How We Ate

The bookstore shelf space devoted to what we eat, how we eat, how we feel about what we eat, and whether it would be better if we stopped eating it altogether is fat and happy, but it hasn’t always been that way — 20 years ago, few people second-guessed a jar of Ragu dumped in a bucket of spaghetti. But what did people eat in the long ago, pre-frozen-aisle days of the 1930s? The rich swam in turtle soup, of course, but it couldn’t have been all onions and water for regular Joe and Doris. Writer-of-many-things Mark Kurlansky lays out the era’s secret menu in his new book, The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food Before the National Highway System — Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal, Regional, and Traditional — from the Lost WPA Files. After that title, the only thing left to explain is the “Lost WPA” part, which refers to the Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project called America Eats, which gave people like Eudora Welty, Nelson Algren, and Zora Neale Hurston jobs, sending them out to ask what people were eating. Given the economy and the Dust Bowl, you might think the files would be a slim thing — Q: “What do you eat?” A: “Whatever you got.” — but these were artists and writers, not Census takers, and they cooked up batch after batch of anecdotes, recipes, and stories. Kurlansky, who impressively brought life to exactly what you think in books like Cod, Salt, and The Big Oyster, creates a nationwide portrait of a time when slow food was a necessity, not a luxury.
Tue., May 19, 7 p.m., 2009