American Food By The Decades

A fascinating survey of American food trends that highlights the key inventions, brands, restaurant chains, and individuals that shaped the American diet and palate in the 20th century. In the United States today, how and what we eat—with all of its myriad ethnic varieties and endless choices—is firmly entrenched in every part of our culture. The American diet underwent constant evolution throughout the 20th century, starting from the meat-and-potatoes fare of the early-20th century and maturing into a culture that embraced the cuisines of immigrant populations, fast-food chains, health fads, and emerging gourmet tastes. Societal changes moved women out of the kitchen and into the workforce, spawning the invention of convenience foods and time-saving kitchen appliances. American Food by the Decades is an entertaining chronological survey of food trends in the United States during the 20th century. The book is organized by decades to illustrate how changes in society directly influenced dietary and dining habits as they emerged over the last 100 years. Detailed encyclopedic entries provide fascinating glimpses into history by telling the true stories behind the foods, restaurants, grocery stores, and cooking trends of the previous century.

Like fashions and fads, food-even bad food-has a history, and Lovegren's Fashionable Food is quite literally a cookbook of the American past. Well researched and delightfully illustrated, this collection of faddish recipes from the 1920s to the 1990s is a decade-by-decade tour of a hungry American century.

One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year Winner of the James Beard Award Author of How to Change Your Mind and the #1 New York Times Bestsellers In Defense of Food and Food Rules What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.

Intended as a reference source for American social history, this volume discusses the people, events and ideas of the 1940s. After an introductory overview and chronology, subject chapters follow with subject-specific timelines and alphabetically arranged entries.

This 1950 collection of public documents on U.S. foreign policy of the period 1941-49 has been revised in connection with the events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of World War II. It retains nearly 90 percent of the documents in the original edition and includes 18 new ones to fill gaps in the historical record. The volume covers wartime documents looking toward peace, conferences on the peace settlement; the basic organization of the United Nations, its specialized agencies and programs; Latin America and the Caribbean; the war and peace settlements in Austria, Japan, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Rumania and Bulgaria; major postwar negotiations and issues concerning Canada, China, France, Greece and Turkey, U.K., the U.S.S.R.; human rights, and information and educational excange; new nations such as India, Pakistan, Korea, and the Phillipines; economic recovery; arms control, and national security. S/N 044-000-02050-5 (pbk.) $20.00.

Food and cuisine are important subjects for historians across many areas of study. Food, after all, is one of the most basic human needs and a foundational part of social and cultural histories. Such topics as famines, food supply, nutrition, and public health are addressed by historians specializing in every era and every nation. Food in Time and Place delivers an unprecedented review of the state of historical research on food, endorsed by the American Historical Association, providing readers with a geographically, chronologically, and topically broad understanding of food culturesÑfrom ancient Mediterranean and medieval societies to France and its domination of haute cuisine. Teachers, students, and scholars in food history will appreciate coverage of different thematic concerns, such as transfers of crops, conquest, colonization, immigration, and modern forms of globalization.

When Barbara Haber, curator of Radcliffe College's 4000-volume cookbook library, was asked by The Boston Globe to name her favorite book in that famous collection, she picked Cleora's Kitchens by Cleora Butler. Why? "Because, " Ms. Haber said, "it expresses, through food, joy . . . you have the connection of food being celebratory in truly meaningful ways. Just wonderful stuff." Starting with a freedman's wagon ride out of Texas, Cleora Butler takes us from the beaten biscuits of her childhood, baked in a wood-burning stove, to fricasseed quail she later prepared as a caterer. Rich with stories and turn-of-the-century recipes impossible to find -- possum grape wine, mother's hickory nut cake, hot water cornbread, and burnt sugar ice cream -- Cleora's Kitchens also provides a glimpse of changing twentieth-century tastes. More than 400 recipes are arranged by the decades in which she first cooked and served them, from grandpa's sausage in the early days to the first avocado anyone in Oklahoma had ever seen, to duckling pati and pine nut pilaf. Through stories, menus, and recipes, Cleora recreates the flavor of her own remarkable history -- and ours.