All-American Food

Simple is hard. It’s not easy boiling down a long essay into a quick sentence or two that captures what it is about the essay that caught your eye. Our friends at Arts & Letters Daily however, have always had a talent for it, which is what makes their site one of the great treasures of the Internet.

A recent item links to an interesting article in Reason which swipes at the anti-fast-food movement by pointing out that old-fashioned diners typically have far more caloric, cholesterol-packed food. Arts & Letters Daily flags the piece: “Long before Americans fell in love with cheap, greasy, franchise chain junk food, they loved cheap, greasy, mom ‘n’ pop junk food.”

I guess they mean “mom ‘n’ pop” in the sense of a locally owned business. But I eagerly clicked on the link because I thought it was going to be a discussion of old-fashioned home cooking in America.

I’ve always had an interest in the history of American food—as must anyone of my generation, I think, who watched the transformation of food in this country over recent decades. Why was food so bad in 1975?

Some years ago, Laura Shapiro had an interesting book called Perfection Salad that blamed much of it on the rise of Home Ec. courses, Fannie Farmer, the Boston School of Cooking, and the invention of the “science of nutrition” and “scientific cookery.” (Farmer’s heirs, of course, are the modern anti-McDonald’s food police the Reason article mocks.)

In my lazy way, I haven’t done much investigation, but the essay Arts & Letters Daily seemed to advertise is one I’d really like to read. Why did food get so bad in America? And how did it get better?