Interpreting Food at Museums and Historic Sites by Michelle Moon

Author:Michelle Moon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Chapter 4

Local Flavor: Interpreting Food and Place

In the novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s Ishmael is introduced to the island of Nantucket, center of Yankee whaling, through a local inn’s chowder. Guests at the Try Pots eat “chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes.”1 In 1851, Melville was already attuned to the ways in which foods defined American places and regions.

American landscapes are patterned over with variations in climate, architecture, speech, and, of course, food. Travelers trade information about regions they’ve visited, publishing accounts and, more recently, sharing photos, videos, and online reviews. Travel magazines, movies and television, and the tourism industry generate and reinforce expectations of place. But sometimes, Americans have leaned away from regional identities and more toward pan-Americanism and homogeneity. Celebrated during the 1930s, regionalism was out of fashion in the 1950s and 1960s. Regional sensibilities have waxed and waned throughout American history in what historian Edward Ayers calls “a cyclical process of forgetfulness and rediscovery.” Recently, regionalism has been rising again in the form of an “impassioned localism” seeking to revitalize communities and strengthen links between people, land, and culture.2

History museums and historic sites are inherently place-based. Many history institutions are already linking food and place in interpretation as they explore the environmental and social conditions that give rise to regionally specific food resources and traditions, revealing thick interconnections between natural and cultural heritage. As exciting as that is, museums also have a responsibility to resist celebratory oversimplifications. Food historian Sandy Oliver cautions that regional food history is both “terrifically underexplored and over-romanticized,” reminding interpreters to challenge themselves with questions like:

When do distinctive regional foodways appear? How long do they last? How self-conscious are they? What does economic condition have to do with it? Did not the northern and southern elite eat more similarly to one another than to the lesser classes in either region? How many regional foods reflect climate and local species, and how many are based on introduced foods? Which resulted from the predominant ethnic group? And which resulted from market conditions? Are there, in fact, parts of the country with no distinctive regional foodway?3

Teasing apart inherited place-based food stories from concrete evidence about food production and dissemination can be tough. Cultural imperialism and similarities in climate, Oliver says, may have caused “greater similarities across the country even before the homogenizing effects of industrial food production and nationwide transport occurred.” Colonial and early Anglo-American eating habits, no matter the region, seem to have been more alike than not. According to historian Susan Strasser, for most of written history, American meals were fairly homogenous:

Salted meat and cornmeal, which could be kept all year, dominated winter diets; summer brought milk and fresh produce, but milk spoiled . . . butter and cheese prevailed among dairy products because they kept better. Leafy vegetables also spoiled, and many farmers did not plant them because of the need for constant care, limiting their diets to wild greens or vegetables that could be stored or preserved, such as turnips, pumpkins, and beans.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.