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Acquired Tastes

Stories about the Origins of Modern Food

Part of Food, Health, and the Environment

Edited by Benjamin R. Cohen, Michael S. Kideckel, Anna Zeide
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$35.00 US
| $47.00 CAN
The MIT Press
On sale Aug 17, 2021 | 290 Pages | 9780262542913
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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

About

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.

Table of Contents

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

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