A U.S. history lesson through food

Make Me Smart March 7, 2023 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

Oh I guess Jake is just gonna do it. That’s fine. Hey, everybody, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to make me smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. And I’m Kimberly Adams. Thank you for joining us on this Tuesday for our weekly deep dive. Regular listeners often hear me and Kai say how much we love history and how cool it is. And so today, we are going to do something super cool. And get a little history lesson but it’s all going to be through the lens of food.

Anna Zeide 

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.  Jello and chicken nuggets and green green bean casserole, all that good stuff. It’s all about food and history. It’s actually a really cool thing because it combines two of my favorite things. Food historian Anna Zeide is with us. She’s the author of the new book, it’s called “US history in 15 foods.” Welcome to the show.

Kai Ryssdal 

Alright, so look why food? I mean, I’m all over it. But why?

Anna Zeide 

I think food has this really interesting position where it’s both like really, really important, right? We all have to eat every day, nothing else that we do can really happen without food. And yet at the same time, I think because of how mundane it becomes almost in its dailiness, it recedes to the back of our kind of concentrated thought. And we don’t spend all that much time thinking about how central it is both, you know, to our daily lives, as well as to historical events.

Kimberly Adams 

You know, it’s so interesting, because so much of any individual culture is wrapped up in food, and America, which is so multicultural, has so many different like, it’s like food pathways coming together. So how did you then pick just 15 of them? And then ones that can actually represent air, quote, American culture?

Anna Zeide 

Yeah, that was certainly a challenge. And I would say sort of choosing the 15 and putting together, the initial Table of Contents took almost as much time as like writing the whole book did because it required so much digging through all of these different stories to think about how these foods might tell us specific stories about, you know, well known events in the past. And as I open the book, I sort of say, you know, it certainly could be 15 other foods or probably 100 other foods that readers could come up with that could serve as different kinds of lenses. And so these aren’t definitive. And yet, I think each one really opens up a window onto a particular era in American history, and lets us re imagine how we might understand it through both food in general, and then the particular food that anchors each chapter.

Kai Ryssdal 

So let’s walk through a couple of those. I want to start with the Whiskey Rebellion. It’s it’s a tax policy story. It’s a “we need whiskey story.” Give us give us that one could you?

Anna Zeide 

Yeah, I really liked this one, in part because it retells a story that most of us if we took a high school US history or college, US history class, at some point, we might have heard of the Whiskey Rebellion. And it’s often framed as kind of being this first major kind of conflict between federal authority and local rebellion. And George Washington steps in and he’s able to kind of put the rebellion down, and the tax continues. And basically, it’s, you know, soon after the American Revolution; new country still figuring out how to assert its authority. The idea is that they, you know, Congress puts levies a tax on whiskey and these kind of frontier men who I think in the classic telling often are, you know, kind of backwoods people who are so attached to their drink, that they can’t have the tax. And I try to retell the story to kind of reframe what whiskey was not just a drink to, you know, to get drunk on, but a drink that really represented connections to the land, an ability to convert the land into a commodity that could be easily shipped to cities, a frontier identity that was sort of, really at the heart of the new nation. You know, I talked about how before the American Revolution, there was kind of a decided shift away from rum, which had been the drink of choice but relies on sugar imported from the British West Indies, to whiskey, which was a kind of uniquely American or not uniquely but could be made from American products, corn, and grain that could be grown here on American soil. And so as the revolution approaches, whiskey comes to embody that kind of American independence that the whole revolution, you know, then carried the spirit of forward.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, while while we’re talking about American wars and food and identity, chapter five, pot liquor, or I guess item number five: “Potlikker, food and slavery in the antebellum south.” First of all, very interested in your spelling of pot liquor, for people who might not know is a reference to sort of the fluid left behind after cooking a lot of sort of soul foods, and I’m particularly thinking of collard greens. And this sort of broth that’s left behind, which is referred to as pot liqueur, which has, I guess, a couple of different spellings. Can you talk about sort of this moment in American history and the role that food played at it?

Anna Zeide 

Right, yeah. And so food is so, so central to the period of enslavement both I talked about potlikker or as kind of being envisioned by enslavers as a waste product. So they fish out the greens and the piece of meat that was cooked with it and eat that, and then pour the remaining broth over the corn mush that was fed to enslaved people. And it was kind of, you know, seen as a waste product. And yet, even before kind of modern vitamin and nutrition knowledge was known, it turns out when you cook greens for a really long time, most of the nutrients leach into the broth. And, you know, sort of through folk wisdom enslaved people knew that it was a healthy substance. And were really grateful for it. And so I use it to sort of talk about how food and enslavement is both used as a tool of power, that then slavers wielded hunger by giving these sort of waste products as they saw them to enslaved people. And at the same time, food was also a way that a lot of enslaved peoples reclaimed power. Took agency for themselves, whether that was through growing small garden truck patches, just outside their quarters, when possible, often after sunset, after they’d worked, you know, long grueling hours in the fields; or being able to forage or hunt or fish when possible in the nearby woods. And so these kinds of connections to food, and often, you know, foods that came from African ancestors and had been handed down was a way that people in their daily lives who were, you know, dramatically disempowered were able to pull some pleasure sometimes out out of food.

Kai Ryssdal 

Can you talk for a minute about food and and marketing? The example you choose, of course, is is Campbell’s Soup and you know, the sort of iconography of that company and what it came to mean. But food and marketing, even you know, today, when we’re probably more sophisticated consumers, one would hope… One would hope. Is still sort of… I mean, there’s a lot of oomph that food marketing carries.

Anna Zeide 

Yeah. Right. And so, you know a big, big theme throughout this book and other work I’ve done is that a lot of foods when they emerge are not obvious sells. You know, it’s not obvious that someone would want to eat jello, this fruit, cold desert made from animal gelatin, you know? Like, these are not taken for granted desirable things. And often people are pretty, you know, they they eat, what they’re familiar with, and what they’ve been used to. And so introducing new foods, is really, very quickly takes companies into the space of having to build a market, where marketing comes into play really strongly, such that, you know, major food companies that we still know today, many of them were leading advertisers in the early 20th century, and that kind of appeal to all kinds of different authority and stamps of approval to get people to want to try this thing and incorporate it into their daily diets. It’s, uh, it’s, you know, often requires some real work. And, you know, there’s history is littered with lots of failed products that didn’t quite make it. And, you know, I think that that…. My first book is about canned food and it’s all about how you know, canned food, acceptance of canned food was what sort of paved the way for Americans to trust all kinds of processed foods. Sort of trusting something and an opaque package where you couldn’t see what was inside and you only had to go, you know, on the word of the of the corporation.

Kimberly Adams 

You know, that jello and some of those other processed foods really talk about sort of food and technology, which you get into in this book, but also you talk about food and global power with the example of spam. Can you talk about that?

Anna Zeide 

Yeah. So this one is partly a personal story, too, in the sense that I grew up hearing my dad who was born in Russia in the former Soviet Union in 1937, talking about how, as a kid, the American soldiers who were stationed nearby would hand out cans of Spam that were leftover from their rations to nearby children. And how he, he would taste this meat. And it was just the most delicious thing he had ever tasted: salty and fatty. And he was also a vegetarian for my most of my life as an adult. And so hearing him sort of.

Kimberly Adams 

Probably after he found what was in spam.

Anna Zeide 

Maybe so

Kimberly Adams 

No offense to spam. I love it.

Anna Zeide 

You know, I think it even then gave me a sense of the context of sort of why something like this would be so delicious. That hunger and lack of access to sort of high protein meat sources was such, you know, was such a lack in that war time period. And it carried with it this kind of appeal of the American soldier and the power and sense of democratic promise that they held. And so that fascinated me as a child. And so, as I came to think more about World War Two, and the food that I wanted to write, spam rose quickly to the forefront. In particular, because of that image of the American soldier in the Soviet Union. And, you know, as I did the research, it became clear that that was true, not just in the Soviet Union, but really, all over the world. Such that America… Everywhere the American soldier went throughout Europe and Asia and the Pacific Theater, spam, and other American foods really went with them. And you know, today spam is still widely popular in Hawaii and Guam, and throughout the kind of Pacific islands, in large part because of this World War Two planting.

Kai Ryssdal 

What do we get wrong about food in our culture?

Anna Zeide 

Oh, wow. That is a big question. Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of things. One of them is that we don’t spend that much time thinking about it. And I think this extends both to thinking about the incredible complexity of, you know, environmental ramifications and technology and labor that goes in to producing our incredibly plentiful, abundant, cheap and diverse and largely delicious food supply that in the US most people have access to. Even even people who, you know, have less money relative to any other time in American history, have more… can eat like kings, so to speak. And I think the fact that we take that for granted, both in that broad scope, as well as kind of day to day, the way that we don’t always allow food to be a source of pleasure or community or rest: that we eat on the go, that we cram an energy bar in where we can, that we don’t linger over meals, don’t let food be that point of connection on tipically on a daily basis. Certainly for holidays or special occasions, we do still usually return to the table and see the way that it builds community. But I think that pushing it to the back of our minds, into the back of our days, really comes at the huge cost of of our, you know, of our health, the health of the planet and our relationship to the pleasure of food.

Kai Ryssdal 

Last one, and then we’ll let you go what was number 16? Which one didn’t… What was the last one not to make the cut?

Anna Zeide 

Yeah, the you know, even figuring out what to write for 15, how to write a chapter about kind of the present, about my own life, felt really challenging. And as I thought about what would be the next chapter, you know, as we move forward, and certainly in our current moment, I do think debates and conversations around alternative proteins are really at the forefront and will continue to be as we reckon with the real unsustainability of our meat production system in an era of climate crisis. And thinking about what all of these, you know, self-cultured meats, as well as just more standard meat substitutes, edible insects, this whole array of alternative proteins that really get into questions about how we make our food and how sustainable or unsustainable that system really is.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, since you brought it up, tell us about number 15. Not to give away everything in the book, but you know how you wrapped up what food means for you.

Anna Zeide 

15 is Korean tacos. And I really came to this after trying you know, as I was writing this book, in the pandemic, in the, you know, post 2020 election and thinking about all of the major sources that’s that were shaking up the world I was living in and even as someone who studies the past and has seen a lot of tremendous change and upheaval, still trying to make sense of the upheaval in our own time. Two major sources that seem to come come out were questions around immigration and how this country that is so founded on immigrants wrestles with and reckons with very competing feelings about what role immigrants play in our society. And then the question of social media and technology, and what it’s doing to our foundations, our democratic our democratic impulses. Understanding what this really dramatically new and tremendously impactful technology is doing to all of us. And so in that space, Korean tacos really emerged to try to help me think about both of those issues, both as sort of a fusion food that brought together the Korean and Mexican populations of Los Angeles where it was first kind of came to power with Kogi in the food truck scene around 2008. And at the same time, Kogi was using Twitter, the very new medium to spread news about its location each day, and at the same time spread this kind of, or promoted this foodie revolution around food trucks and gourmet food trucks. And those same forces of social media and immigrant strengths that produce this food also led, you know, first to kind of the rise of Obama and his immigrant backgrounds, as well as his use of social media and his campaigns. And then were really central in the rise of Trump and sort of anti-immigrant backlash, and the rhetoric that he used and his use of social media, obviously, to, to develop a certain kind of platform. So all of these forces are thinking about how this particular food and these particular political moments come together to shape the moment that we’re in.

Kimberly Adams 

Wow. Anna Zeide is the author of the new book: “US History in 15 foods.” Also a food historian. Thank you so much.

Kai Ryssdal 

Thanks Anna.

Anna Zeide 

Thank you for having me. This was great.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I wow. Mind blown. Food in politics and history and technology and super-powerness.

Kai Ryssdal 

Good for her. That was cool. That was that was very cool. Let us know what you think would you? 508-827-6278. 508-U-B-SMART. Those are all letters. And a little shout out Amy Scott. Email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org. We’re coming right back.

Kimberly Adams 

Alright, news, let’s go. Yes. So my first one is actually an obituary or several obituaries that somebody on Twitter, which I still look at, flagged for me. Judy Heumann, who is a… who was a disability rights activist who passed last week at 75. And she, I’m going to read from PBS News Hour’s obituary, “she lost her ability to walk at the age of two after contracting polio and lobbied for legislation that led to the passage of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act.” She was a teacher, an activist, and a basically pushed to make sure that we were more inclusive in our society of people with all kinds of abilities and disabilities. And especially section 504, which says you can’t discriminate against someone who has a disability if the entity is receiving money from the federal government. And that was a really key part of this that she was pivotal in and just wanted to mark that moment and her contributions. And thank you to Michelle on Twitter who flagged that for me. And then we talked the other day about Walgreens and how Walgreens came out and said that they were not going to be distributing abortion pills in certain parts of the country. And whoo boy are they are getting it. They have obviously faced a huge backlash across the country with this, especially since other pharmacy chains aren’t saying anything. So it’s pretty much just Walgreens out there by itself getting celebrated at CPAC, which, depending on you know where you are in the country, or in the political spectrum, may not be exactly where you want to be promoted at a given point in time. And now the story that made me want to talk about this today, California’s governor has said they will not do business. California will not do business with Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. “Because of this, the state refused,” this is from Reuters, “the state refuses to do business with Walgreens or any company, quote that cowers to the extremists and puts women’s lives at risk, said Newsome.” And so that means all the relationships with between Walgreens and the state were now under review, although we’re not exactly sure how that might mean business might change. But this is only going to get worse because, you know, I think some of these corporations really hoped that they could just stay out of politics for a while and they’re not going to be able to do it.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, it’s, it’s remarkable. And Walgreens is out there all by its lonesome as everybody just watches to see what happens. Yeah, really interesting. Okay, so this will be day two in a row for me of dumping on the New York Times and Jim Tankersley, in particular. And I’m a big fan of his so I hate to do this. But another story in The New York Times today about which I can only say, duh. Jim wrote a piece today about a debt default and what that would mean for the American economy based on a study by Mark Zandi from Moody’s. And Mark Zandi said that it would be catastrophic for the American economy. Yes! Yes! Next question? I just it kills me that. I mean, I guess, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. All this stuff that seems so obvious to me and just is not. I don’t even know. I’m just irritated by the fact that we have to keep saying this. We have to keep saying that Republicans voted to increase the amount that we borrow as did Democrats, and that a debt default would be catastrophic. I just okay. I’ll keep saying it. I’ll keep saying it.

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, the thing is, people know it.

Kai Ryssdal 

I know! I know!

Kimberly Adams 

It doesn’t necessarily push people towards action. Or I think some some of the folks in Congress legitimately want to see the crisis.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, they do. I think that’s right. Sorry let me just say

Kimberly Adams 

Was it Rahm Emanuel that said never a waste a crisis?

Kai Ryssdal 

Never let a good crisis go to waste. Let me just be. I need to be super clear. It’s not some folks in Congress, it’s Republicans in the House of Representatives. Right. I mean, we have to say that. And before you at me with and by you, I mean, anybody listening or anybody who happens to see this go by in a tweet or something. Don’t at me on this one, because it’s not the Democrats. It’s not Democrats in the Senate. It’s not Republicans in the Senate. It’s Republicans in the House of Representatives. And we have to be able to say that without being accused of politicizing or whatever. It’s just that’s the fact that

Kimberly Adams 

It is accurate.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Item number two and and of more substance, probably long term is a piece I saw in Bloomberg today about female executives leaving this economy. So we talked a lot during the during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, and late 2020, and early 2021, about women in large numbers, leaving the workforce because of childcare, parental care, and other domestic duties that typically fall disproportionately on women, and men, typically not doing them. And we talked a lot about that. Now, women, generally speaking, have come back to the labor force as the economy, as the pandemic has waned. But what Bloomberg points out, and it cites several items of research on this, is that female executives are basically leaving and saying, “Screw it. We are not interested in doing this.” We don’t want to tolerate companies, the piece points out, that don’t support them in their roles as mothers and other things that they do outside of work which contributes so essentially to the way this society functions but which for which they are not given due space in their professional lives. And it’s a really important article. We will put it on our show page. But the idea that we are now past the era when women in the workforce is a crisis, as it was early in this pandemic, is just not correct. And it’s going to be a serious problem.

Kimberly Adams 

And look at the list in this in this article of some of the people who they highlight. You know, the list of high level resignations includes YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent female leaders, who also helped create Google’s advertising business. Amy Hawk, the brand CEO of Victoria’s Secret. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Arden, Nicola Sturgeon Scotland’s First Minister. And all of them citing burnout, or wanting to spend more time with their families. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve seen this happening in my own community of women I know, friends and family who either dialed back their hours during the pandemic, or had to because of, you know, all the reasons that we’ve talked about, or they just decided, you know, they got to start spending more time with their kids, and they’re like, “you know, what, it’s not worth it. I’m gonna be with my family, you know, while the kids are still at the age where it matters. And it’s just not worth it anymore. And if the job’s not supporting me, I’ll just do a different job or do something else.” Now that’s a point of privilege to be able to do that. But I guess that’s why it’s executives who are making these choices.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. That’s all I got

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, that’s it. So mailbag! Let’s move on to that.

Mailbag 

Hi Kai and Kimberly. This is Godfrey from San Francisco. Jessie from Charleston, South Carolina. And I have a follow up question. It has me thinking and feeling a lot of things.

Kai Ryssdal 

Alright, so I was talking the other day about Wordle and and how I was so smart because I muted Wordle in my Tweet Deck and then I didn’t have to see it anymore except for Nova freaking Sofo who’s Wordle score keeps coming up on my Twitter feed. I should say here I love Nova, he’s a great reporter and he is a signature voice for us here at Marketplace but I don’t need to know his world score. Anyway, then we got this

Christian 

Hi Kai and Kimberly, this is Christian Seeley. Please tell me I am not the only one when I hear someone on Marketplace say Nova Safo’s name that sings a song Bodhisattva by Steely Dan, and uses Nova’s name in the lyrics instead. You know, singing “Nova Safo would you take me by the hand? Nova Safo would you take me by the hand? Can you show me the shining of your Japan? The sparkle of your china? Can you show me Nova Sofo, Nova Safo” … Well anyway, I hope it made you smile. This one always makes me smile. Thanks, guys.

Kai Ryssdal 

We should mute my track under that because I was laughing so much. That’s great actually! That’s great.

Kimberly Adams 

That did make me smile. Although I don’t know the song.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, really? It’s a good one.You would know it as soon as you heard it. Maybe you’re a little young for that?

Kimberly Adams 

I think you overestimate my Steely Dan knowledge.

Kai Ryssdal 

All right. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Fair enough.

Kimberly Adams 

But there’s something similar and he’ll probably hate me for saying this out loud. But every time I have to write an email to Justin Ho, like I ended up you know, because we have a pretty standard way we write emails here at marketplace. I always think of the song Jai Ho from Slumdog Millionaire.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. But wait, what’s the standard… What? Wait, what’s the standard form for emails or marketplace because I’m sure I’m I’m completely sure I’m breaking protocol every time I write an email.

Kimberly Adams 

No I’m talking about in our email addresses.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Kimberly Adams 

Because the song is called Jai Ho. And you know, jho, every single time like (hums Jai Ho). Anyway, before we go, we’re gonna leave you with this week’s answer to the make me smart question which is: what is something you thought you knew but later found out you were wrong about?

Eric 

Hi, this is Eric from Northern California. I always thought that dancing was this thing that you kind of had to learn cuz I was always a terrible dancer even though I’m a musician, now music teacher. And now I have a one year old and when we first put on music, they just started moving around. And watching my little son wiggle his little arms around and kind of invent new dance moves really changed my perspective on inherent art found within humans. So now I have no excuse to stand on the side of the dance floor at weddings anymore.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh man.

Kimberly Adams 

I think we all naturally dance and we are taught to be ashamed of our dance.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, yeah. and it has stuck with me. Let me tell you I’m staying firmly on the side of the dance floor next wedding I’m in. No, come on. Have you even met me!? Cut it out. Come on

Kimberly Adams 

No, I remember I when I tried to get you to do that Tiktok dance and you did not do it.

Kai Ryssdal 

No, no, no, no. All right. Anyway, what is something you thought you knew later found out you were wrong about? That is the make me smart question. Leave us a voice message with your answer to that question our number is  508-827-6278. 508-U-B-SMART

Kimberly Adams 

Make me smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our intern is Antonio Barreras. And today’s program was engineered by Jayk Cherry with mixing by Drew Jostad

Kai Ryssdal 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our acting senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital and On Demand. And Marketplace’s Vice President and General Manager and grand pooh-bah is Neal Scarbrough.

Kimberly Adams 

But you danced at your wedding, right?

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah I had to. I had to.

Kimberly Adams 

Did you do a good job?

Kai Ryssdal 

I guess. I mean, look, I’m still married, right?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah there’s that. I suppose you didn’t do too badly.