Food Culture

Barbara Kingsolver begins her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, explaining how her family moved from Tuscan, Arizona to southern Appalachia to live on a farm and eat the food they grow. The book is refreshing and unique, a true family feat as both her daughter and husband contribute. She starts with statistics about how much oil is used to carry food, with the disturbing fact that the “average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacation” (p. 4). Her husband, Steven L. Hopp, adds that if every citizen ate one local, organic meal a week, our oil consumption would decrease by “over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week” (p. 5).

Kingsolver goes on to explain how many of us are grossed out when any dirt or soil is still on our food. The irony is that this is where our food comes from; without dirt, we would have no food. It should be the chemical fertilizers and pesticides that scare people. Yet we have become used to the processed, artificial food fed to us in neat packaging since the end of WWII. Kingsolver addresses how this artificial food is contributing to our nation’s ongoing problem of obesity, with extra calories coming from now-common ingredients from corn, soybeans, and other vegetables like lecithin, xanthan gum and citric acid. Specifically, children are targeted by the food industry, with billions of dollars going into how to advertise sugary, artificial foods to children.

One specific part of her first chapter I found interesting was her take on food culture. Kingsolver argues that European and Asian countries have their own food cultures. Italians eat Italian food, Chinese eat Chinese food, the French eat French food, etc. Their recipes and ways of cooking are handed down from generations. While Americans certainly eat all these kinds of cuisines, or at least the Americanized version of them, we have no food culture of our own. Instead, we have processed foods and an opposing series of fad diets that people use to try to get rid of the weight they’ve gained from the processed foods. Coming from upstate New York, I would have to somewhat agree with Kingsolver. Where I grew up, there was no “upstate New York” cuisine that everyone ate. The one kind of food that everyone ate, and everyone eats throughout the country, is barbeque. Barbequing, or cooking out depending on where you’re from, varies from state to state, but it seems to be a staple of the US. It also usually involves people coming together to eat and socialize, as Kingsolver describes French meals.

I wouldn’t necessarily constitute barbeque as a “food culture”, and certainly not a healthy one, but it may be a start. I don’t see America ever having one “food culture” because we are such geographically large nation compared to most European nations. Also, being the “melting pot” of the world, we have too many people from too many backgrounds to throw out all but one kind of cuisine. Considering the diversity of the US, I would argue it’s not just the food industry that keeps us from having one “food culture”, but also our history as a nation.