Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (California Studies in Food and Culture, 7) by Harvey Levenstein

Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (California Studies in Food and Culture, 7) Reviews

• 
  Melanie

  This book was a bit more interesting than I'd feared, but still dry as a bone. It was about how the post-civil-war diet was mainly grains and meat, and over the next 50-60 years we started adding more dairy and vegetables/fruits to our diet. Also about the integration of new immigrant tastes to the American palate (met with reluctance at best) and about the discovery of vitamins and such. It also examined the social engineering of home economics and how in order to change the diets of the poor you had to find a way to get the wealthy to want to eat in the target style and get the poor people to emulate them. It worked with mixed success. Also discussed were a bunch of batshit marketing claims that a lot of companies made about their products (and still do, in my opinion). And how companies got women to stop nursing, for example. Not a bad book, but written in that sleep-inducing font and the chronology of the work was a complete mess. But it was as much about sociology and marketing as it was about food. (And like many other books I've read, it referenced The Jungle.)
• 
  Jenn "JR"

  In the late 19th and early 20th c, the US was a country with so much food that the biggest problem was trying to teach people to differentiate between types of food and to get across the basic concepts of nutrition.
  
  Up until the early 20th c, it was assumed that all food was the same - that you could eat whatever - and your body would use it as fuel. Then scientists started identifying carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins and minerals -- and a whole business of nutrition was born.
  
  This book is about the serious business of trying to understand this information and how to disseminate it to the right people -- so that the work force could be stronger, infant mortality would be reduced, housewives would save money and run their households more efficiently.
  
  Most of the chapters can stand alone as articles, so don't feel bad about skipping around, and about 50 pages of the book are end notes.
  
  What really surprised me was that this book takes a bit of a feminist angle.
  
  I particularly enjoyed the first part of the book - the first chapter or two focused more on cultural values around food, Levenstein manages to articulate changes to women's roles in the home vis a vis housekeeping (the "servant shortage" in the US) and preparing food or being a hostess - along class lines. He even brings up changes in cultural norms regarding the feminine form and fitness. People were much larger - and there were even books for women on "How to be Plump" -- and a picture of "airy fairy" actress Lillian Russell (the "American Beauty") shows a rather zaftig blonde woman, allegedly before she got "fat."
  
  And then Levenstein does something interesting - he touches on changes in the role of middle/upper class women as wives. The married couple becomes a "couple" and are expected to do things together -- instead of it just being this partnership where they raise kids and create a stable socio-economic unit. Leisure had a much greater value and was what most middle/upper class couples aspired to show they were successful.
  
  Women who aspire to a certain status would not want to spend a lot of time in the kitchen nor would they want to make the mistake of eating the wrong foods -- they have to maintain a more aquiline form than their predecessors.
  
  The restaurant chapter at the end portrays a fascinating transition in changes to women's roles and the rise of the masses of working class. Overall, I can see how these changes shaped my grandmother (born in 1908) in her attitude toward a woman's role in the home, food preparation, thriftiness and even restaurants. From the aspirational afternoon tea parties to tea houses to department store cafeterias -- there is a continuous line of appropriate food-related social venues for women which were often separate from men for much of the 20th c.
  
  I can't wait to read Levenstein's next book - the Depression wasn't discussed much in this one, but the way he describes it - folks who were in the lower classes had it pretty hard for a few decades before the Great Depression anyway.
  
  One topic that I would have liked to have seen better highlighted in this book is the growth of population overall. Describing the growing middle classes, addressing immigration and the growth of the working class is one thing but the entire population of the US skyrocketed in the 50 year period from 1880 to 1930, from 50MM to 123MM.
  
  Can you imagine how people felt with this huge explosion in population - at the same time as a big industry/technology boom and waves of immigration? It must've been a very exciting time - and also a lot of pressure with more and more people just appearing everywhere.
  
  The big revolution: not all foods are the same; some foods have intrinsic values that you can't see with your human eye (only scientists can) and you should choose food based more on these values than what you feel like eating.
  
  Or, in the words of Michael Pollan, "mostly plants, not too much."
  
• 
  Mikel

  Good information, some bias. Author criticizes people for the actions they take and then later in the book praises those actions. Overall an interesting read on the larger changes in the American diet.
• 
  Cat

  A scholarly history of changing food habits in the 20th century--especially informative and fascinating in Levenstein's accounts of the profession of home economics (the kind of chemistry women were encouraged to do!); the collaboration between the food industry, mass media, and nutrition scientists in the 1920s; and the changes in restaurant culture caused by Prohibition. Levenstein structures his book through short, engaging, pointed chapters, and his account of technological, economic, and cultural changes do an admirable job assessing multiple factors that contribute to broad shifts in food availability and attitudes. This book will be a key reference for me as I think through the history of modern processed food and the rhetorical association of nutrition with science and the laboratory. Sometimes I thought that Levenstein rather too uncritically associated bland U.S. food tastes with a British cultural inheritance; I thought he could have been more nuanced in tracing multiple cultural inheritances (I know some recent books have traced the persistence of Native American foodstuffs and food preparation practices in U.S. cuisine) and more critical in assessing the role of industry and marketing in establishing "good" tastes over lesser (read: ethnic) ones, though he does acknowledge that the Progressive Era's home economics and New Nutrition movements fairly explicitly pursued "purity" in diet that reflected racial goals as well as culinary ones. A very engaging and wide-ranging book--super helpful.
• 
  Gretchen

  Oh man, this book is great. It covers food culture and history in America from 1880-1930 and seems quite thorough. Levenstein is a good writer - he's engaging and funny and humble. There were a couple sentences where he seemed pretty biased one way or another, but that's bound to happen. He seems like he's mostly done archival and anecdotal research. His background is in labor history and I think that serves him well here, since he offers a good discussion of class and wealth and what that means for food habits.
• 
  jenn

  one of the best food novels available, although it only concentrates on middle-class, white, northern cuisine from the 18th century to the present.
• 
  Camille HR

  David Kamp, author of "The United States of Arugula," referred to "Revolution at the Table," as "a droll study of early-American dietary habits." I call it boring. Try "United States..." instead.
• 
  Cindy Dyson Eitelman

  Gosh! I'd never dreamed of all the history behind our crappy American diet. Except...it wasn't always as crappy as it is now. The book leaves off in the 70's, so it doesn't fully comprehend our fast food and convenience food explosions. It doesn't mention the extremes of over-processing that makes so much of the food in a grocery store not really food at all. It omits how nutritional qualities and flavor were whittled away as industrial agriculture learned to grow things bigger and faster. And it's not able to tackle the issues of weight gain and adult onset diabetes and other diet-related diseases. I assume these things come in the next volume.
  
  But I'm going to have to give it a rest before attempting the sequel, Paradox of Plenty. This one was heavy going--it wasn't a slog, had no more detail than needed, and was very well-written--but I still found it heavy. (And the print was small) Mr. Levenstein did his research well, covering 1880 through 1970, and that's a lot of material.
  
  He writes about how prohibition helped shift our idea of eating out from a rich person's or drinking man's prerogative to and activity that can be done by everyone, every day. Shoppers and shop girls, working men and whole families--they all began to enjoy light meals, sandwiches, cold drinks and ice cream at the soda fountains and cafes. He writes about how the science of Home Economics was created as a career path for women who weren't approved to work in the hard sciences. He shows how diet reform for the working class people was seldom attempted and seldom successful, but the diets did change, eventually, through peer pressure (school lunches; army mess halls) and aspiration to eat like the middle class. There's a chapter The Rise of the Giant Food Producers all about Campbells and Heinz and Schlitz and the triumph of pasteurized milk over fresh. He spends a chapter on the food fads, frauds, and plain old nonsense that abounded at the turn of the century.
  
  Other than the influence of prohibition on eating patterns, I was most surprised to read about the shifting expectations for middle class women, from mistress of servants to homemaker. I don't know what percentage of middle class women employed cooks in the 1800s, but that percentage dropped steadily and drastically--by 1970 it was rare. Without the cooks and servants to direct, the woman was supposed to do it all herself--to be a good cook, an exacting house cleaner, a careful mother, and a thin, beautiful, sexy lady. Wearing stockings and perfectly manicured nails. Hows that for a self image goal?
  
  I did get weirded out by one factual error. In writing of Mexican laborers diets, he states that...the processing of the corn for masa, which involves soaking it in lime, removes important nutrients as well. Huh? I have always read that the preparation of corn with lime water increases the nutritional value of the corn meal it produces. Specifically it allows the niacin to be easily absorbed, and although it reduces the overall protein content slightly, it improves the balance of amino acids. As a side effect it adds minerals, especially calcium. I'm not an expert on this, but the error seemed rather glaring and it made me doubt his other assessments of traditional diets of immigrants against the American diet they adopted. So I went back and read that chapter; didn't see anything else wrong. In an earlier chapter he'd talked about Italian, Jewish and other immigrants to the cities of the north; her writes how their diets also changed and in some ways, much for the worse.
  
  Writing all this makes me want to read the sequel now. We'll see.
  
• 
  Libby Beyreis

  It's not for everyone, but I really liked this book. It traces the history of the American diet and how it evolved, with tons of fascinating stories and insights into how various events (immigration, the world wars, the Depression) affected that diet, often in ways that I wouldn't have expected. If you're interested in why we eat the way we eat, this book should be on your list. Do note it was written in the eighties, so it leaves off some of the modern changes that have happened, but you can see the seeds of it in what he's writing. I'd love to see an updated version of this that takes his insights up to the present day.
• 
  Melanie

  Bought on a whim because my sister read it and it sounded interesting. And it was.
• 
  Emily

  A great history of the changes in the American diet from 1880-1930; changes which Levenstein argues are the roots of our modern diet. I'm excited to move on to his work on the American diet in the modern age.
• 
  Rebecca

  not super exciting but there were some very interesting parts. i read this for a class and so I sort of skimmed but i did appreciate Levenstein pointing out that the "recent" changes in the food system started way back in the end of the 1800s.
• 
  Beth Barnett

  History of food and agriculture topics from colonial times to the 1930s Depression in the US.
• 
  Duncan Mchale

  Recommended by Brent Cunningham in a Lapham's Quarterly podcast 7/25/11.
• 
  Mega Janis

  It's about the transformation of American eating habits from the early times to the days before WWII. I use this book as a reference to write my final paper.
• 
  Janice

  Made it to page 93. Started out thinking it would be interesting, but it is very detailed and technical. Not interesting enough for me to continue reading.
• 
  Mark

  
  https://twitter.com/BeerHasAHistory/s...