Contact: Dr. Richard Pillsbury: (404) 651-1830 Department of Anthropology and Geography [email protected]
Kim MacQueen: (404) 651-3574 University Relations [email protected]
Georgia State geographer will change our ideas about what we eat
ATLANTA - Richard Pillsbury's No Foreign Food is part historical cookbook, part foodwise travelogue, and arguably the most clear-eyed, in-depth view of the American diet available in academia or anywhere else. Pillsbury, a Georgia State University geographer, has written a social and historical examination of American food, rife with economic, social and personal data that adds up to a when, why and how of American cuisine. The New York Times Book Review called No Foreign Food "a persuasive and complete picture of the American diet." Pillsbury wasn't content to sit in his office at Georgia State and crunch numbers. Instead he drove coast-to-coast interviewing restaurateurs, diners and grocers about what they eat. He then compiled this region-by-region study of the changing American diet, chronicling the influences of migration and technology to show with maps, charts and on-the-road interviews how what we eat is affected by where we live. No Foreign Food shows that through acculturation, dishes imported from across the world are no longer considered "foreign," and proves it with interviews and conversations overheard at truck stops, where diners can feast on once-foreign spaghetti and sausage. By thoroughly examining both the content (the food we eat) and the concept (the reasons why we eat it) of American cuisine throughout the last century, Pillsbury debunks a lot of long-held food myths.
Take, for example, fried chicken - a Southern Sunday staple embedded in tradition for as long as anyone can remember. But when researching No Foreign Food, Pillsbury realized it's a relatively late 20th Century phenomenon.
"Until relatively recently, chickens were much more valuable as sources of eggs than of meat," Pillsbury says. "You didn't knock off a chicken untiil it stopped laying eggs, and by that time it was three or four years old and tough as shoe leather, and you stewed it, you didn't fry it." Now that companies like Tysons Chicken ship out something like 25 million a day, fryer chickens are much easier to come by.
No Foreign Food also offers a fresh take on Thanksgiving. Pillsbury recasts the first Turkey Day - at which there was probably no turkey, no yams, no mashed potatoes and certainly no cranberries - and follows its development throughout history as a national holiday. The result, readers will find, is that a lot of our most time-worn traditions don't go as far back as they think.
"Thanksgiving really illustrates how we've changed what we eat," Pillsbury explains. "Turkey was rare in the U.S. until after WWII. The Agricultural Census didn't even start bothering to keep count of turkeys until 1928."
In terms of the holiday's cultural significance, Pillsbury's quick to note that Thanksgiving wasn't really celebrated widely until the advent of the Civil War, and wasn't declared pernanent national holiday until WWII. We don't eat much of anything the original Thanksgiving celebrants ate - their meal consisted probably of venison, corn and squash -- and we're a lot more tolerant than they would have been of people from other nationalities celebrating our holidays.
"The idea for Thanksgiving was to provide a sense of togetherness in American experience, a social contract. It's one of the things that makes us strong as a nation," Pillsbury laughs. "But it's a holiday that's really created out of whole cloth."
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