Transforming Tastes: MFK Fisher, Julia Child, Alice Waters and the Revision of American Food ...

266 Pages·2012·0.76 MB·English

by  Erin Branch

Transforming Tastes:
M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Alice Waters
and the Revision of American Food Rhetorics

Erin L. Branch

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department
of English and Comparative Literature

Chapel Hill
2011

Approved By:

Dr. Jane Danielewicz

Dr. Jordynn Jack

Dr. Marcie Ferris

Dr. Minrose Gwin

Dr. Jennifer Ho
© 2011
Erin L. Branch
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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Abstract

ERIN L. BRANCH: Transforming Tastes: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Alice Waters, and
the Revision of American Food Rhetorics

(Under the direction of Jane Danielewicz and Jordynn Jack)

Transforming Tastes: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Alice Waters, and the Revision
of American Food Rhetorics examines rhetorical alternatives to the rhetorics of
quantification and science that have long dominated American food discourse. In the late
nineteenth century, reformers’ efforts to professionalize homemaking led to the
development of home economics as an academic and professional field. This new field
sought legitimacy by conferring scientific status on domestic work and by persuading the
public that the nation’s moral health depended on women keeping house according to
modern methods. Almost simultaneously, the nascent field of nutrition science began
disseminating research via government-sponsored publications that offered dietary advice
in the form of numbers (e.g., of servings, calories, etc.). As American food discourse
became a scientific, data-driven enterprise, this field meant to empower women instead
marginalized everyday women’s practices by validating only knowledge acquired
through legitimate institutional channels.
Three public figures-- essayist M.F.K. Fisher, cookbook author Julia Child, and
activist Alice Waters--provide rhetorical alternatives to these powerful discourses of
home economics and nutrition science. Fisher’s writings recount her personal experiences
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with food to celebrate the sensory pleasures of preparing, eating, and sharing food with
loved ones. By organizing her texts around pleasure, Fisher’s texts challenge received
notions about the gendered nature of food-writing genres. Although Child’s now-
renowned books barely escaped publishing oblivion, they persuaded audiences that
delicious homemade meals were within reach. Child’s rhetoric thus successfully reached
an American middle class that had, by midcentury, largely abandoned from-scratch
cooking in favor of quick, easy, processed foods. Waters is founder of Chez Panisse
Restaurant and the Edible Schoolyard and a leader of Slow Food International. Her texts
draw on the manifesto genre, and mix sensory descriptions of food with calls for
wholesale reform of the food system. This dissertation demonstrates that in countering
dominant discourses, Fisher, Child, and Waters created rhetorical space for today’s
flourishing and diverse food discourses.
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Acknowledgements

Anyone who has written a dissertation will tell you that as the months drag on, it
can become increasingly difficult to maintain focus, and to resist the pull of hobbies, the
Internet, pets, or any number of other distractions. This problem, for me, was
compounded by the fact that a large portion of my dissertation research involved reading
cookbooks. You might think that spending so many months reading recipes and stories
about food would cause me to lose interest in cooking, but on the contrary: the hardest
thing about this project was resisting the urge to walk away from the computer, pick up
the book, and head to the kitchen. Sometimes, the temptation was too great. As the
chapters wore on and my cookbook collection expanded, my husband, friends, and even
my students were often the recipients of the literal fruits of my procrastination. I suppose
there are worse reasons to delay finishing a chapter.
Like any project of this size, this one was not produced in isolation. I am grateful,
first of all, to my co-directors, Dr. Jane Danielewicz and Dr. Jordynn Jack. I thank Jane
for her unwavering confidence in me and in this project, and for helping me to think
about genres of personal writing in increasingly rigorous ways. As a teaching mentor, her
support and advice in every semester has been vital, especially in one when I was
teaching a particularly challenging group of students. I am grateful to Jordynn for the
boundless energy she brings to her teaching and mentoring, not to mention her own
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scholarship. At every stage of this project and in my search for a position after graduate
school, her feedback and advice have been invaluable. Dr. Marcie Ferris helped me to
broaden the horizons of my project, and to think about the women whose texts I wanted
to study in a longer historical lineage. I thank her, too, for introducing me to the field of
food studies, which continues to be a source of inspiration for me. I am grateful to Dr.
Jennifer Ho for her many suggestions in terms of resources and for her knowledge about
food studies, and also for helping me to navigate the murky waters of the job market. As
co-teacher with Jane of a course on memoirs, Dr. Minrose Gwin modeled the kind of
analytical and critical rigor that I hope to bring to my work. Finally, although he was not
a member of my committee, I wish also to thank Dr. Dan Anderson. Dan first
encouraged me to major in Rhetoric & Composition, and his efforts on my behalf are
behind a number of the lines on my CV. Together, these faculty members have
challenged and inspired me, and I look forward to modeling my academic career on the
fine examples they have set.
As I finished this dissertation, I have been fortunate to begin a new position at
Wake Forest University. I thank my new colleagues for supporting and encouraging me,
and for the release from service responsibilities as I completed this project.
In addition to my Teaching Fellowship from the English Department, this project
was supported by a Ferdinand Summer Research Fellowship. I thank the Ferdinand
family and the Graduate School Fellowship Committee for the time and resources this
fellowship afforded me at a critical stage in the process.
My research was significantly enhanced by several days spent with the Julia Child
Archives and the MFK Fisher Archives at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe
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Institute, Harvard University. I am indebted to the staff there, particularly to reference
librarian Lynda Leahy, for making my time there so pleasant and productive. I also thank
Robert Lescher, Fisher’s former agent and executor of her literary estate, for allowing me
access to her papers. Keith Luf, the Archives Manager at WGBH Boston, supplied me
with a comprehensive listing of the airdates for Child’s television shows, for which I am
grateful.
Since the day I declared my intention to major in Rhetoric & Composition, the
Rhetoric & Composition Writing Group at UNC has welcomed me--and my project--with
open arms. I am so very grateful to Rise Applegarth, Heather Branstetter, Sarah
Hallenbeck, and Chelsea Redeker for being such generous but critical readers. Their
insights and feedback have shaped this project, as well as my thinking and writing, in
crucial ways. I also thank them for being such good and encouraging colleagues, and for
becoming such treasured friends. I also am grateful to Sarah Marsh, Kate Attkisson, and
Meredith Malburne-Wade, my dearest friends and closest confidantes, whose support and
general good humor have brought so much laughter and joy to the last seven years. I
thank Sarah, especially, for the three things that made our exam years possible:
mushroom salad, P&P, and the green couch.
I owe no one greater thanks than my family, especially my parents, Bill and Leslie
Branch, who have made the life I now enjoy possible in all ways. I thank both of them for
encouraging me from my earliest days, for never getting too upset when I stayed up late
to finish a book, and for all manner of support as I completed graduate school. For all the
delicious meals I have enjoyed at their house and in their company, I am grateful, for
both the food and for their inspiration. I thank my brother, Jim, for keeping me grounded
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and making me laugh, and I thank his daughter Sadie for reminding me that sometimes
the simplest pleasures are the best. Since I was very small, my grandmother Alice has
fostered my love of reading, and she has long been convinced that I would one day earn a
PhD in English. I did not believe her until very recently, but my degree will belong to her
as much as it does to me. I am so grateful to her and my grandfather for their love and
belief in me. Finally, I thank my husband Lukas for everything. His steadfast faith and
confidence in this project, along with just about everything else I want to undertake,
sustains me, and I can’t wait to see what we tackle next.

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Preface

In the early stages of my dissertation process, several trusted friends and
colleagues told me that I would end up writing about myself. This seemed unlikely to me;
I couldn’t imagine how my life would fit into what (at that point) was shaping up to be a
highly theoretical project. But some months later, when I had finally arrived at a topic
and had started to develop research questions, I realized that they had all been right.
While I did not literally write about myself, I have noticed remarkable affinities between
my own life and those of the three writers whose works I study in the following chapters.
Like my three case studies, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters, I grew
up in a comfortable home (though not in California), and family dinners, especially on
weekends and holidays, were a regular feature of my childhood. As my brother and I
grew older, baseball practice (for him) and rehearsals (for me) often got in the way of
those weeknight dinners. On weekends, however, my dad would drag out the biggest pot
we owned, turn on the football game, and start rummaging through the refrigerator and
the pantry. By dinnertime, we’d be eating one of his creations, none of which were ever
bound by the rules of recipes. Instead, we’d dine on bean-intensive stews, soups full of
(to us) unrecognizable vegetables or grains with unpronounceable names like “quinoa,”
or (when the Redskins were losing) chili so hot we were gulping milk and ice water for
the rest of the evening.
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Holidays, too, were occasions for pulling out all the culinary stops. A week or two
after Thanksgiving, out of the attic would come boxes of ornaments and other
decorations, along with extra cookie sheets, holiday-themed cookie tins, and an old-
fashioned cookie press. For days, my brother and I would wake up to sticks of butter
softening on the counter, and we would come home from school to find dozens,
sometimes hundreds, of sugar-coated cookies cooling on wire racks. One whole cupboard
would have to be cleared out to accommodate my mother’s tins of cookies--enough to
last us and usually the neighbors, too, well into January.
Despite all of this, my own interest in cooking was sporadic and confined largely
to the brownies I occasionally made at my grandmother’s house. As a high school
student, I was far too worried about fitting into the right kind of jeans to spend much time
in the kitchen. And like many 18-year-old women newly arrived at college, I fretted
about gaining the “freshman fifteen,” which I avoided by subsisting primarily on salad
and applesauce during my first two years at Middlebury College. Things all changed in
the fall of my junior year.
Like the three case studies I examine in this chapter, I traveled to France in my
very early twenties. Middlebury has an extensive network of study abroad opportunities,
the school in Paris being one of the most established, and studying in Paris fit my idea of
what a serious student of culture and literature (as I believed myself to be) should do with
herself. Like my case studies, I spent hours in Paris’s museums and dutifully visited
famous monuments and buildings, and like them I took classes in French language,
culture, and history; in fact, Alice Waters and I attended the same branch of the
Université de Paris (Paris III, or Censier-Daubenton).
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