Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal

299 Pages·2013·3.41 MB·English

by  Abigail Carroll

MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THREE SQUARES
“Combining scholarly rigor with lively storytelling, Abigail Carroll offers a fresh
look at American culinary history. Resisting the nostalgia often associated with
discussion of family meals, Carroll argues that American dining rituals are
relatively modern and are constantly evolving to meet contemporary needs and
values. This masterful synthesis will delight both professional scholars as well as
newcomers to the exciting new field of food history. Highly recommended!”—
Warren Belasco, author of Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, and
Visiting Professor of Gastronomy, Boston University
“With Three Squares, Abigail Carroll gives us a very long view of American
dining habits, beginning with life in colonial times and ending in the 21st
century. With sometimes startling descriptions of the ad hoc eating that occurred
on either side of a main noon meal in our earliest years, we witness the impact of
away-from-home work in industry and commerce that appropriated the middle
of the day and left us with ‘cold, quick, and cheap lunches.’ The story of
breakfast cereal and snack foods and the erosion of the properly set, middle-class
dinner table with everyone minding their manners caps this fascinating
narrative.”—Sandy Oliver, author of Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and
Their Food at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century
“You will never look at your three meals a day, or snacks throughout the day, the
same way after you read this fascinating, well-researched book. For anyone
interested in food, this book is a must. It tells the historical stories and elucidates
the business forces that underpin our current eating practices.”—Anne Fishel,
Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology, Harvard Medical School, and
consultant to The Family Dinner Project
THREE SQUARES
Three Squares
The Invention of the American Meal
Abigail Carroll
BASIC BOOKS
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Copyright © 2013 by Abigail Carroll Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
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Composition by Cynthia Young Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carroll, Abigail.
Three squares : the invention of the American meal / Abigail Carroll.
pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-04096-4 (ebook) 1. Food habits—United States—History. 2. Diet—United States—
History. 3. Dinners and dining—United States—History. 4. Luncheons—United States—History. 5.
Breakfasts—United States—History. 6. National characteristics, American. 7. United States—Social life
and customs. I. Title.
GT2853.U5C38 2013
394.1′20973—dc23
2013008929
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my family—
John, Diana, Cozette, and Julian
—who always make dinner special.
CONTENTS
Introduction: We Are How We Eat
1 Why Colonial Meals Were Messy
2 The British Invasion
3 How Dinner Became Special
4 How Dinner Became American
5 Why Lunch Is Cold, Cheap, and Quick
6 Reinventing Breakfast
7 Snacking Redeemed
8 The State of the American Meal
Conclusion: The Future of the American Meal
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
INTRODUCTION
We Are How We Eat
THIS BOOK WAS not supposed to be about the American meal. I had intended
to write about the American snack: peanuts, pretzels, popcorn, and all those salty
(and sometimes sweet) pleasures we munch at parties, use to nurse our boredom
on airplanes, and indulge ad infinitum in front of the television. I had been
gathering research for the Indiana State Museum on the relationship between
snacking and obesity for a collaborative exhibition with the Science Museum of
Minnesota, and as an historian by training, I could not help but wonder about
snacking trends before the 1970s, prior to which the data sharply dropped off. So
I embarked on my own investigative journey, probing historical newspapers,
magazines, novels, letters, cookbooks, and memoirs. I learned a great deal about
American snacking habits before my lifetime, but to my surprise, I also
discovered something that focused my attention more squarely on the American
meal: the snack and the meal cannot be understood apart from one another. They
emerged out of the same historical moment, and, as this book reveals, their
stories are wholly intertwined.
My investigative journey into the history of snacking, and then into the
evolution of the modern meal, started with a simple question: “Why?” I first
began to interrogate my eating habits as a teenager: Why do I always eat cereal
in the morning? Why do we say grace at dinner but not at lunch or breakfast?
Why do we condemn, or at least scorn, snacking? Of course, the question of why
is as much a question of why not. When it comes to the morning meal, why do
people choose toast and coffee or biscuits, bacon, and eggs? Why not fries and a
hamburger? Or a salad, nachos, mashed potatoes, fish chowder, stir fried
broccoli, marinated tofu, or a slice of lemon meringue pie? The more I thought
about why we eat as we do, the more I realized how difficult finding the answers
would be. They are not spelled out in nutrition texts, explained in cooking
manuals, or revealed in advertisements. Nor are they to be found in food-
industry trade journals (though here one can garner some clues). Instead, they lie
deeply embedded in popular assumptions about what is normal, good,
fashionable, healthy, and American. Perhaps no other aspect of our lives is as
saturated with popular assumptions as the way we eat. When it comes to meals,
our habits have become so deeply engrained that we hardly wonder why we
adhere to them. As writing this book has taught me, though, there are reasons.
A certain logic dictates why we eat three meals a day, not two or four; why
table manners are standard at dinner when hardly any social rules apply to
breakfast; why we consume orange juice in the morning and sandwiches at
lunch; why people snack on peanuts at circuses and hot dogs at baseball parks.
There are even reasons for garnishing casseroles with potato chips and calling
TV dinners “TV dinners,” even though manufacturers did not originally intend
for consumers to eat them in front of a TV. This book is about those reasons.
Most of us think we know why we eat the way we do. We weigh taste against
nutrition and nutrition against price, and we make thoughtful decisions about not
only what we put into our bodies but also how much, how frequently, and in
whose company. In fact, we make many more food-related decisions than we
think we do—approximately two hundred every day—and most of them are not
deliberate; we simply make them on autopilot. It turns out that environmental
factors like the color of a room, the aroma wafting from a kitchen, the wording
on a menu, the size of a snack-food package, the depth of a mug, and the radius
of a plate all influence the way we eat, whether we realize it or not. But although
conscious choice plays a role in shaping how we eat, and environmental
influences do so all the more, another factor has a surprisingly powerful effect
1
on our food habits: the past.
More than mere sources of nourishment, our meals are gifts from our
ancestors and the cultures in which they lived. We have, to a large extent,
inherited the way we eat. Take breakfast, for example. When we pour milk into a
bowl heaped with rice puffs or bran flakes, we probably don’t realize that this
morning meal has a lot to do with nineteenth-century religious health reforms
and the belief that a grain-based breakfast was the biblically sanctioned solution
to a national case of indigestion. Lunch and dinner are also living artifacts that
say as much about the cultures and ideals of the eras in which they were born as
they do about our modern lives today.
We may come together as family over a hot meal in the evening to catch up