead Ministry also suggested that the consumption of animal food represented a growing concern in the society, and the leaders

expressed their disappointment that the matter had not been brought to their attention sooner to be discussed openly as a “family,” rather than privately between individuals. “We found our little assembly to be unanimous in the decision that some small change or alteration might take place in that respect for the better.”’’ Their emphasis on the need to address this issue as a community suggested that the leaders viewed resistance to meatless ciets as a threat to the communal principle and not just a danger to Believers’ physical health. The Lead Ministry also revealed the terrible moral and physical consequences of eating too much meat. They argued, “And 1s it not a rational conclusion, that, while soul and body are united, whatever serves to obstruct the free action of the mind must necessarily be a hindrance to the opperations | szc| and work of the spirit in the man or woman?” The letter’s scientific rationale for restrictions on pork—a “hindrance”

to the body would inevitably become a “hindrance” to the soul—reflected Shaker theology, which constructed the body and the spirit as inextricably connected. The 1820 letter stressed that all members, regardless of moral or physical stature, could be susceptible to the evils of pork: “It appears reasonable that an abundant use of very strong food by persons of any description, should have attendancy [sc] to increase 112 Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys

the [chance] of corruption and bad humours in the blood, and thereby render them, finally, the more liable to deadly fevers, cancers and other fatal maladies.” According to the Elders, less meat could even increase mental activity. Pork especially made people “feel slow and heavy in

body and cloudy in mind.” The language of purification and renewal to promote abstention from

meat became a primary trope in arguments for vegetarianism among Shakers and other pertectionists interested in changing ideas about morality, health, and the body. A spiritual vision received by the Second Family at Watervliet in 1848 concerning the condemnation of swine’s flesh used similar references to Shakers’ purity, economy, and separateness to reiterate the spiritual urgency and purpose expressed in the 1820 arguments for restrictions on meat consumption: “I have not called you,

O my people, from the four quarters of the Earth to live in luxury.... But L have called you to be shming lights to the world, to hear witness to my word, and show by your Godly example that you are harvested from the world, and become joint heirs with Christ, in his new and spiritual kingdom upon Earth.”"”

The majority of the 1820 letter defended restrictions on meat consumption against possible counterarguments. Because there 1s no available evidence for the villages’ responses to the mitial proposal for food reform, this part of the letter provides needed insight into the origins of debates over meatless diets among Shakers. The leaders examined and retuted three forceful arguments that could be made at the time against diet reform: individual food preferences, economy, and the potential inconvenience to sisters responsible for preparing meals and household

goods. Despite the seeming flexibility and openness of the proposal, the authors based their rebuttals on traditional and religious principles typical of Shaker society: emphasis on the community over the indlvidual, sumple living, and the sexual division of labor. First, the Ministry admitted that some members liked animal food as a matter of taste. They claimed, however, that such an argument blatantly ignored the society’s foundation as a communal group and that personal impulses were inappropriate, if not sinful.'° Second, the Elders weighed the economic advantages and disadvantages of restricting meat Puskar-Pasewicz 113

consumption. A central question in the debate, according to the letter, was whether the use of animal fat for “sweetening” foods (comparable to the idea of “flavoring” today) was less expensive than honey or sugar. Not surprisingly, in view of the leaders’ aims, the letter claimed that pork cost more than alternative sweeteners. This argument indicated widespread concerns about the group’s immediate financial stability, yet their fixation on a minor expense—honey versus pork fat—reveals more than a troubled economic situation. Their rhetoric of economy also acknowledged the broader society’s preoccupation with economic instability and the group’s tradition of strict rules against waste forged in their past experiences with food scarcity and pioneer life. A rise in Shakers’ access to “worldly” goods and growing concerns about spiritual laxity—often cited in explanations for the subsequent written bans on meat—most likely contributed to the Lead Ministry’s initial decision to propose diet reform. The 1820 letter emphasized the need for Believers to find satisfaction in a common diet and simple living. In her history of Canterbury village, Bertha Lindsay claims, “From the late eighteenth century to about 1820, the Shakers were given considerable freedom when it came to their diet,” but “as their prosperity increased, so did their consumption of food.”"’ The Shakers’ strained relationship with the outside world and the influx of new members contributed to leaders’ desires to strengthen the society, morally and physically. Restrictions on meat represented both a material and spiritual sacrifice on behalf of the community as well as a step toward preserving good health. Third, the letter recognized and responded to sisters’ potential arguments against the recommended ciet reforms: “The kind sisters that cook are in favour of a good deal of pork, in order that they may have fat to enable them to make their victuals good. Doubtless the feeling they

have to want to make their brethren and sisters comfortable is commendable. But in case they had more sweetening in addition to what they now use, could they not do with less meat in alike proportion and their victuals still be as good and palatable as it is at present, or more soP”'* As demonstrated by the nimeteenth-century debates over food reform, Shaker men and women attached significant religious impor114 Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys

tance to the preparation and consumption of food. ‘The act of cooking, especially for such large numbers of people and with such attention to

detail as demanded by Shaker tradition, produced a unique sense of women’s contributions and value to the community.'” By addressing the potential responses of “kitchen sisters” to the restrictions on pork, the leaders acknowledged the significance of women’s roles as cooks in the society.

The 1820 letter reinforces the idea of the communal kitchen as an important site for negotiation and conflict in communal societies. ‘The letter’s address to the kitchen sisters acknowledged women’s authority and the Lead Ministry’s attempts to persuade the sisters to their side. A dispute between Brother William Evans of the Lower Family in Canaan, New York, and several women in his community suggests the extent to which sisters would defend their influence in the kitchen. Described as bossy and authoritative with the sisters, Evans went too far when he offered advice about their cooking. Even though none of the brethren chose to admonish Evans, Sisters Hannah Bryant and Harriet Sellick “took him by the collar and put him into the street and threw his clothes after him.”*° Similar disruptions between kitchen sisters and brethren occurred in several Shaker villages specifically over the question of dietary restrictions in the antebellum years.*' It seems reasonable, based on these later conflicts, to assume that the authors of the 1820 proposal understood that they needed to gain the support of kitchen sisters if their proposal was to be taken seriously. Attempts to restrict sisters’ use of pork, however, raised both practical and ideological questions about food and bodily perfection in Shaker society. Preserved meats and animal fats played crucial roles in Shaker cooking and housekeeping.* In addition, meat, whether fresh, salted, dried, or smoked, often provided an important staple or a welcome change im the usual monotony of early-nineteenth-century, rural American diets. During the less prosperous years of early settlement at Canterbury village, “porridge and hash appeared repeatedly at meals in the summer. ... Bean porridge was served in the winter for breakfast and dinner.”*’ Many members in the more-established eastern villages during the 1810s and 1820s probably viewed more extravagant meat dishes Puskar-Pasewtez 115

as a well-deserved reward for their years of economic and agricultural hardships. Abstention from pork also threatened to increase the burden of women’s work in the village and limited sisters’ prerogatives in the kitchen. In a clear attempt to diffuse kitchen sisters’ objections to the recommendation, the leaders conceded that pork fat could still be used for the preparation of traditional dishes. Both the later controversies between brethren and kitchen sisters and the Ministry’s negotiations in the original proposal suggest that kitchen sisters were likely to challenge diet reform when they perceived that it would make their own work more difhcult or undermine their notions of authority and identity in the community. Leaders anticipated that members would be reluctant to obey recommendations for abstention from animal food. The Lead Ministry, with little success, tried to guard against attempts by Believers to attribute negligence to complex or indefinite regulations regarding meat consumption. The 1820 proposal urged the villages to develop for themselves effective and “proper methods of proceeding in the execution” without becoming bogged down by questions of quantity, proportions, and quality. The Lead Ministry did not provide specific guidelines, but they urged the Office Deacons to decrease the amount of money spent on pork and allow more for other sweetenings. Families could retain their usual budget and quantity of pork fat, leaders argued, by parting only with the meat. The letter clearly stated that families “could continue to have the final say” regarding diet, and leaders would approve of decisions to keep animal fat available for cooking and sweetening.”* Although missing from this early proposal for vegetarianism, Shaker youth were central in later debates over diet reform in Watervliet as well as other villages. Dietary restrictions provided the means for older members to assert their authority over children as they reached early adulthood. As the future of the society, children and their spiritual and physical health represented an important concern in Shaker communities.’ The dispute between Freegift Wells and Ephraim Prentiss—beginning with the Watervliet leaders’ decision to assign a group of young boys in the village to Prentiss’s care and supervision in 1831 and leading to both men’s removal from Watervliet by 1851-represented the most ui6 Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys

famous and perhaps most volatile conflict over diet reform among the Shakers.*° Shortly after receiving this charge, Prentiss decided to begin a meatless diet—several years before Grahamism took a firm hold among Believers. He attributed this change in diet to concerns about health and in conjunction with his uncerstanding of earlier teachings by leading members of the society. He claimed that other Believers felt that the time would come when animal foods would not be used among the members, and “it was said that this was the testimony of some of the first Eiders” who actually abstained from meat because it was “injurious to health and therefore wrong to indulge themselves in it.”*’ Although it would be easy to view Prentiss as an exception and a fanatic in the community, his arguments represented continuity with earlier Shaker theology and the 1820 proposal. According to Prentiss’s “Report of Interesting Experiences with Boys in Regards to Health, Discipline, and Fleshless Diets,” none of the children under his care were forced to accept the restriction on meat. Instead, they freely chose to adopt vegetable diets, following his example and rationale. The evidence is not available to discern whether the boys were as willing to accept diet reform as he suggests, but one of Freegift Wells’s primary criticisms of Prentiss was that he used the boys as helpless subjects to benefit his own reputation in the community. Prentiss, however, described the boys as potentially harmful and terribly in need of great restraint and authority. Yet his insistence that the boys followed his example based on their own reasoning and not by blind force suggests that he viewed them as controllable by reason, not by physical violence, an increasingly typical characterization of childrearing in antebellum America. His concerns about youth represented anxieties about the increasing numbers of young people who decided to leave during this period or those who stayed but openly challenged the authority of older members and practices.

Within a few years and as the number of boys under his care increased, Prentiss decided that the boys’ behavior and physical health required more drastic and rigid supervision. Prior to the adoption of fleshless diets, he noted their serious emotional and physical weakness-

es. They were “disagreeable,” “crass,” “ready to use violence on the Puskar-Pasewicz 17

least occasion,” as well as “sickly,” “troublesome at nights, talking in their sleep, restless, feverish,” and even “much addicted to wetting their beds.” He blamed the boys’ shameful behavior and physical ailments ona lack of adult guidance, most notably in relation to diet. “But these were not the worst dithculties I had with them-—young as they were their stimulating food evidently excited and brought into action those base propensities which boys of their age ought never to feel—in short, their vere | sec] real excitements and filthy indulgences caused me much tribulation.”*°

Prentiss’s report described the typical diet of ordinary Watervliet residents: tor breakfast, members often ate some form of animal food (beef, pork, mutton, or fish), fried, mostly with hog fat, bread, and potatoes. For dinner, members consumed more meat (either boiled, roasted, baked, or fried) with vegetables and condiments. Supper often included cold meats, bread, butter, cheese, milk, and tea. With the exception of tea and coffee, he claimed, children ate all of these “stimulating articles”

too.’ The lack of guidance for children’s diets had “plain and obvious” effects on their physical health and dispositions. After the gradual adoption of simple and meatless diets, however, he observed astonishing improvements in the boys’ health and discipline. No longer were they plagued by bed wetting or violent tantrums but acted as orderly and promising members of the community. Criticism of Prentiss’s experiment and the adoption of meatless diets by individual members intensthed alter all of the Shaker villages received the inspired message in 1841 that reinforced earlier recommendations for meatless diets. During this period of dramatic revivalism, known as the Era of Manifestations, “the gift that sparked the greatest controversy in these years was undoubtedly the 1841 prohibition of pork, tea, and coffee.””° The heavily disputed spiritual gift directed all members younger than sixty to abstain from eating pork and drinking tea and coffee. Older members were given greater discretion in their adoption of these restrictions.’' Objections to the 1841 ban reiterated many of the counterarguments proposed by the Lead Ministry in 1820: concerns about personal taste, the cooking practices of the sisters, and threats of disunion in the society. The ban’s emphasis on age also reuS Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys

vealed the leaders’ concerns about intergenerational conflict and the more fundamental tensions in the society between communal order and undividual preferences.

Opponents to diet reform acknowledged the need for order and greater attention to healthy living, but they warned that excessive restrictions and “false” messages might lead to greater harm than that caused by the consumption of specific foods or drinks. After his appointment as an Elder at Watervliet in the 1840s, Freegitt Wells claimed that he discovered widespread dissatisfaction among the brethren and sisters with the recommended dietary changes. Wells conceded that the rules against meat were issued with the best of intentions but efforts to promote food reform only encouraged extreme “unreconcillation,” “discouragement,” “loss of confidence,” and even “self-indulgence” among Believers, as his experience at Watervliet demonstrated.” The adoption of meatless diets, he protested, represented a dangerous move toward outside philosophies and sciences. In regard to the ban’s authority as an inspired message, he invoked Mother Lucy and her emphasis on spiritual gifts only for the purpose of union building. He argued that the messages regarding diet reform, received mostly by young Shaker women, emanated from “deceiving spirits.” Disputes between sisters and brethren over the question of diet indicated that sisters were less likely to adopt vegetarianism than were their male counterparts, “perhaps because they were less concerned about suppressing sexuality or realized the extra work that would follow if the regime were adopted.””’ The lack of support for diet reform by Shaker women, at least initially, might also be explained by the creation of stricter rules concerning kitchen work.”* “Mother Lucy’s Word to the Sisters,” a spiritual message received in 1841, warned against practices that compromised the society’s communal principle and order. These practices ranged from “the sisters’ cooking extra meals for each other” to “young girls refusing to be appropriately supervised in their work by more experienced sisters.””” Female members might have resisted diet reform, in part, as a reaction against restrictions on their authority and roles as cooks. Despite the erratic practice of vegetarianism throughout most of the Puskar-Pasewicz U9

nineteenth century, abstention from meat had become an important part of Shaker life for many Believers by the 1870s.”° Supported by prominent male and female leaders in the society, arguments for abstention

trom meat took on a renewed notoriety, even among the sisters. The position of Shaker women had changed significantly by the end of the nineteenth century. A new and increasingly vocal cadre of female lead-

ers in favor of diet reform now proclaimed its practical and spiritual benefits. In an article for a popular nineteenth-century vegetarian periodical, Martha ]. Anderson, a member of the North Family at Mount Lebanon, commented on the arduousness of preparing animal foods: “Then came the hard and disagreeable work of chopping mince meat to be used for frying, and for the unwholesome, but time honored, hot mince pies.” She continued, “The cooks grew weary of ‘broiling their brains over hot coals, of seething, and stewing, of roasting and frying, and trying out fat, and finally declared in favor of universal Vegetarianism and that all should share and fare alike.”’’ Eldress Anna White, a writer, activist, and influential leader, based her arguments for vegetarianism on traditional principles of Shaker spintuality and community:

“The bloodless diet would seem a natural outcome of the simplicity, purity and kindness of the Shaker faith and practice, and in one group at least, the North Family at Mount Lebanon, New York, the practice of vegetarianism has been adhered to for over fifty years.” Despite their passionate defense of meatless diets, proponents of vegetarianism still encouraged Believers in favor of reform to respect the authority of kitchen sisters: “Care is taken, however, not to encroach upon the province of cook, baker or head commissary, remembering in all cases the Shaker principle, ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,’ ””” Proponents, then, appealed to kitchen sisters’ sense of duty and interest in domestic science, rather than asserting adamantly from positions of authorized leadership. Anderson wrote, for example, “With a moderate amount of skill, and an interest in hygienic methods

of preparing food, a good housekeeper can place on the table many appetizing dishes cooked without fat or soda.”* These reformers had learned from earlier experiments with vegetarianism of the need to convince kitchen sisters that changes in diet would neither increase their work nor challenge their authority. 120 Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys

Although the spiritual and physical benefits of abstention from meat appeared in Shaker discussions of diet throughout the nineteenth century, rationales for vegetarianism often reflected contemporary anxieties and concerns within the group. ‘This essay demonstrates how the study of food practices and restrictions enriches our understanding of Shakerism as a “lived religion.” Vegetarianism represented more than the society’s accommodation to “worldly” values and ideas; it provided a system to achieve spiritual and physical perfection. The adoption of meatless ciets served to distinguish the Shakers from the outside world,

but it also revealed the difficult balance between individual preterences and communal ideals. The practice of vegetarianism in these communities, therefore, suggests useful directions for further study of how utopian groups have endowed food consumption with spiritual, moral, gendered, and communal meanings.

Notes [ wish to thank Stephen J. Stein and the students in his fall ig98 seminar at Indiana University, Bloomington, for their valuable comments and suggestions for this essay. ‘This paper also benefited from research and writing suggestions by Susan Ferentinos, Martha L. Finch, Wendy Gamber, Etta M. Madden, John E. Murray, and Lynn Pohl. 1. Freegift Wells, “Writings Protesting the Rules against the Use of Tea, Coffee,

and Perk by Freegift Wells,” Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland ou, collection (hereafter OCIWHi), VU B 67, 1855-56. 2. See Priscilla]. Brewer, Shaker Communities, Shaker Lives (Hanover nu: University Press of New England, 1986), 106-10; Suzanne R. Thurman, “The Order of Nature, the Order of Grace: Community Formation, Female Status, and Relations with the World in the Shaker Villages of Harvard and Shirley, Massachusetts, 1781-1875” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1994), 146-60 and 205-99.

3. Disease and chronic illnesses were often interpreted “as a manifestation of one’s troubled relation with God.” See John E. Murray, “The White Plague in Utopia: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century Shaker Communes,” Bulletin of the Eistory of Medicine 68 (1994): 278-306, 305.

4. See Thurman, “Order of Nature,” 276. 5. See Catherine L. Albanese, “Body Politic and Body Perfect: Religion, PolPuskar-Pasewtcz 121

tics, and Thomsonian Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America,” in New Dimensions in American Religious History: Essays in Honor of Martin E. Marty, ed. Jay P. Dolan and James P. Wind (Grand Rapids mi: W. B. Eerdman Publishing, 1993), 131-51; Lawrence Foster, Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mor-

mons (Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991); and Leonard |. Sweet, Health and Medicine in the Evangelical Tradition: “Not by Might nor Power” (Valley Forge pa: Trinity Press International, 1994).

6. “A Statement Concerning Diet and Dress Addressed to Elders, Deacons, Brethren, and Sisters,” OCIWHi, VII, B, 63, New Lebanon, 1820. Overlooked

in previous discussions of Shaker diet reform, it represents the society’s earlest recommendation for abstention from meat. | am grateful to Stephen J. Stein, who originally directed me to this document. 7. For examples of this development, see Michelle Mary Lelwica, Starving for Salvation: The Spiritual Dimensions of Eating Problems among American Girls and Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Robert C. Fuller, Religion and Wine: A Cultural History of Wine Drinking mm the United States (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996); Walter Vandereycken and Ron Van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls: The History of Self-Starvation (New York: New York University Press, 1994); and Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food fo Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 8. David D. Hall, “Narrating Puritanism,” in New Derections in American Religious History, ed. Harry 5. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 52. g. Anna White and Leda S. Taylor, Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message (New York: ams Press, 1972), 136. See also Brewer, Shaker Communities, 40. 10. “Statement Concerning Diet and Dress,” OCIWHG, VIL, B, 63. i. According to Brewer, “Prior to 1821, any rules or general instructions that leaders at any level of the sect’s hierarchy felt to be necessary were communicated verbally” (Shaker Communities, 39-40). 12. “Statement Concerning Diet and Dress)’ OCIWHi, VIL, B, 63. i3. “Statement Concerning Diet and Dress,’ OCIWHL, VII, B, 63. 14. “Statement Concerning Diet and Dress,’ OCIWHL, VII, B, 63. 15. “A Spiritual Record; Concerning Many Things, Written in Two Parts,” New York State Library (Nyst) reel 9, 1841-48. My citation refers to the microfilm holdings and guide at Indiana University Main Library, rather than to the manuscript collection at NYSL. 122 Kitchen Sisters and Disagrecable Boys

16. The use of diet reform to suppress natural umpulses was expressed even more vigorously in the institution of the 1821 Millennial Laws regarding food and drink. See Stephen J. Stem, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 1992), 150.

17. Bertha Lindsay, Seasoned with Grace: My Generation of Shaker Cooking, ed.

Mary Rose Boswell (Woodstock vr: The Countryman Press, 1987), xx. 18. “Statement Concerning Diet and Dress,” OCIWHL, VIL, B, 63. ig. The contemporary and recent works that I have examined suggest that the preparation of meals was generally considered to be “women’s work” and often endowed with special meaning in the community. See Frances A. Carr, Shaker Your Plate: Of Shaker Cooks and Geoking (Sabbathday Lake Mz: United Society of Shakers, 1986), 15; Lindsay, Seasoned with Grace, vi; and Caroline B. Piercy, The Shaker Cook Book: Not by Bread Alone (New York: Crown Publishers, 1953), dedication. 20. As quoted in Priscilla ]. Brewer, “’Uho’ of the Weaker Sex’: A Reassessment of Gender Equality among the Shakers,” in Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Socrettes in the United States, ed. Wendy E. Chmielewsk1, Louis J. Kern, and Marlyn Klee-Hartzell (Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press, 1993), 146.

21. Marsha Mibok, “Women in the Authority Structure of Shakerism: A Study of Social Conflict and Change” (PhD diss., Drew University, 1989), 194. 22. Piercy, Shaker Cook Book, 136. 23. Lindsay, Seasoned with Grace, Xix-XxXx.

24. “Statement Concerning Diet and Dress,” OCIWHi, VII, B, 63. 25. For evidence of vegetarianism among Shaker youths at other villages, see “Tournal, Shirley, 15 Oct. 1842,” OCIWH: V B 215, 1835-50.

26. “Wells was sent to Union Village, Ohio, as first Elder in March 1836, returning east in 1843. Prentiss was moved to Sabbathday Lake, Mame, at an uncetermined time prior to 1851” (Brewer, Shaker Communities, 249-50, n. 89). 27. Ephraim Prentiss, “Report of Interesting Experiences with Boys in Regards to Health, Discipline, and Flieshless Diets,” OCIWHi VII B 258, 1835-37. 28. Prentiss, “Report of Interesting Experiences.” 29. Prentiss, “Report of Interesting Experiences.” 30. Brewer, Shaker Communities, 131. 31. Lindsay, Seasoned with Grace, xxii. 32. Wells, “Writings Protesting the Rules.” 39, Brewer, Shaker Communities, 10. Puskar-Pasewicz 123

34. See 1845 revised Millennial Laws in Andrews, The People Called Shakers, 270;

Stein, Shaker Experience in America, 198; and Jean M. Humez, ed., Mothers First-Born Daughters: Early Shaker Writings on Women and Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 216. 35. Humez, Mother's First-Born Daughters, 216. 36. Charles Nordhoff, The Commumnistic Societies of the United States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1875), 141; Murray, “White Plague in Utopia,” 298; Margaret Moody Stier, “Blood, Sweat, and Herbs: Health and Medicine in the Harvard Shaker Community, 1820-1855,” in Medicine and Healeng, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University Press, 1990), 154-67; David Richards, “Medicine and Healing among the Maine Shakers, 1784-1854,” m Benes, Medicine and Healing, 142-53; and “Letter from James Sullivan Prescott (1803-1888) at North Union, Ohio to Rutus Bishop and Seth Y. Wells at Mt. Lebanon, and to other Shaker elders at Watervliet, ny and Harvard,” n.d., TV, A, 51, reel 23, p. 26.

37. Martha J. Anderson, “History of Dietetic Reform, as Practised at North Family, Mt. Lebanon and Canaan, Col., Co., N.Y.,” Food, Home and Garden (jJanuary 1894): 6, 7. 38. See Anna White, Vegelarianesm among Shakers, repr. trom “The Counsellor,” WRHS no. 504 (n.d.): 3.

39. White, Vegetarianism among Shakers, 10. 40. Martha J. Anderson, Social Life and Veeetartanism (Chicago: Guiding Star Printing House, 1893), 7-8.

124 Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys

6. Strawberries and Cream

Wendy E. Chmielewske

The Oneida Community, founded by the religious theorist John Humphrey Noyes and his followers in 1848, was one of the best-known intentional communities of the second half of the nineteenth century. ' Oneida lasted for thirty-three years as a communal society set in a rural area not far from Syracuse, New York. Nationally famous for its exper!mentation in religious perfectionism and Bible Communism, nontraditional sexual practices, and changes in gender roles, the community at its height housed between two hundred and three hundred men, women, and children. The founders were dedicated to the creation of a new society where all adults were married to each other, members held all goods in common, and they tried to overcome jealousy and possessiveness as they submitted individual will to the good of the community. As early as 1859, outsiders visited Oneida in the early summer for a daylong strawberries and cream social. The author of an article in the Oneida Circular, a community newspaper, claimed that it was pressure trom these visitors for Oneida’s especially good fruit that led the members to oblige their neighbors with this annual event. ‘The writer was suspicious that the strawberry eaters were more curious about community social and sexual relations, however, than hungry for a good, ripe berry. Even so, Oneida maintained the tradition, reporting seven years later that “nearly a hundred visitors were supplied with strawberries and cream, to say nothing of the ice cream furnished, the lemon125

ace drank [see], ete.”* The Oneida Community (oc) member Charlotte Leonard wearily noted that during one summer day they served fortynine extra visitors. Despite the extra work involved, Leonard found it all worthwhile: “We can enter heartily into this business now, on the ground that we are doing missionary work,” thus connecting food with the oc’s religious agenda to spread Noyes’s theories of Christian pertectionism and Bible Communism.’ Emblematic of internal food culture at Oneida as well as relations with the outside world, these strawberry festivals demonstrate food’s economic importance, its function in the experimental gender and sexual roles, and its religious values in this intentional community. In utopian communities such as Oneida, consciously created in reaction to mainstream society, the culture of food is an important lens with which to examine the internal community workings and, by contrast, conventional society. The production or procurement of food, its distribution and preparation, the disposal of the remains, and the rituals surrounding food illuminate the relationships between individuals and the community’s cultural values. As Elspeth Probyn argues in Carnal Appetites, “the sensual nature of eating ... constitutes a privileged optic through which to consider how identities and the relations between sex, gender and power are . . . renegotiated. In eating, pleasure offers itself to be problematised.”* At Oneida food and eating were sites of such renegotiation between the community members and the outside world. Examining the culture of food at Oneida and its production, consumption, and distribution provides insights into how food played an integral part in not only the community’s theological core but also the complex social and economic relations within the community and with the outside world.

Food and Sexuality Oneida Community founder and patriarch John Humphrey Noyes firmly connected his theories of social reform with sexuality, gender roles, and religion. Noyes wrote, for example, “The restoration of true relations between the sexes is a matter second in importance only to the reconciliation of man to God.” The connections among new ideas of gender roles, theology, and perfected society were clear to Noyes: 126 Strawberries and Cream

“Reconciliation of the sexes emancipates woman and opens the way tor vital society.” In theory, to achieve this “vital society,” men and women

would “mingle in both of their peculiar departments of work.” This mingling, Noyes explained, “will be economically as weil as spiritually profitable.”’ Nonetheless, for Noyes Bible Communism and a patriarchal God were always at the center of his ideas for a new society. Because Noyes had published several articles and pamphlets explaining his theories of birth control and complex marriage, outsiders were extremely curious about the unusual social and sexual mores at Oneida. Food was an important medium of cultural exchange between the community and outsiders. Besides attending the strawberry festivals, visitors to Oneida could eat dinner in a special, separate dining room. By

the 1860s the public could buy Oneida Community canned goods at local grocery stores across the United States. Yet the strawberry festivals

provided the only opportunity for outsiders to view closely the community members, so it is not surprising that the visitors at the festivals might have connected them with their ideas about the unusual sexual practices at Oneida.” Despite the sensual imagery in the descriptions of those strawberry and cream festivals, all the pleasure, gastronomic and erotic, was enjoyed by the visitors to Oneida rather than by community members themselves. The oc members viewed these festivals and dinners as eco-

nomic business, tiring work, and religious mission, but not as pleasure.

They seldom regarded food culture and eating at Oneida as sensual gratification. The types of food eaten and the ways in which meals were served were an outward sign of spirituality and commitment to community ideals.’ Perhaps contributing to outsiders’ curiosity were the sensual images Noyes included in his writings on spirituality. In these he frequently connected pleasure, food, and sexuality. Describing his relationship

with God, he wrote, “The Lord ... entered the secret chamber of my soul, and we sat down together to the marriage supper. .. . This morning I... would be consumed in the love of God. ... I have eaten of the tree of life.”’ Noyes also combined images of the heavenly marriage supper and metaphors of feasting with his ideas about the sexual relationChmiclewshkt 127

ships between men and women at Oneida. In the following passage he connects the Christian ceremony of Communion with his new, radical ideas about sexuality and uses homey images of familiar foods to make them palatable: “The eucharist is a symbol of eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood; ...[he) sups with us. ...Is not this a marriage supper? And is not sexual intercourse a more perfect symbol of it than eating bread and drinking wine? ... We may approach the sexual union as the truest Lord’s supper. ...'To sup with each other, is really less sensual then [see] to sup with roast-turkeys and, chicken-pies.”” Noyes’s use of religious and food metaphors influenced not only outsiders but also members of the oc. Charlotte Leonard attributed the fol-

lowing to Noyes: “Prayer and fasting are one thing. Prayer is the hunger of the inside life... when we are hungry for God it takes away our appetite for food... . Our food is sanctified by the word of God and

prayer!" Noyes’s own use of food and dining metaphors to symbolize the sexual and the spiritual went beyond mere figurative speech or philosophi-

cal theory. Probyn has argued that “food and its relation to bodies is fundamentally about power”; Noyes often maneuvered shifts in community policies when he believed the Oneida family was drifting away from the ideal of community values over individual desires and when his own control over 0c life seemed to diminish.'' Noyes couched these shifts in policies on food consumption and production for the spiritual betterment of the entire community. When there were internal difficulties over leadership in 1878, for example, Noyes called for a fast to bring the oc family back together, connecting prayer, food, and sexuality. Cornelia Worden reported in her cary, “sHN proposes a family fast for a week from all stumulants such as tea, coffee, cider, beer, meat, cards and sexual intercourse. His proposition was sympathized with by the [oc] family. His object is to promote unity by a state of prayer and earnestness.” "*

Ideas similar to those of Noyes regarding the connections between sexuality, diet, and social harmony could be found in the works of popular contemporary reformers such as Sylvester Graham, William Alcott, and O.S. Fowler. By the 1830s and 1840s, when Noyes was developing his religious and social ideas, Graham was addressing audiences in 128 Strawberries and Cream

public lectures and through his writings on the need for young men to control their sexual lives, their diets, and their consumption of alcohol. Graham believed that loss of control would debilitate the individual and, through him, all of society. Exploring these connections, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has noted, “Combining temperance and vegetarianism, the male moral reformers constructed a physiological model that condemned male orgasm as the source of physical, mental, and social deterioration.”'’ Not all of Graham’s ideas about male sexuality were popular at Onetda, but his concern about sexual control was incorporated into oc cul-

ture. For example, Noyes developed “male continence” at Oneida, a contraceptive technique by which men participated in sexual intercourse without ejaculation. Yet Noyes and his followers parted ways with Graham over the issue of recreational sex within marriage. Graham believed that frequent and nonprocreative sex was debilitating, especially for men. Noyes agreed with Graham about the potential debilitating aspects of orgasm. However, Noyes believed physical relations,

even without orgasm, were pleasurable to both men and women and raised the spiritual connection between the couple.’ Given the universal use of male continence at Oneida, almost all sexual intercourse was nonprocreative. At various times the community followed several of Graham’s ideas about control of appetite and recommendations about food. The whole wheat flour and bread named after Graham were often served in the oc cining room. Coffee, spices, rich meats, and wine, Graham asserted, led to “degenerating habits of luxury, indolence, voluptuousness, and sensuality,” and these sentiments were echoed by oc members.'’ That is, although the outside world believed sexual licentiousness was common at Oneida, the members of the community themselves were concerned that spirituality and religious belief formed the core of their society. Their sexual practices were one way to achieve that society.

Preparing, Serving, and Consuming Food Ideas at Oneida about food and diet were thus a mixture of scientific theory, spiritual needs, healthy living, and a formula for communal uniChmielewskt 129

ty. The shifts in beliefs about what to eat and actual dietary practices at Oneida are difficult to chart over time, but the ways in which food was consumed were often considered to be a measure of the health of the community. The Oneida Circular reported in 1872, for example, “One of the signs of the unity and flexibility of the Community ...is seen in the hearty readiness with which new and revolutionary manners are adopted. ... It has been conclusively proved that better digestion, better assimilation, better sleep, and brighter faculties are the rewards of those who limit themselves to two meals.”’° Enthusiastic community reports appeared regarding doing without tea, coffee, and alcohol. These may have been ideals to which many oc members wished to ascribe, but the practice was seldom attained. Evidence from community records does not always agree with what was reported publicly as community practice. Like other nineteenthcentury health reformers, the oc reported that one goal was to reduce or eliminate meat from their diet and to increase the consumption of fruits and vegetables. Considering the parallel debate over the role of sexuality and spirituality, appearing “animalistic” or “bestial” might have been an underlying concern at Oneida. Throughout the life of the community, the question of whether to include meat centered on shifting theories of health. In 1858 the Oneida Circular humorously reported on an oc family debate: “One side ... thought it would be as reasonable to suppose that we should be turned into squashes and cabbages by feeding on these vegetables as that we should become like cows by feeding on beef; and if we must choose between them one would rather be a cow than a squash.”"’ The emphasis on limiting meat in the diet was both a health issue and an economic one. One member remembered “a period when brown bread and applesauce, beans and milk-gravy were the staple, if not the only articles of diet” and “pie was an unheard-ot-luxury.”'” For women who became pregnant, the community diet in the early years was especially difficult: “The Community was poverty-stricken and the tables were bare of appetizing food. Beans and potatoes, molasses and bread (without butter) were the common diet.”’” However, as early as 1855 the Oneida Circular reported that meals in the community consisted of 130 Strawberries and Cream

vegetables and fruits, “good bread of all kinds; tea and cottee; fish, salt, and fresh; some salt pork; and once in a great while ...a dinner of fresh meat.”~” Many oc members reported great improvement in the meals in the later, more prosperous years of the community. Nevertheless, inventories of food canned “for the family” and menus for the fall of 1877 reveal a diet similar to those from the lean times.*’ Doubtless far more

food was available by the 1870s, when Oneida meals were served four times a day: 7 a.m., 10 a.m.,1p.m., and 4 p.m.** Community menus from the period reveal that trom one-third to one-half of all meals included some type of beef or fish. ‘This change from the early years indicates a rise in the amount of food available that contained sources of

protein.” A typical menu for an oc meal, such as the one recorded for Monday, November 5, 1877, included the following:

7a.m. Breakfast cakes—baked potatoes and fried hasty pudding 10 a.m. Bean soup—baked potatoes and gravy—tomatoes, a tapioca pudding ip.m. same as at 10 a.m. 4p.m. pancakes and good maple syrup warmed up potato and cheese For Thanksgiving, however, members had a special dinner of roast turkey, dressing, and cranberry sauce, which was served for two meals of the day.** Extant menus indicate that leftover food from one meal typically was used to cook dishes for a second meal. The Oneida Community had almost nine hundred acres of orchards and gardens, on which they produced all kinds of fruit, vegetables, milk, and cheese. Despite the community’s reputation for marketing high quality fruits and vegetables and the philosophical debates over the need for additional quantities of such foods for a healthier diet, few vegetables and little fruit appeared on the dining tables. Throughout the life of the community, however, the types of food served in the dining room were almost exactly what would have been served in the homes of Americans of similar geographical and class backgrounds outside Chimielewskt 131

Oneida. Vegetables, other than potatoes or beans, made up only about 20 percent of all meals, with an average of far less than one serving per meal. Fruit was served at only one-third of meals, and often it appeared as part of a rice pudding or pie. Potatoes were served at almost every meal, and carbohydrates formed the largest proportion of all meals, approximately 35 percent of the food served.” As community workers regularly canned a wide variety of fruits and vegetables for market, it is puzzling to find that so few of them were served to the oc family itself. By the 1870s the community economy was strong and additional fruit and vegetables were well within the budget. However, out of the thirtyeight different kinds of fruit and preserves sold by the community, only grapes and apples appeared on the oc dining tables with any regularity, and these appeared during the colder months.*° oc kitchen inventories also reveal that the only spices used were cloves, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg, in desserts such as gingerbread. This limited range of spices matches that found in the U.S. household. Furthermore, oc members sometimes drank tea, coffee, cider, beer, and wine, despite this being a radical departure from the health reforms that had been popular at Oneida in the early years.*’ Indeed, except for a lower consumption of meat, meals served at Oneida by the end of the 1870s were very simi-

lar to those in other households throughout the northeastern United States.

The Business of Food Food production and the processing of canned fruits and vegetables formed a significant part of the economy at Oneida. The sales of the canned food and the preparation of meals for the large numbers of visitors to the community provided income for the oc family as well as invaluable, positive propaganda to counteract the rumors of free love and immorality for which Oneida periodically was under attack by opponents. In 1868 Jane Cunningham Croly, a well-known newspaper columnist, feminist, and author, visited the oc.*° Two years later when Croly reissued her Fennte June’s American Cookery Book, she included recipes from Oneida, providing positive publicity for the community.” By 1870 the Oneida Community was known for its thriving fruit and 132 Strawberries and Cream

vegetable business, producing forty-five different kinds of canned or bottled foods.”? Grocery stores and bakeries as far north as Quebec, west to Minnesota, and south to Washington, D.C., purchased Oneida canned corn, succotash, peaches, plums, jellies, and other goods to sell to their customers. Fancy hotels in New York City, Boston, Grand Rapids, and Washington, D.C., also served Oneida goods.” In 1873, according to the visiting reporter Charles Nordhoft, the Oneida Community “produced and solid preserved fruits to the value of $27,417.” Although the fruit and vegetable business was less than 10 percent of the $350,000 earned that year, it was a business that maintained ties to the land, an important element of community identity for the experimental society. By 1877, when the fruit and vegetable business was well established and had a steady market, sales were over $85,000 tor the year. Sales increased yearly, and profits averaged about 18 percent for the period between 1872 and 1882, when the fruit business managers kept complete records.

Not all the fruits and vegetables processed and sold by the Onelda Community were actually grown on their acreage. The uncertain weather of upstate New York sometimes ruined delicate crops, so large

amounts were purchased from other areas.”’ oc members and hired laborers processed the fruit and vegetables and prepared the cans tor shipping by cart, rail, and steamship to destinations all over the country.

As with other economic enterprises at Oneida, members regarded canning fruits and vegetables as part of the business of the community. They did not consider it an extension of the community kitchens or the sort of work traditionally performed by women in the outside world. In 1854 three oc men visited the North American Phalanx, a Fourteristic intentional community in Monmouth County, New Jersey, “to learn from this society their method or process of preserving fruits in glass.””* All Oneida members, men and women, participated in the harvesting of fruits and vegetables. Jessie Kinsley remembered the

harvesting “bees”: “Early mornings in summer found us out... culling fruit and vegetables. How well I remember being awakened by the shouting A pea bee! A pea bee!—Or Strawberries—Come and Pick?” AnChmiclewskt 133

other community member remembered that men and women worked together in teams to harvest the corn: “The march to the field was in pairs of aman and woman.... Each man took a row of corn and swiftly cutting the stalks handed them to his woman helper.””® This pairing in the fields matched the sexual pairings in the community and gendered relationships in general, thus reenforcing Noyes’s ideas for a vital society. Although women served as extra hands in the fields and the fruit department when needed, they did not make decisions about the direction of the business. Oneida propaganda proclaimed that women’s roles were expanded at the community, yet in reality, women continued to work under the direction of men in almost every area.

Gendered Food Labor The growth of industrialization of U.S. society throughout the nineteenth century created constantly shifting relationships among the production, distribution, and consumption of food. A decreasing rural population continued to produce food for an ever-increasing urbanized population, a population that still had to eat. Such shifts aflected both the overall U.S. economy and the individual household. Both men and women were crucial workers in the farm economy. However, men generally had charge of the crops or animals that produced the largest portion of the farm cash income. It was almost a universal custom for women to be in charge of household food preparation—trom slaughtering of animals for home use, to preservation of meat and vegetables and cooking of all meals. In urban and suburban areas, by contrast, men often lost much of their connection to the production of food for their own households, while their work as food sellers or processors in factories became waged labor. Women, in all places, continued to be responsible tor the unwaged labor of food preparation and disposal of the remains within their own households. Carole M. Coumthan has written that the traditional role of women as food providers for their families “defines the nature and extent of female power.” In the nineteenth century U.S. women often controlled the culture and rituals surrounding food im both rural and urban areas. For some women, managing the distribution and preparation of food in 134 Strawberries and Cream

their houscholds was connected to feelmgs of control and responsibility and formed a crucial part of their identity in the world. Counihan notes, “The mother determines when, what, and how much family members will eat. She controls the social mores of the table, which ... behaviors and values [are) deemed right and just by society at large. She controls the symbolic language of food, determining what her dishes and meals will say about herself, her family, and the world.””’ From the earliest days of the oc, an essential tenet was the restructuring of the gender relationships found in the outside world. Women were encouraged to work at intellectual or physical pursuits and to be less “delicate” and attached to “feminine vanities.” Oneida women cut

their hair short for convenience and wore short skirts with pantalettes underneath to ease the labor of physical tasks. They worked in the community fields and factories as well as in the publishing ofhices that produced literature and propaganda. But they also performed traditional women’s work in childcare and as cooks and waitresses. Women alone were responsible for the cleaning of the community buildings and for all the hand-sewing of clothing—for themselves, the children, and the men of the oc family. Although women at Oneida had a broader variety of jobs than did women in the outside world, the oc structure actually broke down the traditional lines of women’s power in the domestic sphere without providing equally empowering alternatives. A close reading of the historical sources reveals that any power women did have at Oneida occurred mostly within social relationships and was often entirely based on their sexual connections with powerful men. If Counihan is correct in identifying the mother’s oversight of food as a major source of identity and domestic power for women in the family, then separating women at Oneida from the oversight of food culture-—limiting them to food labor—eliminated a significant portion of their traditional authority. The work of producing food encompassed work in the fields and in the kitchen. From the beginning of the Oneida Community, the philosophy of reordering gender roles led to customs that dictated that both male and female members work at outside tasks. Women could “throw off” their delicate, feminine ways by participating in the outside work: Chmiclewski 135

“Mrs. N. who is a constant milker, said that she enjoyed milking in the winter. ... Ifa woman wants to slip out of her effeminacy, she cannot take a more effectual way than to milk in the winter.” On the one hand, although women were greatly encouraged to work at these sorts of jobs, their particypation was on a voluntary basis. Male members, on the other hand, were assigned permanently to outside work and in the decision making for the horticultural areas of the community’s cash economy. Members viewed having both men and women work at tasks usually associated with one sex or the other as a step toward that goal of a “vital society.” However, while women were encouraged to throw off their “effeminate” behavior, no overt calls were made to men to throw off their “masculine” behavior. Yet men at Oneida could be found working in the kitchens at domestic tasks traditionally performed by women in the outside world. Male community members, in fact, were in charge of the kitchens. A man ran the bakery with “a company of young women” to aid him in the daily baking of sixty-five loaves of bread.’’ Two female members were in charge of the actual cooking, but a male steward was in charge of the entire kitchen facility, deciding on which food supplies would be available for meals. Thus, in the outside world women usually had complete authority over the kitchen; at Oneida they had to share that sphere and often acceded their traditional control to men. Yet male community leaders recognized that preparing food every day for the entire oc family, plus visitors, was hard work. For example, the kitchens at Oneicla were initially located in the basement level of the community buildings.*” When the community was on a sound financial basis, modern conveniences were added: “The new Kitchen is provided with a ‘dumb waiter, speaking-tube, improved fixtures for cooking by steam, and, in short, with ... all, the modern improvements. ... [tis anticipated that the labor of preparing meals for two hundred folk will be materially reduced ...and a change is made with gladness,””"! Some of the conveniences in the kitchen were inventions of community members. Having men work in the kitchens alongside women had practical results as weil as advancing that vital society important to community spirituality: “To many it may seem a waste of talent for ...amechanic to pare potatoes, but experience proves that such talent carries improvement where they would scarcely reach were those departments 136 Strawberries and Cream

regarded as exclusively the province of women.... A first-class jomer who worked in our kitchen ... introduced a system of washing potatoes by means of a circular cage revolving in water; ... and our women now think they could not do without it.”” However, relationships in the kitchen did not always run smoothly: “The feeling of poverty which has come over us during the last few weeks and which has tempted the stewards to scrimp in the provision tor the table was criticized very severely.” At a community meeting, “criticism of the Legal Spirit was exhibited in the kitchen and among the stewards—Mr. Craigin coming for a considerable share.” Community feeling was so strong on this that “Mr. Noyes thought that Mr. C had better not continue in that position any longer.”” Unlike women in the outside world, who were used to feminized domestic space, oC women had few places that were theirs to control, completely apart from men. However, they used a small, secondary kitchen, known as the Nursery-kitchen, as a meeting place. Men were not excluded, but it was generally acknowledged to be women’s space: “This little kitchen ...|is| the snuggest, coziest, hanciest places within our ken.... Our ‘pocket-kitchen’... might appropriately be called [a] ‘hub. ... Here the women and girls are wont to rehearse the news, if any there be.”**

Like the kitchen, the first dining room at Oneida was located in the basement. Until 1874 two sittings were required, as the dining room was not large enough to seat all members of the community at one time. The children ate with the adults in the large dining room, but at their own table.” At meals the community family sat at round tables big enough for ten to twelve people, filling the seats as they entered to eat a meal. Young women set the tables with food, plates, and other utensils and served as “waiters” throughout the meal. These women reported polishing hundreds of knives and forks every day before meals. The young women who waited on the tables also washed dishes. Jessie C. Kinsley, born at Oneicla, reported that she remembered “waiting on table, dishwashing and wiping, dining room work, kitchen work.” By the late 1870s a steam-powered dishwashing machine was installed next to the dining room. Community delight in the modern conveniences of the kitchens was Chimiclewskt 137

extended to the dining room as well. Several members and visitors reported the “ingenious contrivance” of the turntable in the center of the table—what we might call today a lazy Susan—where dishes of food sat so they could be accessible to all diners at each table. The Oneeda Circular humorously reported on the drawbacks of this invention: “If you don’t look out, ...as you are conveying a spoontul of gravy for instance from some dish on the center table to your plate, someone opposite to you may give the table a whirl, and before you are aware the dish from which you are dipping is two or three feet away, and you are lucky if you get a chance to put the spoon back.”*’ Having all the dishes on the table at once saved the young female “waiters” considerable work and was welcomed as a new convenience.

The members of the oc family focused on betterment of the individual and the community. All facets of life were examined and reorganized to reach John Humphrey Noyes’s vital society for the greater spiritual and social good of men and women. Community leader Noyes developed the theological theories that formed the basis of Oneida’s existence, and he connected these principles to reordered social relationships for other oc members. Noyes believed that major changes in gender roles and sexual relationships were crucial to the new vital society he envisioned. Food imagery often served as religious metaphor in Noyes’s writings, and he used this imagery to describe his theories on sexuality. The production and consumption of food and its economic and cultural significance at Oneida came under scrutiny as well. In the economic work of food production, men were in charge and women assisted in that process. Preparation and serving of food were tasks women shared with male members of the community, thus diluting their traditional domestic power. As with many other aspects of life at Oneida, food culture was shaped consciously to community ideals of the perfected society. Notes i. Recent scholarship on the Oneida Community that explores issues of family, gender, and sexuality includes the following: Louis Kern, An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias; The Shakers, the Mormons, and

the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 38 Strawberries and Cream

1981); Lawrence Foster, Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Onetda Community, and the Mormons (Syracuse NY: Syra-

cuse University Press, 1991); and Marlyn Klee-Hartzell, “The Oneida Community Family,’ Communal Societies 16 (4996): 15-27. The diaries of two oc

members also address these issues: Tirzah Miller Herrick, Desire and Duty at Oneida: Tirzah Miller’s Intimate Memoir, ed. Robert S. Fogarty (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000); and Victor Hawley, Special Love/Special Sex: An Oneida Community Diary, ed. Robert 5. Fogarty (Syracuse Ny: Syracuse University Press, 1994). 2. Oneida Circular, July 16, 1866. 3. “Journals of Charlotte M. Leonard,” August 31 and September 6, 1876, 39, Oneida Community Collection, Syracuse University (hereafter cited as oc Collection, su), box 63, folder: Leonard, Charlotte M. 4. Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetetes: FoodSexidentittes, 7. 5. John Humphrey Noves, Wistory of American Socialisms (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 629, 636. 6. Those outsiders especially interested in Oneida could also subscribe to the community newspapers or purchase pamphlets written by Noyes on his religious and sexual theories. 7. The most extensive writing from Oneida Community members about food and eating was a cookbook published by the oc press for outsiders. See Harriet Skinner, Oneida Community Cooking, Oneida ny: Oneida Community, 1873.

8. John Humphrey Noyes, Bible Communism: A compilation from the annual reports and other publications of the Oneida Association and its branches; presenting, in connection with their history, a summary view of their religious and social theories, 1853 Digital Edition, http://ibwww.syr.edu/digital/collections/b/BibleCommunism/, n.p. (emphasis in the original). 9. Noyes, Bible Communism (emphasis in the original). 10. “Journals of Charlotte M. Leonard,” September 10, 1874. ul. Probyn, Carnal Appeiites, 7. 12. Diary of Cornelia Worden, 1878, oc Collection, su, box 76, folder: Worden, Cornelia, 17.

13. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Sex as Symbol im Victorian America,” in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, ed. Jack Salzman (New York: Burt Franklin, 1980), 5:57. 14. Female sexuality was controlled through a form of spiritually based “courtChimiclewski 139

ship” and limited maternity. Only male members of the community instigated heterosexual intercourse. Because in the nineteenth century female sexuality was intimately connected with maternity, the limiting of women’s opportunities to conceive by definition limited their sexuality. Given that male continence was totally controlled by the male partner, it is not clear if women at Oneida had many choices in this aspect of their lives. Two recently published diaries of oc members reveal the emotional aspects of this sexual control: Muller, Desire and Duty at Oneida; and Hawley, Special Love/Special Sex. 15. Smith-Rosenberg, “Sex as Symbol,” 63. For an example of oc beliefs on eliminating certain foods from the diet, see Onewda Circular, December 12, 1855. 16. Oneida Circular, October 28, 1872. 17. Oneida Circular, February 25, 1858. 18. Oneida Corcular, February 22, 1869. 1g. Jessie C. Kinsley “Dearest E| dith|—” | written inj Early summer of 1914, oc Collection, su, box 63, folder: Jessie C. Kinsley (folder 3). 20. Oneida Curcular, March 29, 1855. 21. Thirty-one hundred quarts of vegetables, 792 jars of jellies and canned fruit, and 409 gallons of apples and applesauce were reported as having been processed for “the family” in 1867 for a population of about three hundred men, women, and children (“Fruit put up for the family 1867,” oc Collection, su, box 31, folder: Inventory 1867). 22. Charlotte Leonard reported that the new regime of four meals started on December 24, 1876 (“Journals of Charlotte M. Leonard,” 52). 23. Inventories of goods at Oneida on January 1 of each year reflected what was in the community kitchen and storehouses on that date. Included in the inventory for January 1, 1878, were more than 69 pounds of lard, 680 pounds of ham and fresh pork, and 770 pounds of corned beef and fresh beef (see inventories of “Store Room” and “Arcade Cellar” in “Subsistence Inventory,” January 1, 1878, oc Collection, su, box 34, folder: Inventory 1877). [fall this beet and pork was served to the three hundred members of the oc family, it would have been enough for only nineteen meais, if one estimates each serving at four ounces of meat. Given the evidence of the menus of November and December 1877, nineteen meals with this amount of meat would have been served within one to two weeks of eating. While meat was consumed at Oneida, it was probably eaten in lower amounts than in the outside world. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual consumption of meat in the United States was 178 pounds per capita (Elaine N. McIntosh, American Food Habits in Historical Perspective | Westport cr: Praeger, 1995], 82). 40 Strawberries and Cream

24. oc Collection, su, box 16, folder: 1877 Menus. The steady repetition of these

menus accentuated how typical this meal must have been. 25. Menus for November 4 to December 17, 1877, may be found in oc Collection, su, box 16, folder: 1877 Menus. Untortunately these are the only actual menus to have survived.

26. Most vegetables consumed in the U.S. and the Oneida Community during the winter months were those that could be easily stored—squash, turnips, pumpkins, and beans. Some items, which appeared on oc fall menus, such as tomatoes, corn, and peas, must have been canned. 27. “Diary of Cornelia Worden,” 1878, oc Collection, su, box 76, folder: Worcen, Cornelia, 17. Worden reported that during a fast oc members refrained from meat, tea, coffee, cider, and beer (“Inventory of the Horticulture Dept.,” oc Collection, su, box 31, folder: Inventory 1861); 970 pounds of coffee were reported in “Store Room | Inventory],” oc Collection, su, box 34, folder: Inventory 1877. Other inventories listed several hundred gallons of wine. In her cookbook, the oc member Harriet Skinner wrote, “The temperance of the Community in general is not the cowardly temperance of total abstinence, but the temperance of self-control” (Oneida Community Cooking, 41). 28. Croly visited Oneida in August 1868, and as Noyes wished to impress her, he asked his niece, Tirzah Miller, to host her tour (Miller, Desire and Duty at Oneida, 58).

2g. jennie fune’s American Cookery Book: Containing upwards of twelve hundred choice and carefully tested receipts; embracing all the popular dishes, and the best results of modern science... also, a chapter for invalids, for infants, one on Jewish cookery, and a varvety of miscellaneous receipts of special value

fo housekeepers generally (New York: American News, 1866, 1870). The first

edition did not include the chapter of Oneida recipes. 30. See Sales/Letters books, oc Collection, su, for a list of items the oc sold. 31, “Fruit Department Sales Book,” 1865-66, oc Collection, su, box 29; Willham Hinds to Wilham Levering, November 22, 1865, oc Collection, su, box 3g. 32. Charles Nordhoil, The Communistic Societies of the United States (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 264. The equivalent of $27,417 in fruit sales in 1873

is $422,461 in 2005.

33. George E. Cragin, “Fruit Canning in the Community; Notes and Reminiscences,” oc Collection, su, box 44, folder: George E. Cragin (older 2), 2. Pears, peaches, plums, and cherries were shipped from other parts of the state. Chinielewskt 141

34. Cragin, “Fruit Canning,” 1-2. 35. Jessie C. Kinsley, “Community Work,” oc Collection, su, box 63, folder: Jessie C. Kinsley (folder 4), 1-2 (emphasis in original). 36. “George N. Miller, Story of Early oc Life,” oc Collection, su, box 65, folder: George N. Miller (folder 19), 4. 37. Carole M. Counihan, The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1999), 48, 49. 38. Oneida Circular, October 29, 1857. 39. Oneida Corcular, January 6, 1868. 40. “First Annual Report of the Oneida Association, January 1, 1849,” digital edition, http://hbwww.syr.edu/digital/collections/f/FirstAnnualReportOfThe OneidaAssociation/ (accessed October 20, 2005). 4i. Oneida Circular, June 13, 1870. 42. Oneida Circular, August 2, 1869. 43. Oneida Circular, April 4, 1864. 44. Oneida Circular, February 27, 1871. 45. “Second Annual Report of the Oneida Association, February 20, 1850,” digital edition, http://hbwww.syr.edu/digital/collections/s/SecondAnnualReport OfTheOneidaAssociation/ (accessed October 19, 2005). 46. Jessie C. Kinsiey, “Community Work,” 1-2, 5. 47. Oneida Circular, February 28, 1870.

142 Strawberries and Cream

AF alt of Gods chufing,

| , Plenly opened,

For the belp of thofe poor in fpirtt, whofe

| bearts are fet ta feektheLord ther God |

in New-England, in the folemn

Ordinance of

; Wherein is thewed 1. Thenature offuch a FAST. 2.The| | Teitimony God will givethereuntoofhis gracious acceptation | 3. The eee Seafons wherein God will bear witnefs to fuch

A FAST. 4 Some helps to Faith that it fhall be fo.» 5. _Why fuch a FAST is foacceptable and fuccefsfull, 6. How much this concerns Gods people ia New-E ngland.

| Preached on a Fatt called by publitkiA We

thority, On 26.1, 94, ,

| By THOMAS THACHER, «° —

Paftor of a Church in Bojton. |

- BOS | Printed by obsTON Fofter, 16 7 gt. . | Title page, A Fast of Gods chusing, sermon by Thomas Thacher, preached in Boston’s Third Church on January 26, 1674, published in Boston (1678). Reproduced with permission from Readex, a division of NewsBank, Inc., and the American Antiquarian Society.

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above: As in the Shaker communities, Amana women found themselves

performing extensive labor associated with food preparation and commodification, such as turning cabbages into sauerkraut. “Putting up Amana Kraut—Homestead, Lowa,” ca. 1925. Gourtesy of Amana Heritage Society.

opposite: Laurel Robertson attempted to resuscitate family unity through natural-foods cooking and fresh, home-baked bread, illustrated in this woodblock print crafted by the author for Lauwrel’s Kitchen Bread Book: A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking (1984). Reprinted by permission of Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, p.o. Box 256, Tomales CA 94971, www.nilgiri.org.

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The founders of the Bloodroot restaurant and authors of The Political Palate, Betsey Beaven, Noel Giordano, Selma Miriam, and Pat Shea (sitting), decorated their restaurant with photographs of women. Photo by Noel Furie, reprinted with permission from the Bloodroot Collective, The Political Palate (Bridgeport cr: Sanguinaria Press, 1980).

wl , ES I Spear ‘ois DNdiy’ gee IN2ZE YW.ee ee=— eset (IN INNES F (L\fbSX o/heee ee ei LieAfb ES:RE Sy SS (0 (ff

ri\s fy MI ao “ . a a “.

New York, 143-44 Petrini, Carlo, 1,3

Nordhoff, Charles, 133 phantasmagoria, culinary, 266-69 North American Phalanx, 193 Pierce, Louise, 209-10 ' gn deCountry ™ my Co-op: de r ™battle - ~/,efor - do . “a ryJefirey, a > 58-59 North Pilcher, control of, 221: foods sold at, 222: Plymouth, 35-37, 40-42, 44-45, 54.

and health, 227-28; model, 228- See also Puritans 29; opening of, 224; success of, political consciousness: American,

cy @ ry eR * TRC eg SOQ eo °8 ° °

2Or o> 2 rey sc POPC +

North family, 1 | Norton, Furaha,and, 1 192, ; 199-200; | ° ana, 12 consumption

225-26; survey about, 223 187-88; Co-op Wars and, 220-22,

North family, 120 227-30, 232, 234-353 excessive

Noyes, john P25°295 Humphrey, 125-29,and, 138. - ~ 179yes, J DAFCY, 190s vegetarianism 162-65, 14in2s

80, 240, 253

a Lhe Political Palate (Bloodroot Cololive oil, 58, 59 , ee - aoa lective), 163, 169, 170 Oliver, Jamie, 260

og pe , pork, 109,259-60 112-18 — . , Oliver's ‘Twist, . | Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth), 78,

ey ; ; 81-54 35; diet, 129-32; and fasting, 129, : -

Olsen, Theodore, 100

Oneida Community: business, 192- .

Lo, Posman, Ellen, 23

, . P) |

op .. a potato fields, Amana, 152, 160n8

. . ; IOLIUCK, I

141n27; foodways, 21; founda- hack ; wo tion of, 125; mealtimes, 191, 19'7- I T? a Potter, David M., 38, 140ng2; sexual practices, 21, 6-7, 4 * 11-12 ek

126-29 Powell, Julie, 31057

organic consumerism, 180 Pradesh, Andhra, 91

The Other America (Harrington), prasad, 20, 93-94, 98

29% Prentiss, Ephraim, 109, 116-18,

Our Daily Bread Bakery, 231 123n26

Ox Yoke Inn, 153 Probyn, Elspeth, 29n97, 126 Promised Land, 86

Paine, Thomas, 202n33 protein complementarity, 181n1

Panisse, Chez, 173 Protestant Reformation, 11 Paradox of Plenty (Levenstein), 228 Public Broadcasting Service (PBs),

Paterna, Father, 68 258-66. See also cooking shows The Peart of Great Price (Smith),10 puja, 91-92, 94-95, 101-2

Peckham, Elizabeth, 207-8 Pure Land, 241, 248~49 Index 287

Puritans: and fasting, 38-43, 47; Robinson, Frances, 206 identity of, through foodways,19, | Robinson, John, 37 37-38, 78; and thanksgiving, 43- Rockefeller Institute, 162

A5, 47-50; and utopia, 9 Rogers, William, 188 Puskar-Pasewicz, Margaret, 21 Ronneburg Restaurant, 153

Pyong Gap Min, go Rosenberg, Rosalind, 216 Roth, Philip, 19-20, 75-81; Amert-

Quinn, Tom, 223, 224 can Pastoral, 78; Goodbye, GolumOQuirpum Comic Esaqr., 196 bus, 78-81; Porinoy’s Complaint, 78, 81-84; The Facts, 76-78

Raasch-Gilman, Betsy, 224, 226; A Rothstein, Edward J., 25 Eistory of North Country Co-op, Round, Phillip H., 19

224, 228 Royalists, 199

Rangachari, 92-94, 97-98 Rush, Benjamin: Inquiry into the

raw foods, 97 Natural Fistory of Medicine recipes, 272 among the Indians of North AmerReconstructionism, 240 tC, 200

Records of the Tnesday Club of An-

napolis, 1745-56, 188 Sahagun, Father, 58, 61 religion: Amana Society and, 143, Sam’s Club, 93 149, 157; and food and sex, 126-29; San Diego mission, 55

and identity through foodways, San Francisco, 173-74, 240 18-19; and individual food prac- San Francisco Zen Center, 254n1 tices, 242; in New England, 35-38; San Miguel, 71

New Spain and, 59-60; vegetari- Santa Rosa Mountains, 67-68 anism and, 23, 239-54. See also Sarma, Seshu, 98 Buddhism; Hinduism; Shakers; satort (enlightenment), 172

spirituality Savage, Hattie, 206

Renaissance, 11 Schlosser, Eric: Fast Food Nation: restaurants, 152-54, 157-59, 169-71 The Dark Side of the All-American

Richard, Michel, 258 Diet, 4

Rinchen, Geshe Sonam, 243 Schwartz, Richard H., 246 Rittenhouse, David, 202n33 Scituate, 46, 47

Rizzo, Mary, 22-23 The Second Political Palate (BloodRoach, Michael, 249 root Collective), 169, 170

Roberts, Amy, 211-19 seder, 85-86 Robertson, Laurel, 21; Laurel’s Seelye, L. Clark, 203, 216 Kitchen, 163, 165-69; The Laurel’s — Sellick, Harriet, 115

Kitchen Bread Beok, 167 Serra, Father Junfpero, 55-56 288 Index

sewall, Samuel, 43, 48 tity of, through foodways, 18-19, SeX, 21, '75~-76, 82-83, 126-29 22-93, 237n19; and vegetarianism, dex in Education (Clarke), 204 240, 252-54. See also caste distincShakers: and food preparation, 114- tions; middle class; working class 15, 123n19; and foodways, 21; and Southworth, Alice, 46 music, 30n47; and vegetarianism, spices, 192

13, 109-21; and youth, 116-18 spink, Mary, 212

Shamblin, Gwen, 9-10 spirituality, 111-14, 116-19, 121, 227.

Shapiro, Laura, 208 See alse religion Shea, Pat, 169 spreads: condemnation of, 219-14; “Sheila-ism,” 241 cost and complexity of, 207-13; Shostak, Debra, ig development of, 204, 206; gender Shroyer sisters, 223-24 and liberal ideals and, 22; public Silent Spring (Carson), 225 knowledge of, 206-7, 210-11; repSinger, Isaac Bashevis, 246-47 resentation of collegiate life in,

sleep, 39 214-16 Siow Food Manifesto, 2 Sri Venkateswara temple, 91 Slow Food movement, 1-4, 7, 16 starving times, 44-45, 54, 56

Slow Food USA, 1-2, 9 Steele, Kristen, 250

Smith, Brian K., 96 Stellino, Nick, 260, 263 smith, Captain John, 5 strawberries and cream festivals, Smith, Joseph, 10-11, 29n36; The 125-27

Pearl of Great Price, 10 Stubbes, Philip, 41 Smith, Louise, 206~7, 214 Students for a Democratic Society,

smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 241 23604 smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 129 sugar, 58-59, 147

smokehouse Restaurant, 153 Sukhavati, 248 Snyder, Gary, 251

social order: Amana Society,144-45, The Tassajara Bread Book (Brown),

155-57. 159; American, 187-88; 171-74, 180 and excessive consumption, 192- lassajara Cooking (Brown), 163, 93; and foodways, 14-15, 38, 164, 171-74, 180 165; and natural-loods movement, tea, 118, 190, 192, 14127, 147

180; of New Spain, 57, 59-60; of tea tables, 208, 209 Oneida Community, 126,129,135. technology, 224~25

See also caste distinctions television, 16, 23, 272. See also cooksocioeconomic status: and Co-op ing shows Wars, 220-22, 229-30, 234; and Ten Commandments, 243-44, food preparation, 269~72; iden- 255N10 Index 289

Thacher, Thomas, 39, 40 U.S. Public Heaith Service, 162 thanksgiving: American culture and, — utensils, 172 85, 88n1g; first, 45-46, 52n27; his- utopia: communal, 8-11, 20-21, 24;

tory of, 35-39, 54; Oneida Com- deferred, 89-90; definition of, 7munity and, 131; Puritan ritual of, 8, 12; fictional, 8-10, 24: and food43-45, 47-50; at Wellesley Col- ways, 12-15, 23-24; Hindu, 100,

lege, 205 102-3; local and global, g-10, 24Theravada Buddhists, 250, 256n24 25; religious vegetarianism and, Thomas, Anna, 163-66, 174-75, 177- 247; republican model of, 188-92; 80; The Vegetarian Epicure, 163, sensorial, 259, 269-73; Spanish

175, 177-80 Catholic, 56; types of, 8-9

Thou Shalt Not Kal; or, The ‘Torah Utopia (More), 7-8, 189, 192-93 of Vegetarianism (Frankel), 244 utopianism: achievement of, 12-18;

Tibetan Buddhism, 239, 248-50. in American, 5, 11-12, 187, 242:

256n24 communities and foodways, 3-4,

tikkun olam, 251-52 7-8, 12-18, 23-24 to Cherish All Life (Sapleau), 245

Todd, Rev. John, 204 Valentine, Gill, 15 lomato Blessing and Radish Teach- varnas, 96

anges (Brown), 174 Vassar, Matthew, 203 ‘True Grits, 223, 224 Vassar College, 203-4, 206, 209 Tubutama mission, 57,70 Vedic tradition, 91-92, 96 ‘Tuesday Club: Cheyne’s influence vegetables, 131-34, 141n26, 190-91. on, 191-92; consumption and cor- See aiso vegetarianism

ruption in, 199-200; ideals, 22, The Vegetarian Epicure (Thomas), 188; More’s influence on, 9; needs 163, 175, 177-80 and labor balance of, 193-95; rules vegetarianism: aesthetics of, 175-80;

of, 18g; selection of leaders in, and compassion, 242, 244-47, 2515

195-96 and economy, 113-14, 116, 162-63,

‘Turner, Bryan 5., 41 165, 173, 174; and feminism, 16971: functions of, 15; Hindu, 97-98;

United Society of Believers. See historical studies of, 21; North

Shakers Country Co-op and, 227; Onei-

United States: and Asian immi- da Community and, 129; percentgrants, 89-91; culture of, 19-20, age of Buddhists practicing, 250; 85, 88n1g; diet of, 225; foodways rationale, 162-63, 249: and reliof, 18; Jews in, 75; as symbolism gion, 23, 239-54; Shakers and, 13, of abundance, 4~7, 24,75, 84-85; 109-21; utopian communities and, and utopianism, 5, 11-12, 24,187 10, 111; world transformation and, 290 Index

243, 249, 251-52. See also natural- Woman’s Home Companion, 215

foods movement; vegetables women: Amana Society, 147, 158-59;

Virgin of Guadalupe, 69~70 and control of diets, 204-5; food Voyage to Icarva (Cabet), 8 practices of, at college, 17, 22; and higher education, 203-4, 214-16;

Wagner, Richard, 266 modern American, 164-66, 168Wallace, Elizabeth, 205 69; Oneida Community, 193-38, Waters, Alice, 2, 173 199n14; and vegetarianism, 163Watervliet, 113, 116-18 64. See also feminists; “kitchen Weigh Down Workshop, 9-10 sisters” Wellesley College, 203, 205-9, Wonder Bread, 225

212-14 woolen mills, Amana, 155

Wellesley Prelude, 207 Worden, Cornelia, 129, 141027 Wells, Freegift, 109, 116-17, 119, “Word of Wisdom,” 29n36

1239n26 working class: in co-op stores, 229-

Wells, Seth, 110 30; dehinition of, 2339-34, 236n7;

Welsh rarebit, 204, 210, 211 eating habits of, 227-28, 237n19;

Wentz, Zella, 219 leaders of revolution, 221-23

wheat, 58, 60 Wright, Lucy, 111, 119 White, Anna, 120

Wigglesworth, Michael, 40 Yan, Martin, 260, 269 Wild Harvest series, 259, 261-62 Yan Gan Cook: The Best of China,

Willard, Frances, 166 259, 262-63, 267-69 wine: Amana Society and, 146, 152, “you are what you eat,” 103n 155; Anza expedition and, 58,59, | Yumas (Quechan), 60, 61-66 6o; Cheyne on, 191

Winslow, Edward, 45, 52n27 Zimmerman, Dean, 220, 230 Winthrop, john, 37, 41-43, 48 “uber, Bill, 153

Index 291

IN THE AT TABLE SERIES

Eating in Eden: Food and Available in Bison Books Editions American Utopias

Edited by Etta M. Madden and The Food and Cooking of Eastern

Martha L. Finch Europe

Lesiey Chamberlain

Recovering Our Ancestors’ Gardens With a new imtroduction by the author indigenous Recipes and Guide to

Diet and Fitness The Food and Cooking of Russia Devon Abbott Mihesuah Lesley Chamberlain With a new introduction by the author A ‘laste of Heritage

Crow Indian Recipes and Herbal Masters of American Cookery

Medicines M. EK. Fisher, Fames Beard, Alma Hogan Snell Craig Claiborne, Julia Child Edited by Lisa Castle Betty Fussell With a preface by the author Good Eating Jane Grigson

Dining with Marcel Proust A Practical Guide to French Cuasine of the Betle Epoque

Shirley King

Foreword by James Beard Pampille’s Table

Recipes and Writings from the French Countryside from Marthe Daudet’s Les Bons Plats de France ‘Translated and adapted by Shirley King