America Eats!

Sixty years ago legions of writers fanned out across America to capture the role that food played in the everyday lives of everyday people. Stories were collected from ocean to ocean of how communities congregated around sharing and preparing large meals. These events often revolved around civic events, church socials, agricultural harvests and political campaigns. The stars of the show, however, are less the recipes for Burgoo, Booya, or Brunswick Stew and more the interactions between neighbor and neighbor. The events were an essential part of the social fabric that tied together a largely rural, and often isolated, population who relied on shared common bonds for survival, companionship and entertainment.

The stories were collected under the aegis of "America Eats!" sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, a Rooseveltian New Deal program intent on employing artists, writers and other cultural figures in a post-Depression America. It was not without controversy and the "American Eats!" project was eventually shelved. The stories stayed sequestered in archives until Pat Willard unearthed them and spent a year driving across the country finding good things to eat.

Part of her mission was to see in an age of foreshortened time and diminished attention, which, if any, of these local food traditions survived. Many did not. Canning, preserving and salting, once a necessity for survival, is now a quaint hobby evoking the simpler days of yesteryear. Whole genres of social gathering simply don't exist anymore--the fun feasts of Nebraska, where neighbors congregated to feed and entertain each other; the Polk County Possum Club of Mena, Arkansas where club members drank raucously, sang risque songs and hunted a certain rodent; pie socials, and harvest festivals featuring sauerkraut or watermelons all have fallen by the wayside. The gatherings were part of a quieter, less sophisticated world unconnected by geosynchronous satellites and "entertainment" was a local responsibility not a global industry.

In many ways, its not all bad. These gatherings were as much a survival necessity as they were choices for pleasure. We are certainly a materially richer society than we were many years ago, and the burgs of rural America could be narrow and bigoted places. Certainly, due to the spoils of globalization, today our diets would seem to be far more varied with fresh sushi, year-round tropical fruits and "gourmet" culture. Yet, fast food monocultures, a loss of local traditions and the growing presence of obesity and diabetes point to an unexpected poverty.

However, what moved me deeply about this book, often to the point of tears, is the resilience and pride that Willard found in the people she met on her travels. Below the radar of the fashionable press, still beats the heart of a country who yet maintain traditions that tie them to a cherished past. When told the story of the federal writers who once visited their town Willard writes, "It always took them aback, how someone--anyone--would have paid enough attention to what they were doing, what they ate, how they lived, to have written it all down...but then they would look at me straight and say, 'Make sure you get it right.' Almost all the people I met and talked to, whose stories I scribbled in notebooks as I peered into their pots, or walked quickly by their side: almost all of them said to me, 'Make sure you tell it right, then.'"

"Pay attention. That's what they meant. Write about what it means to us. How important these rituals are. These traditions we hold lightly but dear, because we've always done them this way and know how important they are.--As one man said to her, 'People think we don't care anymore. But we do and that's important to us. To the country, I mean. It's a link to the past, this food, this ceremony we have every August. Look how far back we go! What we've lived through! And we're still here.'"