ABSTRACT
How many consumption items resonate more with autobiographical memories than food? In so many ways food is more than simply fuel to get our bodies through the day. There are many cultural splits in food: rice, potatoes, corn, or wheat for your starch? Oil or butter for your fat? Fish or meat or beans for your protein? These splits can be plotted on world maps and are centuries—in many cases, millennia—old. There are even splits in as new a country as the United States. Fischer (1989) draws lines that divide foodways here and mark someone’s birth area. Regular consumption of cornmeal, pork, and boiled greens mark people as Southern as much as their accent, even though this trilogy of food was present on the entire eighteenth-century frontier for economic reasons. Regular consumption of wheat bread, beef, and cold salad marks the northerner. Pie for breakfast, while sometimes thought to mark the true New England Yankee, was as recently as the 1930s a sign of someone who had spent significant time on a farm where breakfast had not yet been reached by Graham’s “reform” from eggs and meat and dessert to cereal and juice.
