In recent years, studies of food have proliferated and are reaching increasingly large audiences. This is in part because of the participation of popular writers and public intellectuals, who have extensive experience in writing for the general public. Written in lucid prose, their work tends to focus strategically on common individual foodstuffs;1 some of them provocatively engage with fundamental socioeconomic, cultural, and moral matters that concern the well-being of society and individuals.2 Many scholars have also adopted the approach of addressing large issues through the lens of a singular food item or system.3
There has been a marked increase in scholarly research on food within various academic disciplines, such as public health, literary studies, sociology, and anthropology, touching on a wide variety of topics ranging from culture to policies.4 As latecomers to the table, as it were, historians are looking at food with newfound energy. In the area of American history, researchers have made fruitful efforts in chronicling food consumption in the United States.5 Among them, Harvey A. Levenstein’s work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American foodways stands as still-unrivaled social history, combining his passion for food with meticulous research.6 New research since then has significantly furthered our knowledge of food in American history and society, covering issues that did not receive sufficient attention from earlier scholars like Levenstein.7
One such issue is gender. Representing the fast-growing scholarship on this issue is the work of Sherrie A. Inness, a literary scholar by training, who has done a great deal in illuminating the importance of women in American food history. The essays in her anthology Kitchen Culture in America explore the critical roles of women in American food consumption.8 Expanding her study of the ways in which American cooking literature served to keep women in the kitchen during the first half of the twentieth century in Dinner Roles, Inness wrote another book about the 1950s, Secret Ingredients, exploring not only gender but also race and class in cooking literature.9
Ethnic food, largely a misnomer for non-Anglo food, is another topic that has generated growing intellectual interest, and it has been used as a vehicle for studying racial minorities and immigrants in the world of gastronomy. The geographer Wilbur Zelinsky was one of the first to systematically survey America’s ethnic-food landscape in his pioneering work in the 1980s.10 Published around the same time, the anthology Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States, includes nine case studies of different minority and immigrant groups in an effort to explore the meaning and practice of traditional food in their lives.11 Donna Gabaccia’s pathbreaking book offers a comprehensive examination of the history of America’s gastronomic diversity.12 In an engagingly accessible study, Joel Denker, a longtime food writer, chronicles how different immigrant groups brought their food to the New World.13
A great amount of work has been done in understanding the connection between food and race in recent years, as evidenced in my essay “Food, Race, and Ethnicity.”14 For example, Frederick Douglass Opie highlights the immigrant presence in soul food, noting not only the influence of Caribbean cooking in the 1960s and 1970s but also the growing importance of ethnic succession as Harlem soul food restaurants have been taken over by recent immigrants.15 Psyche A. Williams-Forson investigates the importance of chicken in the lives of African Americans, especially African American women. She acknowledges the racial stereotypes of African Americans that developed in connection with chicken, but she also shows its significance as a source of empowerment and income for them.16
Mexican food is another important ethnic cuisine. By 1980, it had become one of the “big three”—along with Chinese and Italian food—in the quickly expanding ethnic restaurant industry in the United States. Its history “has bubbled up in articles and chapters in books.” Yet few have attempted a book-length study that “tracks each foodstuff, each craze, each pioneer, each controversy,” as Gustavo Arellano notes in Taco USA, a provocative account of Mexican food’s journey to American mass consumption.17 Scholarly research on Mexican food remains disproportionately inadequate in light of its enormous presence in the marketplace and its extraordinary roles in facilitating immigration and cultural interactions.
Similarly, Americans have relished the food and convenience in Chinese restaurants for more than a century, but mainstream America paid strikingly scanty attention to the historical and cultural meaning of Chinese-food consumption. Since the 1990s, though, several essays have appeared in scholarly publications. In 1993, Gaye Tuchman and Harry Gene Levine drew attention to an extraordinary phenomenon: the long-standing Jewish connection to Chinese food.18
Shun Lu and Gary Alan Fine look into a question that many American Chinese restaurant-goers and commentators have wondered about: How authentically Chinese is the food in such restaurants? Chinese restaurateurs, the authors note, understood that “novel culinary traditions must be situated so as to seem simultaneously exotic and familiar: distinguishable from mainstream cuisine (and thus desirable) yet able to be assimilated as edible creations.”19 In a chapter in Secret Ingredients, Inness also explores the issue of culinary authenticity faced by Chinese American cookbook writers as they tried to appeal to non-Chinese audiences.20
Scholars have reminded us of the importance of transnational interactions as a context in which to understand the history of American Chinese food. For example, J. A. G. Roberts’s China to Chinatown chronicles the spread of Chinese food in the West, including the United States, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also discusses writings about Chinese food by Americans living in China.21 In an essay about the evolving Chinese restaurant industry in southern California, Haiming Liu and Lianlian Lin consider the role of immigration in the development of Chinese food and its importance to the Chinese community.22
The first decade of the twentieth-first century witnessed the publication of three books devoted to America’s Chinese food: Jennifer 8 Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Andrew Coe’s Chop Suey, and John Jung‘s Sweet and Sour.23 Lee provides captivating accounts of important episodes in the development of Chinese food in the United States, such as General Tso’s chicken, the fortune cookie, and the experiences of illegal immigrants working in Chinese restaurants. As the first book-length study of the topic in English, Lee’s book has garnered widespread attention. Coming from the world of food writing, Coe brings greater historical depth to the topics he covers. His extensive discussions of China’s culinary tradition and the reactions to it from American travelers there help us understand the background of its development in the United States. Jung, a retired psychology professor, has successfully reinvented himself as an insightful and prolific scholar of the Chinese American experience. Sweet and Sour contains valuable stories, many told directly by Chinese restaurateurs, that shed important insights into the saga of American Chinese food. These publications pave the way for us to more directly and systematically investigate that fundamental question: How and why did Chinese food become so popular in the United States?
Indeed, the new research and publications about food mark only the beginning, and much more lies ahead. Of particular importance are two challenges. First, while participation by scholars and writers from a wide range of disciplines has significantly broadened our comprehension of the importance of food in different aspects of life, food as a topic has yet to become a coherent field of intellectual inquiry. Second, and more important, in spite of the fruitful efforts and insights of numerous food writers and scholars in this regard, the scholarship on food as a whole has not sufficiently helped society recognize the centrality of food in human experience and history.24
Confucius proclaimed in the Book of Rites that the pleasures in food and sex embody the great human desires.25 Two centuries later, a young philosopher named Gao Zi expressed the same idea in a conversation with Mencius, declaring that the desires for food and for sexual pleasures represented human nature.26 The United States and other Western societies have, since Freud, significantly advanced an appreciation of the far-reaching importance of human sexuality. But the role of food remains underappreciated, and the field of food studies has yet to produce Freud-like giants to comprehensively theorize and widely disseminate the centrality of food in human experience and history. Symptomatic of this underappreciation, many people have harbored deep and undisguised doubts of the intellectual legitimacy of such a seemingly mundane topic. After moving to the United States in 1959 and earning a master’s degree in 1972 in eighteenth-century French literature, Jacques Pepin hoped to write a dissertation on the history of French food. But his hope was crushed by his adviser at Columbia University, a Frenchman, who said that “cuisine is not a serious art form. It’s far too trivial for academic study.” It was, the professor added, “not intellectual enough to form the basis of a Ph.D. thesis.”27 Over the decades, food researchers and writers often have to explain or even defend the significance of their topic. For example, the famous American food writer M. F. K. Fisher faced such questions as “Why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way others do?”28 Other American food authors, such as Hasia Diner, have encountered similar suspicions about the academic validity of their topic.29
The failure of many Americans to fully appreciate the importance of food can be traced to four sources. First, in both the United States and China, there is a tendency to regard food as something sensual. A popular early-twentieth-century Chinese writer, Lin Yutang, wrote fondly that food is one of the “keen sensual pleasures of our childhood.”30 The American art historian Bernard Berenson also saw food as belonging to the realm of “sensual pleasures.”31 In both countries, eating is associated more with our emotions and bodily needs than with our minds.
Second, food, especially food preparation, is often seen as belonging to the private sphere of “women’s work,” whereas society tends to privilege men’s activities and the public sphere. In the United States, historically, home cooking was considered to be women’s responsibility, and white working-class men tended to stay away from jobs in the kitchen. This is why cooking quickly became an important occupation of marginalized and feminized Chinese immigrant men after their arrival in the mid-nineteenth century.
Third, prevailing social currents, such as the Puritan outlook, strongly discouraged attention to things gastronomic. The Bible extorts Christians not to focus on their bodily desires because “your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you” (1 Corinthians 6:19 [KJV]). And it warns: “[P]ut a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite” (Proverbs 23:2 [KJV]). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white Protestant reformers and home economists made a concerted effort to streamline American foodways in a dispassionately utilitarian approach. An important leader of the home economics movement was Ellen Henrietta Richards, a native of New England, who founded the American Home Economics Association in 1909. In 1870, she was the first woman to be admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she was also its first female graduate and instructor. As a chemist, she applied scientific concepts and principles to food, and in 1890 she opened the New England Kitchen, a demonstration workplace designed to provide scientifically prepared and low-cost food to the working class. Nonetheless, she could hardly have been called a foodie. For her, the value of food was determined in terms of calories, nutrition, and economics; it was not to be enjoyed in terms of taste or aesthetics. In her widely read The Cost of Food (1902), she cautioned against indulgence in food: “The man who has his eyes fixed on a good for which he is willing to subordinate everything else can maintain health without the luxuries of the table. He finds that food which will serve him best, and is not tempted by that which is useless.”32 In her mind, anything beyond what was necessary was bad not just for her individual Anglo readers but also for their race: “We take no warning from other animals and from plants, all of which fail of their best end when overfed. Nature does not make an exception in favor of man. … In all the discussions of the infertility of the higher branches of the human race, how little attention is paid to the weakening effect of the pampered appetite.”33 Apparently, her focus was not on food itself but on its social and moral ramifications.
Fourth, we have a tendency to take for granted things that are obvious and easily reachable. In affluent societies like the United States, food is numbingly abundant, making it seem mundane. In 2009, the average store (among the 35,612 large supermarkets) carried more than 48,000 food and food-related items, all of which are also available in other places, including retail giants like Wal-Mart and Target.34 In addition, the plentitude of food is also measured by its accessibility and affordability. The percentage of income the average American has to spend on food has fallen from more than 42 percent in 1901 to about 13 percent in 2003.35 Evidently, the more we are removed from hunger as a society, the less we remember the centrality of food in our existence as individuals and communities.
We must remember, though, that such extraordinary food abundance represents only an exception. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out, throughout history most societies have been poor, and with poverty comes hunger. For most human beings, food scarcity has been a very common experience.
To more appropriately appreciate the significance of food, we have to recognize not only its intimate connection to every facet of our socioeconomic, cultural, and political life but also its central importance to our physical well-being and existence. To do so, we must study and understand food from perspectives that transcend the boundaries of traditional disciplines. This is a daunting task, but it also makes the study of food an exciting intellectual endeavor.