Lauren Rabinovitz has researched gender and American cinema, amusement parks, popular culture, and technology and culture, but what really piques her interest these days is food.

The University of Iowa professor of American studies and cinema and comparative literature has taught the increasingly popular class Food in America for the past few years. The course is both an historical survey of food and a look into the business of food in American life today—from the rise of the meatpacking and other industries at the beginning of the 20th century to America as a “fast food nation” to the politics surrounding organics and sustainability issues.

Rabinovitz’s research and teaching currently focus on what American food history reveals about modernization, mechanization, and American self-identities. She recently received a Regents Award for Faculty Excellence, which honors faculty members for work representing a significant contribution to excellence in public education.

Rabinovitz spoke with Spectator@IOWA about the role food plays in American culture.

What does the food we eat tell us about American culture and history?

This is a big question. One author of a book on food and America as a multicultural society says, “we are what we eat.” That’s a great soundbite insofar as American food has always been a continuing hybridization of different ethnic, immigrant, and regional cultures mixing and crossing over food traditions.

For many people, now and in the past, their first exposure to or experience with an ethnic group different from their own is usually through food. It’s certainly nonthreatening, and it’s often what allows people to say they know something about another ethnic group.

We’re in the midst of the holiday season. How does food play a role in the holidays?

Food plays a central role in all important rituals, whether the ritual itself is religious, national, or of some other kind. Food is also an important stimulus of memory, and people use food to bring memories of family, growing up, and past rituals to life in the present. The winter holidays are all religious ones, and the foods incorporated in their celebration run a wide gamut, depending on any individual family’s history and what brings them together, on different ethnic traditions, on histories of both affluence and scarcity.

Have you found that traditional holiday meals have spread across the country? If so, how did those traditions come about?

There are only two holidays that are uniformly American—Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. Thanksgiving is always the more interesting to me because it is really a food holiday and because it was created to be a national ritual.

For 30 years prior to the Civil War, a prominent editor of a so-called ladies’ magazine (Sara Josepha Hale) campaigned in her magazine and through letters to the president for a national Thanksgiving Day. There had been individual national days of thanksgiving prayer since the 1600s, but these were usually fast days! In the early Republic, there were also feast days of celebration singled out.

In an effort to promote national unity during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln declared a national Thanksgiving Day in 1863. Soon after that, it became an annual tradition, but was only declared a national holiday with a fixed date in November in 1941.

The Thanksgiving we know and celebrate originates from late 19th-century customs. It was a time when harvest celebrations shifted from community-wide events to family events, and as more people left family farms and moved to cities, it became a harvest homecoming as well. The food we associate with Thanksgiving—stuffed turkey, pies, sauces—and the lavishness of the meal are all associated with Victorian eating habits of celebration.

Today, Thanksgiving provides a myth of national origins that effaces this history and assimilates all into support of one nation while it celebrates the abundance of American food and the ritual of homecoming. Certainly, in different ethnic groups and in different regions, there are a variety of traditions for what will be on the table, and the holiday itself remains controversial for the way it rewrites Native American history.

Have you discovered any food myths that people might be surprised to find out are true?

My favorite food myth is Johnny Appleseed. Johnny Appleseed was a real person, John Chapman (1774–1845), who did go to the western frontier, which was then Pennsylvania and Ohio. But he went to buy land on the outskirts of new boomtowns, where he cleared the land and planted nurseries. As the towns extended and the land became more valuable, he sold the land back to the towns. In short, he was a land speculator who became in his lifetime one of the richest men in America.

Since you can’t produce edible fruit on an apple tree grown from seed—it has to be a graft—the trees he planted produced sour crab apples that were pressed for hard cider. Johnny Appleseed only became a name in an 1871 Harper’s Magazine story about him, where he was mythologized as a figure of democratic action and heroism, a story Walt Disney made even more popular in 1948. But if Johnny Appleseed is an American icon, it’s because he was a true American entrepreneur buying and selling real estate to make millions while spreading liquor on the western frontier.

Have there been any events in the history of the United States that shifted people away from eating a certain thing at a certain time?

The tomato, a member of the nightshade family, was considered poisonous in colonial America. There is a myth that someone tried to assassinate George Washington by poisoning him with a tomato. But the Spanish colonizers always ate tomatoes, and by the early 18th century, the whole “poisonous” thing seems to have gone away.

At the heart of your question is really a question about the safety of the food supply, and has that affected what and how people eat. Since the creation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906 to check on and regulate the safety of the food supply, there have been numerous times when a disease outbreak due to tainted food—produced in an industrialized environment—has caused recalls or boycotts. But these always seem to be temporary.

Perhaps a more interesting incident was the government’s effort to ban saccharine as carcinogenic in 1977. More than one million people protested through letters and petitions to the government. They said it was a positive influence in their lives, questioned the research on which the finding was made, and told the government to butt out of their individual food choices. The outcry—not to mention the diet industry’s lobbying—was so strong that the ban was overturned. At that time, people especially argued that if the government allowed them to smoke cigarettes, it had no business telling them not to eat saccharine.

What are some things in American food history that people might be surprised to learn?

My students are always surprised to learn that the tomato is indigenous to the Americas—that something so central to Italian food was brought to Italy by Columbus. In addition, potatoes, chocolate, peanuts, corn, pumpkin, and wild rice were all indigenous to the Americas and only exported to Europe after the first contacts. Indeed, American food has always been an import-export trade and part of what we would call a global economy.

—Kelli Andresen
photo by Kirk Murray