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Anna Zeide, "US History in 15 Foods" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
00:38:24
An interview with Anna Zeide
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- [00:01]
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- [00:31]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
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Dr. Ana Zadeh
Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
- [00:46]
Brian Hamilton
And breathe.
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Dr. Ana Zadeh
Oh sorry.
- [00:48]
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- [00:52]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
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Brian Hamilton
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- [01:01]
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- [01:31]
Brian Hamilton
Welcome to the New Books Network hello and welcome back to New Books in Environmental Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brian Hamilton of Deerfield Academy and I couldn't be happier to be joined today by Dr. Anna Zadeh. She's Associate professor of History and the founding Director of the Food Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. She's the Author of the 2019 James Beard Award winning book the Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry and she's the co editor of 2021's acquired stories about the Origins of Modern Food. She's here today to talk about her latest book, it's called US History in 15 Foods and it came out on February 9th from Bloomsbury Academic. Dr. Zeta, welcome to the show.
- [02:22]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Thank you so much. I'm excited to talk to you about this book as we have about the others.
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Brian Hamilton
Yeah, you are my first three time guest, so congratulations for that. There's a plaque in the mail you can put up, but it's also noteworthy, if less noteworthy, that you're also this book inaugurates a new Series from Bloomsbury called history in 15. This is the first in a planned series. Can you tell us about that before we get into this one?
- [02:46]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah. So I was really happy to be able to write this book as part of this series and help kind of set the foundation for what some of the shapes. Shape of these books might be. So they're intended to be kind of a crossover academic and public oriented books that take big themes, whether it's food history or the other two that are under contract or a global history of epidemics and an LGBTQ history in 15 lives. So taking big themes and sort of breaking them down into digestible chunks. And the 15 largely comes from hoping to make these good teaching resources. So 15 weeks of a semester, the idea that an instructor could assign the books and it would correspond to the timeline of an average academic cycle, but also for public audiences or anyone else sort of having these short chapters that feel like they address a range of different stories, all on common theme. So this book is the first. We'll see how the others come forward. But I think the press is looking for other installments and proposals for the series. If anyone listening would like to propose.
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Brian Hamilton
Something and we should specify. Sure. We're talking 12, 13, 14 pages, essentially. Right. So it's really moves quickly. It's a great.
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Dr. Ana Zadeh
That's right. Yeah. Trying to keep them. That was a challenge in this book. I kept asking for a little few more word count because it was hard to do. Do everything that each chapter needed to do and maintain this desire for short and accessible chapter.
- [04:20]
Brian Hamilton
Yeah, absolutely. And worth it. Undergraduates will read it and others as well. So that's great to think about. I mentioned the challenge for you. The challenge for these other authors that are lined up here in the series is of course, selection. And so I'd love to hear you talk a bit about how you narrowed yourself down or worked up to whichever direction you went to 15. How do you get to 15?
- [04:38]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah, I was thinking of going back and digging in some of my notes to think about some of the other foods that fell on the cutting room floor because. Yeah, kitchen floor. I wrote the book in a fairly condensed timeline, but I had written the proposal and came up with a chapter outline several years before that. So probably in 2017 or 18 that I did the proposal. And that whole summer I really just spent reading what widely to try to think about how to choose these foods. I was very clear. I kind of begin the introduction by saying when I say I've written this book, people guess what foods I might have chosen. And they're rarely the ones that I ended up with, which is to say they are not kind of classic foods that you would think of as American foods. They're not apple pie, there's no hot dogs in here. And so instead I tried to think of foods that really embodied a particular moment in American history as much as being a food history book. It's very much a U.S. history book. And I thought a lot about what are the major trends and themes and changes that are happening in different moments in American history and how might I choose a food that helps me to tell that story. And so yeah, there was the choice not only of the 15 foods, but then the periodization of trying to tell to break US history up into 15 chunks. That made sense given my expertise and the kind of areas that I wanted to emphasize and going back to pre colonization. But certainly there's a lot more focus on the 20th century and later part of the 19th because of both the rapid scale of change in food in that time and because of my own training in that time period. But I try to give a nod to the first half, so to speak, of the US Survey too, to understand that portion of the story through food.
- [06:34]
Brian Hamilton
You're right that there aren't like the Norman Rockwell foods in here, but there are a few chapters that are on foods that typically show up in a US History textbook. Right? There's corn in the colonial era. And thinking about the early English colonization, there's whiskey and the so called Whiskey Rebellion. Certainly in the early Republic, there's a chapter on peanuts. And you often get peanuts showing up with George Washington and Carver in a textbook or maybe Jimmy Carter as well. But most of your selections are kind of familiar foods, foods we know for the most part that don't show up in textbooks, but turn out to be surprisingly useful at sort of elucidating major currents in these different eras of U.S. history that the book is broken up into. And I would echo you say the book really works as a US History book for those that don't care about food. I mean, it'd be weird to read this book if you don't care about food, but it works. If somebody didn't know US History, this would be a fine place to start. And after 200 pages, they have a good primer on the topic. But one food you write about that kind of straddles that line between the canonical foods that do show up in textbooks and those that don't is maybe graham crackers, or more specific, Graham, accurately, Graham Graham bread. Right. So, yes, Sylvester Graham, he often does sneak into US surveys to kind of, I don't know, illustrate, like, the kooky edge of antebellum reform era that spawned more serious movements like abolition or temperance, women's suffrage. But you really take him seriously. And so why doesn't Graham. Why does Graham deserve kind of the earnest treatment you give him, do you think?
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Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah, I think I first encountered Sylvester Graham less in a kind of broader US History narrative and more in the history of nutrition or some of the older food history that kind of snuck into history of medicine, where he, along with many of the other kind of food and dietary reformers of the most early but later 19th century, were definitely dismissed as kooks and cranks and, you know, had very little to offer and like, little, you know, anecdotes about the. The oddities of this time. And I. I think I even reading those without knowing the context that, well, when I first encountered them 15 years ago, something sat wrong with me about that. It felt like something about their kind of countercultural or oppositional ideas that they were putting forward felt like they were worth taking seriously in what it would have taken to kind of come up with these proposals and why something would have motivated these very quirky, you know, dietary practices. And, you know, I think that that trend beyond me, you know, there's been a lot of reconsideration of the Kellogg's and other kind of dietary reformers. And I felt like that chapter maybe more than others. I feel like the early 19th century was not an era that I had found as fascinating in the past. And I found myself, through the telling this Graham story, really loving that era and wanting to study the early 19th century more. And I think reading about him and what he was reacting against and why bread, you know, this Graham bread was this unbolted whole wheat flour, basically at a time when very few people were seeking out whole wheat flour. And in contrast, fine, refined white flour was definitely seen as the modern and desirable food. What it was about whole wheat flour, as well as the other dietary practices, vegetarianism, you know, abstaining from alcohol and other practices that he promoted. What, why. What it was that those abstentions represented to him about the increasingly fast pace that he was noticing about the country, about what he felt like was happening. And so, you know, whether his specific recommendations hold water today in any kind of nutritional sense, which I think is an interesting question, but obviously not, not the most valuable historical one. It seems very clear that he tells us a lot about the moment and in Particular about the changing technologies of food production and the way that grain processing and flour milling had come to represent something for him that he was not comfortable with in terms of the direction the nation was taking alongside many other social ills, like you mentioned in abolition and temperance and other movements of that period.
- [10:51]
Brian Hamilton
It's interesting, even if he wasn't like ahead of his time necessarily, he was very much of his time, as you're saying. Many of these recommendations now are kind of standard FDA fare or kind of eat more vegetables, eat whole grains, drink less temper and alcohol use and things like that. It's funny, we came around to that. So he's. He has the last laugh, I suppose.
- [11:10]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah. And I think he. Because he's, you know, no one's really. I mean, students who aren't studying history haven't really ever heard of Graham bread, don't really know Sylvester Graham, but everyone knows Graham crackers. And so it's also this interesting and kind of easy in to say there's this guy, you know his name from this food and this Graham crackers specifically have like, you know, way more sugar and are far more highly processed than he would have ever promoted. So it makes for a good story as an entry point into this character.
- [11:37]
Brian Hamilton
Absolutely. Well, when you get us to the Progressive era and the turn of the 20th century, you choose Jell O as our guide. Something else students would have resonance with your students. And this ends up working really, really well. And it's not that your point, it's just that there's this weird processed food that shows us that food was getting weirdly processed this time. This isn't just about like, oh, industrial capitalism was suddenly on the menu. Instead, you make this convincing case that Jello gives us a great vantage point to observe the kind of the imperatives and the blind spots of the progressive movement at that time. And so could you take us through that argument a little bit?
- [12:13]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah, yeah. And Jell O, I think, is an interesting one because I think for the broader American public, they think of Jell O as sort of important in American food history. But they usually would anchor it more to the 1950s and the mid 20th century post war moment when it did have a kind of revival and obviously legacies that still carry forward today in terms of people have had their grandmother's Jello salads or other things. And so I sort of like that this instead pushes it to say, this tells us not about the 1950s as much as about the turn of the 20th century. And maybe more than any other chapter I really like the way that this one came together to looking at the production and consumption sides of things and using the food to connect those dots. Because that chapter tells the story both of why Jell O and its, you know, ingredient, gelatin, which comes from animal parts, why it became, why there was such a large supply of gelatin at this moment as a consequence of the rise of the meatpacking industry and the rise of cattle culture and a displacement of bison and indigenous peoples and the rise of the kind of industrial system that had all these byproducts that then needed to be used somewhere, which stimulated, you know, the desire to use this gelatin in various products, including Jell O. And then how Jell O becomes this company that really works in hand in hand with the rising domestic science movement to sort of promote this lighter, you know, flavored product as a dessert, in contrast to the heavy desserts of yore. And how they use advertising really intentionally, in a kind of early advertising phase to introduce a food that, you know, there had been very laborious boiling calf, you know, calf feet to make a gelatin product in the past, but in a lot of ways it was a new product. And so how do you create a market for a new product? How do you use advertising? How do you make, you know, cold fruit flavored meat parts appealing as a dessert? And so, yeah, I thought Jell O came in to really beautifully connect the dots that there. And yeah, Jello. I'll. Helen, Helen Vate, who's another food historian, recommended Jell O for that era. I had had other foods in that space that just weren't quite working. And I kept thinking through what else I could do. And she's a well known food historian of the Gilded Age and Progressive era. And so I, I wrote to her and said, what else would work here in Jello was her suggestion. And it, and it, I think it really worked perfectly.
- [14:50]
Brian Hamilton
That's terrific. And then when you get to the post war suburbia chapter, it's not Jello you go with, but it's green bean casserole. And now if I can get personal here for a moment, I have it on good authority that this, this Thanksgiving staple is a point of contention in your marriage. Would you care to comment on, comment on that? I don't know.
- [15:06]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
It's true. And I dedicate this chapter fully to my partner who asked me if I would write a chapter about green bean casserole. And so I did. It's my gift to him and he gets a lot of credit for me being able to write this book, too. But, yes, green bean casserole in our family. And I. And I think it's not an uncommon dynamic, that it's a very beloved dish among some members of people's families and represents something kind of abhorrent in other dimensions of people's lives. And I think, you know, there are lots of foods like this that are contentious. And Thanksgiving, like other holidays, that brings together different families and different people eating together, I think sometimes highlights these foods that become so iconic and memorable on the one hand and new and never heard of for others. When I often ask students around Thanksgiving who's ever tried green bean casserole, many have never even had it. Many, you know, it's always on the table, and I think there's some regional variation, but it also just seems kind of just idiosyncratic. Who has or hasn't come to love it? And for a long time, I said to my. To my husband, you know, this. You don't really like this, right? I mean, it doesn't actually taste good. It's just that you have this memory, this association with it. He'd say, no. Oh, it's delicious. What are you talking about? And, you know, after many years of it being on our table, I've sort of come to like it, and my kids have sort of come to like it now, too. And I felt like that itself was an interesting story in terms of how does a dish like this that is, you know, kind of weird, like a mixture of unexpected canned foods that get mixed together. How does it come to feel like a staple? And why does it elicit also a kind of disgust, among other things, parts.
- [16:54]
Brian Hamilton
Of, you know, and so it's not only this war and in your family, but it's also. I mean, you say this is a cold war food, right? This is essential ammunition in the cold. I think you say that it becomes a symbolic weapon to show American superiority. So how is that?
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Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah, so green bean casserole is invented in the, you know, industrial kitchens, domestic home economics economics kitchens of Campbell Soup Company, which they have, you know, on staff, home economists who are trying to come up with innovative ways to use Campbell's soup products to put these recipes into promotional booklets and on the backs of cans. And so canned food, the broader food system, the use of home economics and domestic science to create these tools that were supposed to make women's lives easier so they're not having to cook from scratch. All of these tools and technologies and advances and ways of thinking of women's labor were definitely Used very strategically in the kind of ideological fight of the Cold War to say, you know, American superiority, the superiority of democracy and capitalism are embedded and evidenced by how free our women are on the one hand, to stay home, to be able to take care of their children, to have an easy meal on the table by dinner time, not, you know, working hard, toiling in the factories like the Soviet women in their baggy work, work, unif. And so green bean casserole came to sort of stand in, at least in my telling, for, you know, all of this kind of technological improvement and the ability to create these homey, comforting casseroles that embodied the kind of domestic space of the, of the mid 20th century. And that domestic space also, you know, the nuclear family and the Leave it to Beaver kind of motif was also very much a part of that Cold War platform.
- [18:52]
Brian Hamilton
That's great. And you got chapter here on tofu, but most of the other chapters, they're sort of set in the food's golden age, or at least one of the golden ages that the food had. And in here the tofu really, you know, Tofu in the US really starts taking off in the 80s and the 90s. But you give us sort of a prehistory of that tofu going mainstream. And so what was up with tofu in the earlier period?
- [19:13]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah, tofu is an interesting chapter. And I really tried to find something else to use to tell the story because as you mentioned, the chronology fits a little less well because honestly, tofu doesn't. I use it to tell kind of 1960 to 1975. And tofu really only emerges at the end of that period. But, but I felt like the, the platform, the foundation and the platform that was laid by the alignment of food and politics and countercultural movements before tofu's rise is what enabled it to become so popular. And the seeds of starting to think about foods both kind of of Asian origin and foods that come from protein sources other than meat, and the kind of rise of very small scale shops. Tofu really notably emerged from the work of a few people who both brought knowledge of tofu for production from Japan. And of course, there were Japanese and Chinese immigrants who are already making tofu here, but much more for their own communities and less of this kind of spreading to broader culture, to white culture. And there were sort of the acolytes of the tofu movement, William Shirtleff, who still runs this amazing soy info center online that learned to make tofu. And he and his partner started just visiting small shops and this Was also the time of many new cooperative grocery stores and small kind of hippie movement food places and having this network across the country of places where Shirtliff could come talk about his book of tofu and talk about the processes and then have places that could source the products and connect to lots of small local communities. It began this kind of seeding venture that built on the backs of this other food movement that had started to spread. And the way that food had become politicized through the civil rights movement and through the back to the land movement and environmentalism made it possible for tofu to sort of emerge and spread in this moment of concern about the way that our diets were shaping other cultures abroad or shaping the environment. How meat consumption was part of a broader problem as the energy crisis begins in the early 70s. So all of these kind of connecting the dots through this food that would later take off.
- [21:45]
Brian Hamilton
That's great. You close out the century with two chapters that foreground McDonald's. And that might sound kind of obvious, but you do it in all these nuanced ways that are constantly surprising me. One of the first surprises I had was that I'm kind of ashamed. I didn't realize how central the McNugget was to the popularizing of the chicken nugget, which is, again, that's not the argument of the chapter, but that's something I took away from that. And I also didn't realize how much the chicken nugget. The lifespan of the chicken nugget in American culture is really like, it's my life. I'm the chicken nugget generation. I didn't realize. It kind of just came around just before I was born. And I didn't realize when I was eating all these nuggets at McDonald's from my mom when I was five, that it was like, these were like, this is a new food. This is a new food I was eating. That's so strange for me, obviously becomes this world beater and my own children are eating so many nuggets. But anyway, that's beside the point anyway. But you use. But again, your point is not about nuggets themselves, but about the 80s and about how the chicken nuggets, in your words, express the values of Reagan era America, the America which I was born and raised in. And so what ways does it. Do they do that?
- [22:42]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah. And it was a surprise for me too. I chose chicken nuggets before I had the sense. I kept asking everyone as I wrote it, what do you think came first? The McNuggets or the Chicken nugget, you know, and everyone is like, well, the chicken nugget. And I said, no, no, like McNugget in a lot of ways was the creation of, you know, McDonald's had this really central role. You know, there were other similar products maybe before, but as far as what we call a chicken nugget with that name and with the particular food technology that's needed to create that product, it was very much a product of the early 80s. And yeah, that. That chapter, I think, tells so much about the rise of the chicken industry more broadly. The dramatic rise in popularity of chicken that was so promoted by this vision of it as a healthier food in a time of concern about saturated fats. And then the kind of irony that the. The form that most chicken quickly got turned into is this further processed form where it's heavily breaded and deep fried and refried and reconstituted in fast food or in frozen food, which, of course, negates quite a lot of its healthfulness. And so that kind of sunny projection of what chicken could offer, and then the reality, both of the kind of health consequences and nutritional consequences of it, but also what lay beneath the incredible rise of popularity and cheapness of chicken was these reductions in regulations for labor and environmental protections that very much characterized the Reagan era and the Carter era before it as well, where it was possible to staff these factories increasingly with immigrant labor with very little protection, so that this huge supply of chicken, processed chicken, could be had to turn into these chicken nuggets. And so you know what it was that was changing about the regulatory structure and the industrial development and labor structure of the 80s that made it possible for us to have this ubiquitous nugget that, yes, certainly even the. By the time we were. We were young, even though it had been around only a few years, it felt. It felt so established. And now, of course, it's like a whole class of food on its own. And you know how that came to be so accepted? I use a number of old McDonald's ads that just introduced the chicken nugget when I teach about this sometimes. And they're just kind of amazing. This sort of like, can you believe it? There's no bone. You can dip it. The sauces, you know, all of that. It was such a. A kind of remarkable sense of a new product that was gonna take off. And indeed it did.
- [25:23]
Brian Hamilton
Yeah.
- [25:23]
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- [25:53]
Brian Hamilton
And you bring us to the present with your final chapter on Korean tacos. And you look at immigration and social media and you look at that through both, not just the development of this food craze that kind of stands in for others, the Korean taco that has these long histories in different cultures, but also the Obama campaign, for instance. And, and you also mentioned kind of at one point about kind of this, what you might call food revolution that we saw in the end of the first decade of the 21st century and into the next. And by doing so, you're kind of historicizing some of imagine your future readers of this book. People that will be excited about a book that tells us history through food will be those that came of age at that time. And so I'm curious how both, how you see today's food activists certainly, but also foodies, a different kind of category in our generation. How do they bear the marks of this, of this kind of early Obama ish, early social media era.
- [26:40]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah, yeah. And so the Korean taco I find so interesting because when Kogi came out, this Los Angeles food truck that sort of popularized the Korean taco and helped spread the food truck phenomenon more widely when it was first, you know, being reviewed in restaurants and magazines and other things. There was this clear connection between this Obama era season of hope, the sense of change, a next chapter for America, where we were headed, and this new food, ethnic fusion, food that had this kind of mass appeal and was, was bringing together ways of eating that hadn't been seen before. And I think that kind of hopefulness very much permeated the early, you know, 20th, 21st century food movement, as you mentioned, the sense of being able to take something delicious and turn it into a transformed food system. You know, as with so many early phases of food system, I think it came quickly to be seen how many people were left out of those movements, how, how entrenched so many of the, the processes that had led to, to the problematic parts of our food systems were, how much political entrenchment made it hard to make changes, how even local efforts ran into all kinds of problems, you know, And I think today, as I've been somewhat historicizing that movement and teaching a new class on introduction to Food Studies this semester, I've been talking to my students a lot about how they see the food movement and they're quite unaware of it, even as they are very aware of the effects it has had. Right? So I say, well, how many of you have seen food ads for local food and thought that that was valuable? And everyone's hands goes up. How many of you thought about alternative meat sources and why we have those? Everyone hands goes up, you know, local, like, how about farmers markets? How many of you have been to one? Hands go up. So you know, how dramatically, even in the last decade, so many of the, you know, the goals of the food movement were realized in small ways in ways that have become tangible. And yet how quickly some of the bigger visions got monopolized or pulled into broader industrial efforts. How many kind of issues of injustice continue to dominate questions about food security, but also how much more the conversations about justice, I think, are central to conversations about food in a way that they maybe weren't in the beginnings of that food movement. So, yeah, I think we're still in a very interesting time. And to be able to feel and consider my own engagement with food as a product of that movement and how much has changed and how little has.
- [29:26]
Brian Hamilton
Changed.
- [29:29]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Is very interesting.
- [29:29]
Brian Hamilton
Watching the present become the past, it's going to keep happening to us. I have a half baked, pun intended question. I'm thinking about looking back at the table of contents, thinking about the whole book here. With one or two exceptions, Americans still eat all of these foods that you write about. And, and by contrast, most of us still don't really wear the clothes from all of these eras or we don't really read, we don't broadly read a lot of the books from a lot of these eras or dance their dances. I guess we do live in the houses, in the building work, in the buildings that were built these times. We don't keep building buildings that look like that all the time, Whereas we do keep making a lot of these foods in much the same way. And so I sort of wondering, you know, our food ways evolve, certainly, and your book shows that really clearly, but we also retain some for a really long time. And so I wonder, do you think that food offers, like, a unique cultural means through which to connect to history in a way that, like, we're doing it just the same way? Right. And if so, are we actually doing that? And could you know, are we connecting to our past through food? Could we be doing that better? Is there potential here we're not using? I don't know really where I'm going here, but what might it look like? I don't know. Take it where you want.
- [30:31]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah, yeah. No, it's an interesting question. For the first time last semester, I incorporated a kind of historical cooking lab into my US Food history class, where we were actually recreating old recipes and talking about them, and logistics and other things prevented us from doing it that often. But we did it for two. Two different modules in the course, and it was. It was really fascinating because, yeah, the ingredients were ones I could easily go find at the grocery store today. The recipes themselves still felt quite legible, even though one of them was from 1796 from Amelia Simmons American Cookery, which was kind of the first American cookbook. And of course, you know, it didn't have the same measurements or temperature or, you know, we had to. We had to translate it somewhat for the modern kitchen. But I think my students were interested in how accessible it felt like they could go back to this cookbook and still make a lot of the same recipes, which I think speaks in support of at least your idea that a lot of these foods stick around, even if the context changes so much. And the way that recreating these recipes, I think it's. You know, we have photographs, we talk a lot. I think when I teach history about how. How limited our sensory, you know, ability to access the past is to kind of the visual, because we can't really smell the past. We can't taste the past. I know museums and others have tried to experiment with these kinds of, you know, what did New York City smell like in 1900? But I think, and. And, yes, we can try to taste the past. We can try to cook these old dishes or source ingredients in. Come closer to the way that they might have been in the past, but also recognizing how much the technologies that produce all the ingredients have changed, how breeding efforts have changed the taste of our fruits and vegetables and meat. All of these things, I think, yeah, give us access to continuity and also a sense of all the factors that shape how we might be eating the same food, but why it might be something totally different today than it was in the past.
- [32:39]
Brian Hamilton
Oh, that's great. Thank you for clearing that up for me. I know historians don't do the future, but. So apologize. But any predictions for the food that would represent the next chapter of US History? Is it going to be cultured meat? Or dried grasshoppers. Or as we're speaking, we're still waiting to hear from the Department of Defense about aliens. So maybe there's food coming from planets. What do you predict?
- [32:59]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah, that's a good question. That's a good question. I think so, because I think it helps us to. Or maybe even of the present. You know, I think even the Korean Tacos chapter now feels a bit dated in terms of what it is. And so I've thought about, like, what is the food right, right now and how. Because I've, I am aware of a lot of these kind of, you know, food trend, food industry trends where they say that the hottest foods of 2023 are going to be X, Y and Z. And I find those so interesting because they just kind of say them as fact. And I think. But you know, what's all that lays beneath these predictions? What are these foods intending? And I, and I also in terms of the edible insects you mentioned, I used it, that idea in a chapter I wrote about in the Acquired Taste book about Marion Harland, who was this, you know, kind of domestic advisor who at first didn't like canned foods and then she came to recommend them. And I tried to compare it to like, what if some local, I mean, some current food personality started talking about edible insects, what kind of influence that would have into something that most people still find questionable as a way to kind of relate to what canned foods might have felt like to a lot of consumers, you know, 120, 20 years ago. And so I do think that thinking about alternative proteins, whether it's insects or cultured meats, is such a important and lively conversation at this moment. And I think it's going to be really valuable to see where it goes. I thought about using both of those, actually, for the 21st century chapter already as a way to kind of predict where conversations are headed. And I also think the ongoing kind of globalization of our food systems and contentiousness of immigration, which is certainly discussed in the Korean Tacos chapter, will continue to shape the way we think about food into the near term future, such that ongoing new flavors, so to speak, to white American audiences at least, will probably also be central to the chapters to come.
- [35:06]
Brian Hamilton
I wonder. I was thinking about sort of we're seeing some tides turning on globalization potentially, certainly too soon to say that, but. But I was wondering how that could be reflected with foods. But we will see if we see it all. I know that the months ahead you'll be busy teaching and sharing this book with lots of readers, but I'M sure you're also really eager to pad your appearances, your lead in appearances on the show. So are there other things on the back burner that you'll return to when you have time to and what part you might bring back to us?
- [35:34]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Yeah, I have been working for a while on a history of food waste project that I kind of set aside while I worked on the US history and 15 foods. But I am returning to a little bit. I'm working on a chapter of it right now that looks at dumpster diving and the rise of food not bombs in the 1980s. Similar period to what we're talking about with chicken nuggets, especially the origins of food not bombs and the nuclear protest movement against nuclear power in the late 70s and early 80s. And thinking about how food waste and food salvage and efforts at addressing this enormous problem of food waste alongside ongoing food insecurity and hunger and homelessness have characterized our recent past. I'm also starting for the first time some truly interdisciplinary projects. I'm working in a food studies program here at Virginia Tech alongside history. And so I'm thinking a lot about how the work, how our historical work might inform more contemporary focused projects or social science or ecological science projects. So I'm both interested in connecting the food waste project to ongoing food waste work in other areas. And I'm thinking of I'm working on a small project with a colleague in another department about food aid and food pantries and kind of stigma associated with those with using or not using those spaces. So thinking about how our historical knowledge and experience might actually be able to fit in and support other kinds of research as well.
- [37:09]
Brian Hamilton
It's totally fascinating and exciting. Thanks for giving us a little sneak preview there. But let's live in the present right now. The book again is US History in 15 Foods. It's out now from Bloomsbury Academic. Its author is and my guest has been Dr. Ana Zadeh. Ana, thank you so much for your time and for this book.
- [37:26]
Dr. Ana Zadeh
Thank you. This was fun. Ever spend all day fishing and catch nothing? That's what happens to hackers when Cisco Duo's on Watch every login, every device, miss every user protected. Cisco Duo Fishing season is over. Learn more@duo.com.