WHATS COOKING? EATING IN AMERICA

Foreword:

The USA as we know it today is a result of its diverse population.

Four centuries of immigration have profoundly affected the culture and society of the United States. Except for Native Americans, all Americans are either recent immigrants or the descendants of immigrants who have settled in North America over the last five centuries.
The first immigrants to colonial America came almost exclusively from western Europe. During the first decades of the 17th century, settlers from England colonized Virginia and New England. They established the first permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.

Although the United States has been shaped by successive waves of immigrants, Americans have often viewed immigration as a problem. Established Americans often look down on new immigrants. The cultural habits of immigrants are frequently targets of criticism.

Here I want to give you an overview on immigrants that arrived in the USA since the 17^th century, a time when America was already largely settled by white Eurpopeans.

I also want to show the development of the distinct American language that went hand in hand with the appearance and settlement of various national groups.

Another issue that the immigrants had a strong influence on was the development of the American food, which is given a survey on in the second part of this report.

EATING IN AMERICA

INDIAN INFLUENCE

"The first settler had come upon a land of plenty. They nearly starved in it"

When the Pilgrims first arrived in the New World, they showed a grim reluctance to eat anything that did not come from their own stockpile, that basically consisted of salt meat and dried beans.They´d rather starve than to experiment with the exotic food that was there of plenty, like lobster, clams,mussles and oysters,salmon and scallops or duck.

Due to their inexperience as farmers and the different climate their first crops of peas and wheat failed.

But fortunately there were Indians to save them.

The natives of the New World were eating better than any European.

The variety of food they were supplied with was for Europeans unimaginable and their diet was a lot healthier too.Among the delicacies unique to teh New World wer the whit and sweet potato, the peanut, pumpkins, choclate and vanilla, pineapples, chilli peppers, the sunflower and tomatoes.

The agriculture of the Indians had a sophistication the Europeans could not even begin competeing with. As a result, while Europeans struggled even in good years to have enough to eat, the Indians enjoyed a constant bounty.

The Indians single most important gift to the colonists,- apart from not wiping them out -was corn.

Under the patient tutelage of the Indians the colonists gradually became acquainted with native products like pumpkins.

Pumkin Pie became a big hit after the Pilgrims were introduced to it at their second Thnaksgiving feast in 1623.

The Indians not only introduced the colonists to new food, but to more intersting ways of preparing them. Dishes like clam chowder, cranberry sauce or corn pone were all Inidian inventions.

INFLUENCE OF THE IMMIGRANTS

Only a relative handful of new foods entered the American vocabulary in the ninetheenth century, among them pretzl,pumpernickel,liverwurst,tutti-frutti, and spaghetti.

What changed was the way Americans ate.

Before the 1820ies, dining out was an activity reserved almost exclusivly to travellers.

There were no places dedicated to the public consumtion of food just for the pleasure of it, nor any word to describe them.

Then in 1827 a new word and concept entered America from France: restaurant.

Soon restaurants sprouted all over.By the 1870ies NYC alone had over 5000 restaurants.

In 1905, Gennaro Lombardi owned an Italian restaurant in New York's Little Italy. He started to serve a food from Naples, Italy, and people loved it. Made from a flat, yeast bread baked with melted cheeses and tomatoes, the dish was called 'pizza.' Today, pizza is delivered to the doors of American homes throughout the country, but back then it was a way for immigrants to have a slice of home in their new country.

Many classic Italian dishes are in fact New World creations.

For example caesar salad, chicken tetrazzini or spagetti with meatballs were all produc´ts to satisfy the American palate.

Italian food was often all but recognizable to visitors from Italy.

A similar situation obtained with many other well loved "foreign" foods.

Chilli con carne was unknown in Spain until introduced there from the New World.

Chop Suey first saw light not in China but in San Francisco and the Fortune Cookie was invented in Los Angeles.

The number of restaurants in America rose between 1910 and 1925 by 40%.

A hungry New Yorker in 1925 could choose between 17,000 restaurants.

FAMOUS AND CLASSICAL AMERICAN FOOD

CORNFLAKES

In the 19^th century, as the diet in America became livelier a lot of people believed that the consumption of the wrong food would lead to the nation´s moral breakdown.

In that time Horace Flethcer gave the world the notion that each bite of food should be chewed 32 times and wrote a successful book, the ABC of Nutrition.

The zenith of America´s long obsessive coupling of food with moral rectitude came with John Harvey Kellog, who took over a health reform institute and introduced a regime of treatments that was as bizarre as it was popular.

Throughout much of his liefe, Kellogg nurtured a quiet obsession with inventing a flaked breakfast cereal.

One night the process came to him in his dreams.In his nightshirt he hastened to the kitchen, boiled some wheat, rolled it out into stripes and baked it in the oven.

The product was not only tasty but sufficiently unusual as to be without question good for you.

As it dawned on the people that breakfast cereals were awfully easy to make, imitators sprang up.Not until 1907 when Kellog at last brought to market his cornflakes, did he begin to get the credit and wealth his invention merited.

JUNK FOOD

Against such a background it is little wonder that Americans turned with a certain enthusiasm to junk food.The term Junk food didnt enter America before 1973, but the concept was tehre long before and it began with one of the great breakthroughs in food history: the invention of choclate.

The choclate bar was invented in England in the 1840ies and milk choclate in Switzerland some 30 years later, but neither became popular in America until the Hershey bar came to the market in 1903.

The golden age of candy bars was the 1920ies. Several classics made their debut in that busy decade- the Milky way and Butterfingers, Mr Goodbar,Snickers, popsicles, Milk Duds and

The Dubble Bubble Gum in 1928.

The HAMBURGER

No one knows where the first Hamburger was made.

The presumption has always been that it came tpo America from Hamburg, Germany, like the franfurter came from Frankfurt. But also Hamburg, NY and several other American cities claim to have been the birthplace of the Hamburger in 1885.

By the turn of the century the Hamburger steak was referred to as apatty of ground beef fried on a grill, but not until 1921 did the hamburger as the sandwich we know today begin to take its first steps towards respectability.

The term fats food was coined in 1954.

McDONALDS: All American Restaurant

When brothers Dick and Mac McDonald opened their southern California drive-in restaurant, they named it after themselves. Today, more than 12,000 restaurants in over 56 countries carry their name, and more than 22 million people eat at a McDonald's every day. Thanks to McDonald's, people around the world think American food is a hamburger, french fries, and a milkshake or soft drink. The restaurant's golden arches are as well known and as welcoming as the Statue of Liberty.

McDonald's became successful thanks to Ray A. Kroc, a salesman of food mixers. Kroc sold his mixers to the McDonald brothers, took an interest in their business, and began to franchise restaurants in their name. In 1961, Kroc bought out the McDonald brothers' share of the business, then started the Hamburger University in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. Here, students can earn a Bachelor of Hamburgerology, while studying the McDonald's way of running a restaurant. This allows customers to get their food fast and to ensure that all meals served at every McDonald's are the same. In fact, you can eat the same meal at every McDonald's in the United States and abroad.

McDonald's leads the fast-food business in sales. While many busy parents are grateful for the restaurants' delivery of fast and cheap meals to children, they are also concerned that a McDonald's meal is not very nutritious. Fried food and sodas do not build strong and healthy bodies. Responding to this criticism, McDonald's has added items, such as salads and grilled chicken sandwiches, to its menu. Still, the hamburger is what made McDonald's what it is today. It is the hamburger that keeps most people returning to the golden arches either on foot, or for really fast food, in the drive-through lane.

ABOUT DRINKING

On the 16^th of January 1920 the Eighteenth Amandment, the Volstead Act and Prohibition came into force, that made any use and trade of alcohol in the United States illegal.

Of course this law had a devastating effect on restaurants, bars and  wine growers.

Even though the wine growers discovered that tehre was nothing illegal about pasting a prominent label on each bottle of harmless grape concentrate announcing boldly:

" Warning:Will Ferment and turn into Wine", and providing step by step instructions on how a careless consumer mighht inadvertently convert this healthful beverage into something with the power to make his legs wobble.

This strict law made people more creative than ever.

Seldom has any law anywhere led to greater hypocrisy .

People not only continued to drink, but in greater number than ever.

The brewers were nearly as desperate as the wine growers, but they soon discovered a new product and started producing a huge variety of soft drinks, like Howdy, chero-cola,7-Up, Root beer or Ginger Ale.

The Story of COCA COLA

However it was not until 1886 that America got its quintessential softdrink when John Styth Pemberton, an Atlanta Pharmacist, brewed up a concoction of cola nuts, coca leaves, caffeine and other similarly dubious condiments in an iron tub in his backyard, stirred it with a wooden oar from an old boat and called it COCA COLA.

His bookkeeper, who had a dab hand at calligraphy drew up the florid logo that Coke uses to this day.

Anotehr Atlanta pharmacist, Asa G. Candler bought the formula for 2000 $. By 1919 his outlay had grown in value to 24 million$.

Such success naturally encouraged immitation. Coke took trhem all to court.

By 1926 it had resorted to law no fewer than 7000 times to protect its trademark.

In 1930 it also won the exclusive right to its alternative name, COKE.

The only competitor it notably failed to destroy was Pepsi-Cola invented by C.D. Bradham in 1898.

Today Coke is sold in 195 countries and is claimed to be the second most universally understood English term, exceeded only by OK.

SOURCES:

Made in America by BillBryson

Internet