Acquired Tastes

How modern food helped make modern society between 1870 and 1930: stories of power and food, from bananas and beer to bread and fake meat.

The modern way of eating—our taste for food that is processed, packaged, and advertised—has its roots as far back as the 1870s. Many food writers trace our eating habits to World War II, but this book shows that our current food system began to coalesce much earlier. Modern food came from and helped to create a society based on racial hierarchies, colonization, and global integration. Acquired Tastes explores these themes through a series of moments in food history—stories of bread, beer, sugar, canned food, cereal, bananas, and more—that shaped how we think about food today.
            Contributors consider the displacement of native peoples for agricultural development; the invention of Pilsner, the first international beer style; the “long con” of gilded sugar and corn syrup; Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and the rise of celebrity tastemakers; and faith in institutions and experts who produced, among other things, food rankings and fake meat.Series Foreword
Introduction
Part I Time and Space
1 Tulare Lake and the Past Future of Food
2 A Biography of Modern British Bread
3 Old Is Bad, New Is American: Philippine Food Consumption and Production During American Empire in the Early 1900s
4 Does Your Beer Have Style? The Nineteenth-Century Invention of European Beer Styles
5 The Thin Ripe Line: Watermelons, Pushcarts, Distribution, and Decay
Part II Trust
6 Gilded Sugar and Corn Syrup's Long Con
7 The Search for the Average Consumer: Breakfast Cereal and the Industrialization of the American Food Supply
8 Eat the Rich: Radical Food Justice in Memphis and Chicago
9 Blackness and Bananas: The Josephine Baker Effect
10 Marion Harland, Tastemaker: How One Woman's Influence Helped Build an Industry
Part III Science
11 Who's Afraid of the Dark Sugar?
12 Darby's Fluid Meat, Digestion, and the British Imperial Food Supply
13 Ella Eaton Kellogg's Protose: Fake Meat and the Gender Politics That Made American Vegetarianism Modern
14 Marietta's Lamb
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Index“Food culture is too often limited by an obsessive focus on the new and now. The essays in this excellent, rigorous collection are a pointed reminder that the past is very much the present, and the future, too.”
—Helen Rosner, staff writer, The New Yorker
 
“An endlessly fascinating collection of stories about the invention and popularization of modern food. A constant thread traces the idea of nutritional reform through science and its sinister relationship with scientific racism, as well as efforts to challenge white supremacy in the global food system.”
—Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University
 
“These lively, wide-ranging essays about the surprising forces that shaped American eating habits make a stellar contribution to food scholarship.”
—Laura Shapiro, author of Perfection SaladBenjamin R. Cohen is Associate Professor at Lafayette College and the author of Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food. Michael S. Kideckel teaches history at Princeton Day School and is the author of the forthcoming Fresh from the Factory: Breakfast Cereal, Natural Food, and the Marketing of Reform, 1890-1920. Anna Zeide is Associate Professor of History and  Director of Food Studies at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, winner of the 2019 James Beard Award in Reference, History and Scholarship.