Ok. Finally!! I’ve upload my big project that I did for my American Studies class this summer. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. I’ve uploaded the pdf as a magazine, and I’m going to do a thread with a bunch of quotes or near-quotes from it.

I found this topic absolutely fascinating. A caveat; this was done in the span of about two weeks, and reading back through it, there are definitely some edits that should have been made, haha.

So here is my 5,000 word food magazine project (with an amazing 90 footnotes!):
White People Food: Intentionally Processed. Intentionally Bland. https://issuu.com/carisadel/docs/whitepeoplefoodcarisadel

White People Food: it is convenient, homogenized, and bland. Why do white people seem to be allergic to spices? Do white people know that Green Bean Casserole is white food? How did Spaghetti enter the mainstream? And what is up with Jello Salad?

The story of white food is intimately connected with an American history of whiteness, and food itself gets to the heart of what it meant to be an American.

Homogeneity standardized the national diet through mass production and distribution, and because food was intentionally bland, blandness became standardized. Recipes written for middle-class white women began to be built around convenience foods.

Cookbooks played an important role in creating homogenized whiteness as the standard for what was considered American food, because the entire cooking industry also included definitions of proper white womanhood.

Part of the whiteness that is revealed in the convenience of green bean casserole is not having to do the work yourself. White taste of blandness and uniformity was bred in the factory. There is no ancestral meaning behind a casserole. It is merely a manufactured whiteness.

Because soup was a not a big part of the American diet, Campbell’s needed to create a market for their product; they did this by creating and encouraging “insecurities in women about their roles as mothers and homemakers…”

Settlers in Massachusetts and Virginia believed in the civilizing properties of simple British food, and thought there was a moral superiority in not being elaborate in their eating habits.

Influential food writers of the 19th century believed that rich food and spices caused indigestion as well as disease, madness, and social decline.

Early American recipes offered food that was deliberately bland and promoted Puritan self-denial and middle-class virtues as being truly American. The absence of taste was a marker of class superiority.

Domestic Scientists/Home Economists (largely women) emerged towards the end of the 19th century and they also believed that identity and food were linked, that mealtimes contained a moral dimension, and that taste was of no consequence.

Domestic scientists believed, essentially as the first American settlers did, that wild food created wild people. They believed the ‘unhealthy’ diets of immigrants were responsible for all the social sins of the country.

Domestic scientists believed that women in charge of the family food would keep the country from moral decline. Believing as they did, that the home was the “germ of Anglo-Saxon civilization”, teaching women to be white through food was approached with passionate dedication.

One way they spread whiteness was through white cream sauce. Women were taught to boil the hell out of their food and then cover it with the purity of a cream sauce, which got whiter with the invention of Crisco.

Canning industry + scientific whiteness = condensed cream of mushroom soup. By using recipes containing convenience foods such as cream of mushroom soup, cookbook writers in the mid-20th century continued promoting a cuisine of whiteness.

With processed foods prevalent by the 1950s, it seemed like cooking didn’t involve skill. This was insulting to a femininity that was in charge of the moral fiber of a nation. The solution was to make it seem as if creativity was required to serve a meal properly = Jello Salad.

Because of its manufactured connection to a 1950s white, middle-class housewife, Jello came to represent wholesomeness, purity, and domesticity. The test kitchens of General Foods came up with 1,733 different ways to prepare Jello.

Jello is considered an American food, and yet it was created to serve the goals of whiteness. The Jello salad represents a white femininity that embraced the docile, meaningless role it was given to play.

One of the reasons that canned foods were so appealing to whites was because of new laws and new technologies that ensured sanitary conditions. A lack of food purity had become associated with immigrants.

It was in America where Italian food as we think of it was born. Here, the immigrants banded together as Italians and not as Sicilians and Genoese, melding food cultures as they did so.

But lo and behold, the domestic scientist was waiting to tell them how dirty and smelly their Italianness was. Teachers were waiting to shame schoolchildren for eating garlic and judging their process of assimilation on whether or not they were still eating spaghetti.

While teachers targeted children, reformers targeted the mothers. Social kitchens, designed to teach newcomers how to eat like Americans, offered Italian immigrants food such as pea soup, tomato soup, beef broth, oatmeal mush, boiled corn mush, and rice pudding.

These reformers discouraged immigrants from eating spicy, mixed foods, believing that when foods were mixed together, the body couldn’t process all of the nutrients, and therefore it was wasteful.

They passed around pamphlets in Italian warning immigrants not to eat salami, sausages, and pickles, because they “damaged the stomach without providing any sustenance.” Immigrants were assimilated through food into middle-class white culture.

Teddy Roosevelt said that hyphenated Americans were “a danger to the country” and that there should “be no room for them in this country”, and President Wilson said “some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over”.

Through the assimilation process of Italian-Americans, spaghetti as an American meal was created. But in order for spaghetti to be acceptable to white Americans, it first needed to be divorced from its Italianness.

Non-Italian, white-owned Italian food companies worked to get laws passed that targeted both Italian imported food and small Italian companies in the US, making it easier for them to corner the market on Italian food.

They also marketed their pasta as being produced in clean factories, which helped separate it from the image of the dirty immigrant.

Betty Crocker spread her Americanized spaghetti version to white homemakers, but this homogenized white people spaghetti contrasts with genuine Italian food, because there is no single taste, texture, or color uniformity in the sauces that real Italian-Americans ate.

Italian food differs from WPF in that Italian cooks are described as feeling the texture of food to know when it’s done, as having a memory of how food is supposed to be, instead of working from a recipe, which ensures you will get the exact same result every time.

The whiteness of spaghetti extended beyond the food itself. Italian eateries catered to “Anglo-Protestant middle-class fantasies about Italians,” in the décor and types of food offered, evolving “to meet the racialized expectations of white customs.”

Food in the Italian-American community was about history, good taste, and a larger society. It required time, money, and giving up social status to endure. The cost of Italian food is something that white people were never willing to pay.

“It is no accident that…Italian-American food entered the American mainstream only after the great wave of immigration from Italy subsided” - Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty

White People Food exists because whiteness erected boundaries around what was considered edible. It gave a moral underpinning to eating, and used food as a defense of the white, Anglo-Saxon way of life, calling it American.

Green Bean Casserole, Jello Salad, and Spaghetti all reveal how ‘classic American food’ is, at its core, about promoting the superiority of whiteness.

Domestic scientists loved recipes because they provided unchanging results. But our recipes themselves have changed. Diversity in culture and in food is as omnipresent as white cream sauce once was.

White People Food now exists because it sits alongside the foods of other cultures, just one option among many in the buffet of American cuisine.

Originally created in the factory, canned and boxed food told no story. But in looking at the stories of the cans and the boxes themselves, we can see that they do have a story to tell.

/fin #foodhistory #WomenAlsoKnowHistory