Book Review: The Food of a Younger Land

The Food of a Younger Land
Mark Kurlansky

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Over the past couple months I’ve been slowly working my way through the excellent The Food of a Younger Land, a collection of WPA pieces edited into a volume by Mark Kurlansky (author of Cod and Salt: A World History), and now I’ve finally finished it. For anyone curious about what American food was like before the advent of fast food, frozen food, or 20th century cultural homogenization, this book is a fascinating peek into the past.

The book consists of excerpts written by the Federal Writers’ Project of the depression-era Works Progress Administration. The Writers’ Project employed everyone from serious novelists to people who had never published a word before, and it had offices in regions across the US. Much like the WPA project which aimed to document regional folk music of the time, the Writers’ Project conceived of a book entitled “America Eats” which would comprehensively treat what Americans ate, the folkways and customs associated with food, and the ingredients and wisdom particular to local food cultures. It was not only a work program meant to keep writers employed – like the other WPA projects, it reflected an interest in creating an American national identity, and it also stemmed from a fear that the local food cultures being documented were already too quickly fading into the past.

Unfortunately, “America Eats” was never actually completed. The WPA published many other valuable works, but the project was dissolved before the book about food could be put together. However, the WPA archives contain tons of material intended for this project, with submissions from around the entire US, and Kurlansky has excerpted what he considers the most interesting material to create this volume.

The book really reads like you’re personally leafing through a box of WPA files. The pieces are left raw, and are roughly organized into five regions: the northeast, the south, the “middle west,” the far west, and the southwest. Most states are represented, though not all, and some are more heavily represented than others – it all depends on how functional the various local projects were, and how much of interest they produced. Pieces might be brief descriptions of a local barbecue, just a single recipe, an essay about the typical cuisine of a particular area, or even a short story. Authors were told to concentrate on what made each locality’s cuisine unique, what foods they were most proud of, and what food “controversies” raged among the people (think: Manhattan vs. New England clam chowder).

The book is certainly a fascinating representation of how different American regional cuisines were from each other early in the past century. It was fascinating to me to see how much more of the Midwestern food I recognized as “traditionally American” than the food of other regions – even the Northeast, where I currently live. That’s probably attributable both to the fact that I grew up in the Midwest, as well as to the fact that many Midwestern foods were incorporated into the emerging “national” culture and cuisine of the 20th century, to the extent such a thing exists.

It was also a very different country at the time of America Eats – pieces reflect an inhospitable Maine where the people were so poor they might make “chowder” out of only potatoes, a highly segregated Jim Crow south, and a west where cowboys still lived for weeks alone out on the plains. Many pieces also document the foods of Native American nations, at least as understood by the America Eats authors. It’s notable that many of these pieces purport to record the American Indians’ “traditional” dishes, but by this time these peoples had already been pushed off of the lands where they traditionally lived, and their cuisines had surely changed as a result – thus the essay about Choctaw dishes in Oklahoma, when the Choctaw people were actually originally from the Gulf region.

There is a lot one could say about this book, but one thing that struck me was how many of the pieces were about huge public gatherings – barbecues, pay-admission picnics, annual sponsored holiday meals – where a community prepared its traditional foods. It’s hard to think of corresponding festivals like that today. In part that may reflect the fact that America is a less homogenous place than it used to be, but in part it also seems to reflect the loss of community that came along with the interstate highways and other modern transit, the increasing geographic mobility of the population, the influence of a national media and national food cultures, and other aspects of modernization.

Whether to indulge in a little nostalgia or to gain some insight into how people used to eat seasonally in your corner of the US (with hopes that we can begin doing so again today?) it’s worth picking up this fascinating book.

Book Review: American Chestnut

American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree
Susan Freinkel

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In light of some of the chestnut recipes featured recently on this blog, it only seemed right to read a book about the sad fate of the American chestnut tree and the improbable but exciting efforts to bring it back.

You may not know the story of what happened to the American chestnut tree, especially if you’re in your 20s – because the tree has been for all intents and purposes extinct in the wild for your entire lifetime. How would we know to miss something that has never been there? Well, back in the day chestnut trees used to comprise a huge amount of the deciduous forest from Maine all the way down to Georgia, across the eastern seaboard and west to Ohio. The trees were particularly important in Appalachia, where they provided a free source of animal feed for impoverished farm families. In fact, there used to be an interesting east coast chestnut economy: many poor mountain families would gather chestnuts each fall and winter after big storms and take them to the general stores which used to serve as the centers of Appalachian commerce. There they’d be paid in little metal tokens which would serve as store credit for shoes, sugar, and other things the families could not make on their own – each store used these credits like its own mini-currency. From there, the general store owners would bring the loads of chestnuts to dealers at train stations; even the train conductor on these trips would get a cut, which was often his best pay for the whole year. The huge chestnut haul would finally be shipped to cities like Philadelphia and our very own New York City, and distributed to street vendors – before the blight, street carts roasting chestnuts were a classic scene and aroma on cold early winter New York City nights.

But in 1904, in the park which today has become the Bronx Zoo, a forester first discovered the fungus known as the chestnut blight – Cryphonectria parasitica. C. parasitica, unbeknownst to anyone, had taken advantage of increased international commerce by hitching a ride in from Asia, where it attacks Japanese and Chinese chestnuts. Those related species carry a high degree of immunity to the fungus and therefore usually survive infection. Not so for the American chestnut tree: this fungus creeps under its bark and eventually chokes off the flow of its sap, killing the tree within a couple years. Only some of the root system remains intact, and it sends up new shoots for several years more in an effort to regenerate. However, in a disturbingly Sisyphean manner, every time those shoots start to get big enough to be a viable sapling, the fungus attacks again and suffocates them. If you take a hike in eastern forests you may well see the little shoots of these frustrated American chestnuts, but you are extremely unlikely ever to see an adult tree. By midcentury, the blight had killed about three to four BILLION American chestnut trees, basically eliminating them from the wild but for some miraculous old survivors.

Susan Freinkel’s American Chestnut tells this story, and goes on to chronicle the various 20th-century efforts to save the chestnut from its blight. The first third of this book reads roughly like a disaster movie, with the blight creeping down the coastline despite all efforts of frantic state governments to save this valuable tree. (Ironically, many of them made it worse by chopping down vast swaths of chestnut forest in an effort to quarantine the fungus or to get maximum value out of the chestnut lumber before the trees were attacked.) The next third is more of a detective novel – chronicling how various scientists and enthusiasts, from the start of the pandemic to today, have come up with ideas as to how to save the chestnut.

One idea is called “hypovirulence,” and basically consists of introducing a parasite upon the parasite. Yes, this has a disturbing give-a-mouse-a-cookie quality – but it turns out there actually is a virus that weakens C. parasitica (as Frienkel says, it’s like the fungus catching a cold), which can give an individual American chestnut a fighting chance. Unfortunately, the chestnut as it previously existed almost always isn’t strong enough to ultimately fight off the virus even where hypovirulence is employed.

Freinkel also devotes a chapter to efforts to genetically engineer a blight-resistant American chestnut. The resources haven’t been devoted to this that have been brought to bear on, say, creating Monsanto’s “roundup-ready” crop monstrosities, but a couple researchers have tried to add foreign genes to the chestnut to help it resist the blight. (Research still hasn’t revealed which genes give the Chinese and Japanese chestnuts their immunity.) So far, it hasn’t worked out so well; Freinkel deals with this subject evenhandedly, and expresses justifiable concern about things like adding antimicrobial frog-skin genes to an edible plant. (Believe it or not, that was actually one idea.)

But the majority of this section concerns efforts to breed blight-resistant chestnuts, both by crossing the rare surviving American chestnuts with each other and – the most promising method – by “backcrossing” American chestnuts with their resistant Chinese cousins. Basically, this means making an American x Chinese match, and then crossing the result with other American trees over and over and over, selecting the best offspring that still have good resistance, until you have a tree that is almost entirely genetically American but isn’t susceptible to the blight. The American Chestnut Foundation took this approach. Of course, trees grow slowly, so the timescale for doing a project like this was many decades – far longer than one individual researcher’s career. That’s part of what makes the story of the chestnut a good book and an interesting exploration of environmental tragedy, the power of human nostalgia, and faith in science to ultimately put things right.

But what makes this book stand out to me is not just the compelling story, but the author’s thoughtfulness about the ultimate consequences of releasing a new, blight-resistant “backcrossed” American-ish chestnut tree into the wild once we do have one. What does environmental restoration really mean? After all, we can’t actually recreate the forests that existed back before the blight (which were filled with passenger pigeons – oops – and not yet devastated by coal mining). Is it meaningful to create our best approximation? Are we kidding ourselves to think that’s even possible? Does it just make us feel better about the next time we make a huge environmental mess, because we presume we can just clean it up later? Freinkel comes down on the side of restoration, but you can see why it’s best to be cautious where we have insufficient scientific knowledge to really know the consequences of our environmental tinkering.

This book was written in 2006, so the story ends right at the cusp of developing a truly resistant, mostly-American chestnut tree – and I’m happy to say that since then, the news has been good. Check out this Times article from September on the first efforts to reintroduce a brand new blight-resistant tree: http://www.acf.org/pdfs/news/2009/9-September/SoFarSoGoodforBlight-ResistantChestnuts.pdf

For what it’s worth, since this IS a food blog: real American chestnuts are apparently a little smaller and therefore harder to peel than Chinese ones, but they are sweeter, with a carroty taste. I like the hybrids we can buy at the market today, but I still hope that someday I can try a real American chestnut.