What Even is American Food?

Book Review of Paul Freedman's American Cuisine: and How It Got This Way

It’s often said that there is no such thing as American food, that all of the great American staples are borrowed and adopted from other cultures and cuisines. I robustly refute this claim and could write a whole screed about how people who say America has no cuisine are philistines jealous of America’s cultural vibrancy. But instead, I read a several hundred-page history of food in the United States.

Historian and food enthusiast Paul Freedman authored American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way in 2019. I picked it up because, after reading way too many Bridgerton novels, I needed something I wouldn’t be quite so embarrassed to carry around.

How do we define American food? Paul Freedman tries to answer.

Freedman impressively covers food history in the U.S., dating from the colonial period until the 21st century, teasing out the consistent themes that create the essence of American cookery. With traditions as different as the plain cooking of New England Puritans to immigrant food and mass industrial food, finding the common threads was no small task. However, Freedman argues that it isn’t a specific set of dishes, flavors, or ingredients that define American food the way other cuisines are understood. Rather it is our love for novelty, convenience, and a particular understanding of health characterize the American palate.

I found the concept convincing overall. As a country with a unique history, it would make sense that our cuisine would reflect that. America as a nation wasn’t formed by a historically shared sense of belonging or ethnic ties; rather, we are bound together by ideas. So why would our food reflect certain tastes or ingredients? Ideas are central to the notion of America. Our food is no exception. We like the idea of convenience. We like the idea of novelty. We like the idea of health. The irony is that our food frequently doesn’t deliver on any of those fronts. These ideas, combined with waves of immigration, each group bringing in their own new ideas, means our cuisine can’t be static, which erodes ethnic-nationalistic ideas of cuisine that dominate so many other parts of the world.

In the earliest chapters that tackled historical foods, very few dishes or recipes were recognizable today. Maybe baked beans are still relevant, but I’ve never seen terapin - a surprisingly frequent mid-Atlantic staple - on a modern menu. The only reason I knew that a terapin is a turtle is because of the University of Maryland mascot. The notion of authenticity in food is flimsy in even the most traditional food cultures but is eradicated in the context of the United States. So absent a cannon of dishes passed down generationally, American food is shaped by other forces—namely migration, consumer tastes, and industrialization.

Previously on Maryland menus. Today, mostly painted on Maryland basketball courts.

Regardless of the strength of the primary thesis, I found myself arguing with Freedman on certain finer points. His treatment of the South, insufficient weight for economic factors in mass-market food, and lack of attention to home cooks after 1960 all frustrated me despite what was an otherwise delightful read.

Freedman regularly qualified any regard he gave the South as an epicenter of great American food, as if incapable of giving the South its due. He rightly credited Black Americans as the drivers of Southern cuisine. Working as cooks in plantations and grand houses, they developed many of the pillars of the Southern kitchen, like Macaroni and Cheese. Furthermore, poor Black Southerners developed and tended to the region's more humble but equally delicious dishes such as Hoppin’ Johns. I didn’t even mind the critiques of many middle-class, mid-century Southern cookbooks that read more like a set of instructions for white housewives to give their Black domestic workers. But somewhere along the way, a just critique of the South’s relentless racial politics expanded into a snobbery towards the cuisine itself as if the ugliness of history had spoiled the food.

Freedman paid little attention to the South’s contribution to the emergence of farm-to-table style cooking. He felt that since the South didn’t industrialize as much as the rest of the country, they had less to reclaim. One would think that the greater continuity of Southern local food would be a bonus, but rather that seems to make it count less. Today, Southern states are leaders in reviving heritage varietals like Carolina Gold rice or Berkshire pork. Sean Brock, a leader in this movement, was hardly mentioned relative to the chapter dedicated to Alice Waters and Berkley. Waters deserves all her pages, but Brock deserves more than a few paragraphs.

There is a deep irony in undervaluing the South and its cuisine for socio-political reasons. By letting his righteous disgust of Southern racism seep into his esteem for the food, he too marginalizes the Black cooks responsible for creating perhaps the most original American food tradition. The work of Southern Black cooks isn’t any less Southern just because their political status makes us uncomfortable. If anything, we should lift them and their accomplishments even more.

In a separate chapter, Freedman pays insufficient attention to the supply-side economic conditions that push America towards a food industry dominated by mass-market products and mega brands. America has embraced processed food more quickly and completely than our European counterparts. Today, nearly 60% of U.S. calories come from ultra-processed food. While Europe has started to adopt our industrial foodways, it is still lagging and keeping a connection to more traditional food products. Freedman attributes this difference to the American appetite for novelty and convenience. Americans do enjoy novelty. It’s one of the reasons we embrace ethnic food from immigrant communities so readily. But this argument has the not-so-subtle implication that Americans are lowbrow and lack a discerning palate. But how can that be when, alongside America’s industrial food culture, live some of the best restaurants in the world?

I’d argue that the reason the U.S. created food behemoths such as Kellogg, Kraft, and Campbell’s has less to do with 19th and early 20th-century consumer taste differences and more to do with market structures. The continental United States is about the size of all of Europe. During the rise of industrial food (Late 19th to mid-20th century), the United States rapidly grew in territory and population. Such a large and prosperous single market didn’t exist anywhere else in the world. The size of the U.S. consumer base made economies of scale more profitable than possible in the fractured European market, which hadn’t yet congealed into the EU single market. Cereal makers in Germany couldn’t enter France freely. But Kellogs in Michigan had access to a customer base from sea to shining sea. To take advantage of such a large market and profit from said economies of scale, products would need to be able to be shipped over vast distances. Processed and packaged food filled this gap perfectly. Processing that kept food shelf-stable allowed products to be made in a centralized factory and shipped across the continent to millions of consumers who grew wealthier every generation. This is an economic landscape not replicated in Europe during that period. So, while, yes, consumer demand isn’t entirely excused from the rise of industrial food, the more interesting story is the supply side of the equation.

My final quibble with Freedman’s tour-de-force came when he forgot home cooks in the late 20th and 21st centuries. He spent much of the book focused on what average Americans were eating and cooking, sourcing cookbooks from early Americans until the 1960’s. Peering into the lives of ordinary people, mostly women, across our history depicted lives we don’t always get to see. Along the way he also cataloged top chefs and restaurants that influenced the eating habits of those average Americans. These two halves, home cooks and chefs, felt equal in weight and relevance throughout most of the book—a pair of cooks in a symbiotic relationship crafting American cuisine together. When arriving in the 1970s and the rise of Chez Panisse and the farm-to-table movement, Freedman leaves home cooks behind. From this period on, Freedman dedicates the last quarter of the book to high-end and celebrity chefs. I concede there has been a flurry of food as entertainment in recent decades, but people still eat at home, right? The symbiotic dance between professional and home cook is still happening. Middle America now cares about things like organic food and the providence of their ingredients. There is an iconic comedy sketch where two Portland diners insist on traveling to the farm where their chicken diner was raised before ordering at a restaurant. Home cooks are reaching for greater culinary heights both at dinner parties and for everyday meals. This is all happening simultaneously as the Standard American Diet receives greater criticism for its poor health outcomes. This contradiction deserves exploration, but instead, Freedman chronicles the rise of the Food Network. Again, it's not that Guy Fierri did deserve his pages; it’s that home cooks deserve greater coverage, too.

Despite these secondary disagreements, I appreciated that Freedman demonstrated genuine affection and appreciation for American food, even its stranger aspects. The book is deeply researched and impressive in its scope. I earned so much about the country I love, Its odd relationship to food, and how that reflects its unique history. America is a country that plays by its own rules. And American food seems to have no rules at all. This is thrilling and makes way for tremendous creativity and innovation. However, the lack of consistent traditions can also leave many American eaters lost in a sea of mediocrity. But I’m hopeful for America’s food prospects. We produce beautiful food in this country, and more Americans are beginning to discover that.