"A Revolution in Eating"

James McWilliams book, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, contains a number of very fascinating historical details. The focus is on the British colonial areas of the New World, and how each one developed its own regional food ways and agricultural practices and products. Delightfully, the book includes many wonderful illustrations from the 17th through the 19th century, and is based on a great many early sources to provide details of American culinary history.

There are interesting explanations of early cooperation of Native Americans with British settlers throughout the book: the Natives helped the settlers to adapt to new environments, which were changed as the British introduced their domestic plants and animals as well as making unintentional introductions like weeds and rats. Though eventually the natives were forced out or brutally killed, their foods, such as the famous trio of corn, beans, and squash, were integrated into essentially British cooking practices. An example: the creation of bread, an essentially Old World food, out of corn, the New World grain.

While the colonies on the North American continent eventually united against Britain, won the Revolutionary War, and became the United States, in earlier times, the colonies in the Caribbean were equally important or even more important, and McWilliams explains this very clearly. The British establishment in the West Indies had a critical role in developing the economy of the North American colonies; thus presenting the history of these colonies as a unit, even if it didn't continue later on, is quite enlightening.

A Revolution in Eating. Published 2005.

The regions McWilliams discusses in addition to the West Indies are the New England States, the Carolinas, the Chesapeake Bay area, and the Middle Colonies including New York and Pennsylvania. In each region, the author considers the contributions of three groups: the English settlers, the Native Americans, and the Africans -- who were often, but not always, enslaved workers in the agricultural and culinary development of the region. I especially found this book to have an exceptional presentation of the details of how Africans contributed knowledge of rice cultivation and cuisine to the Carolinas.

The emergence of race as a key to classifying people occurred in the colonies during the era under discussion.  In The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter, (blogged here) I learned quite a bit about how at first in colonial America, Africans could be indentured servants or free people or slaves -- but the concept of race overtook the earlier less race-based views. In British colonies, slavery began in the West Indies, but spread north.

In A Revolution in Eating, I learned much more about how the enslavement of black people varied in different regions, depending on the demands of the agricultural setting -- with the most extreme exploitation and abuse occurring in the sugar plantations and sugar refineries of the Caribbean, but also in the tobacco and rice growing regions of North America, and to some extent even in the more northern colonies. The book documents the contributions to regional cuisine by blacks, as well as the way that racial consciousness enabled the poorest and least economically promising situations for whites to persist because there was always a group that they too could look down on -- in other words, the emergence of the worst of racism. McWilliams makes clear how racism meant that black people didn't -- and don't -- get credit for what they contributed.

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