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American Food in American Literature

The months between berries and peaches

They are overflowing cornucopias that extend

Fruits red and purple, sombre, bloomed and black;

Then, by rich fields and beaches of frozen river

We trample bright persimmons, while you kill

Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and Canvasback.

Elinor Wylie1

I ate another apple pie and ice cream, which is virtually everything you ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.

Jack Kerouac2

In October 1998, Jiao-Tong, the literary editor of China Times in Taipei, Taiwan, invited me to write an essay on American food in American literature for filing at the first Conference International Food and Literature, held in Taipei in May 1999. I thought I would find many books of secondary sources on this topic. After an extensive search of the network and communications with several professors of American literature at universities in the United States and Canada, I was surprised to find no book in print on the subject. Not only was there no book on the subject, we also found no single article that deals directly with me. The absence of sources Secondary explains why most of the references in this essay are primary sources. The limitations of time and space to further explain these lines why I limited my study of American literature of novels, short stories and poetry. I tried to make a representative selection of novelists, storytellers and poets, writers including nearly two hundred years of American literature, of both sexes and a variety of ethnic groups. Because there are so many versions of the works main quote, I limited myself to those citations the author's name, job title and the inside and verse, chapter, or section, and omitted the numbers page of the particular version, I've used. Less-known works, collections and anthologies receive standard citation format.

To put order in this vast amount of material, I have created three topics on which I weave what I found about American food in American literature: continuity and discontinuity; purity and impurity, and the abundance and scarcity. These three items allow several important truths about the American experience over time to appear as concerns of their writers as well. For example, the great changes wrought in the land and indigenous peoples were accompanied by deep and lasting attachment to the eating habits Europeans. Moreover, the enormous wealth of natural resources and artificial wealth America has always coexisted with the land devastated and absolute poverty. The greatest American writers like Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck, have repeatedly recognized and embodied these points in their plots and characters, much that are embodied in everyday life and the personalities of Americans.

Since an introductory framework for my presentation, I would like to offer some possible explanations for the lack of secondary sources. First, I think the most famous and popular American foods such as pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream are derivatives of European food. The pizza came from Italy. The hot dog is a version of the German sausage. The burgers are joined with reformed meatballs the bread that is as old as the agricultural civilization itself. And the ice cream also has its counterparts in the kitchen of the European nations. So the first reason the lack of secondary sources is that most American foods are derived, not originals of America.
A counterexample is ironic in this context fortune Chinese cookie. As a food, has very little nutrition, but as part of the American idea of Chinese food has become a necessity in American Chinese restaurants. Without But they have asked several owners, waiters and waitresses in Chinese restaurants in America if the fortune cookies in China came from China. All of them have told me they did not. It was invented in the United States and most likely, according to this oral history in San Francisco. This seems to be a credible story. San Francisco grew up as a city on The money generated by high-risk professions, such as whaling, shipping, mining gold and marine fisheries at sea. We can easily imagine a person Chinese entrepreneur takes note of how concerned Americans in these professions were at their good luck or bad luck in the future, putting this knowledge, along with American taste well established for desserts, and creating a sweet dessert that different words and wisdom contained looked at the plight of consumers.
Second Instead, until recent decades, American literature and literary criticism is dominated by men, whose vision of the food world regarding women and put them both in the kitchen and out of sight. Most writers I have read for this trial used food and activities around food to highlight aspects character or plot. They do not mind the food gathering and preparation, cooking, serving, eating, drinking and cleaning activities that substantially enhance aspects of its principal characters, most of whom are men, or as events that substantially advanced the plot, the story line or themes of his writing.
Moreover, a related topic could be included in this type of study that deals with body care in general. For example, it is rare that no other writer American mention bodily functions such as excretion or urination. Different types of breathing are certainly associated with different types of emotional conditions and physical, such as fear, pain, fatigue, exercise, or contemplation. But as food, other bodily processes are usually ignored, taken for granted or gloss. I mention this topic only in passing and not have the time or space here to dwell on it, but simply noted that focuses on food as a theme in relation to literature is an important innovation that means a wide range of human activities, whose presence or absence in the literature would be an extension interesting in this approach.
Third, as an American, I believe that most Americans take food for granted. We tend to see it as an inevitable burden set on our freedom of activity for the condition of having a physical body. We tend, especially in the last decade of the 20th century, to try to minimize as much as possible time and energy necessary for all life stages related to physical nourishment of our bodies. The growth, popularity and power industry fast food in the United States reflect this disdain for the needs of physical nourishment.
After the Allied victory in World War II, the U.S. experienced unprecedented prosperity while applications of new technologies permit more tasks to do with increasing speed. Full acceptance of free market competition, an ideology, political and economic opposition to centralized planned economies and societies, the tremendous success the rapid, large-scale production of masses in support of military forces during the war, and increasingly tense and complicated struggle between capitalism and communism began to change the values of the American Society of slower, simpler life values of agricultural and rural life in the fastest, most values complicated industrial production and urban life. Speed began his emergence as a core value in America. For example, in 1955, shortly before the experiences in Kerouac On the road, the two fast food companies are now the largest American-McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken "was founded. "Early 1980, there were about 440 food franchising companies with a combined total of over 70,000 outlets in the United States. "3 Americans Juvenile living in situations of increased congestion in Europe gradually adjusted to the extent of the American land and resources. size, especially greatness, became a value common in all areas of American life. With the advent of speed as a value, the American ideology for the rest of the 20th century was its main outlines-the bigger, better, faster, better. From cars to burgers, this ideology began to rule more and more how Americans thought in everything they did. Both play important roles and values means in the relationship between Latin American food and literature.
Moreover the social environment of European origin, male domination and indifference to food, is the traditional character of the successful American writer. Most most famous writers of United States has been and still are men. Most of these male writers such as Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Poe, and Miller, continuously since its main characters, most of whom were men, in positions that require the creation of a stable and meaningful life. As early settlers, the pioneers, such as immigrants, their characters are constantly faced with challenges to their survival, their ability and honesty, which defines the second in terms of verbal and overt physical superiority instead of mutual cooperation care or upbringing. A counter example is ironic Ayn Rand, a writer fully accepted that the values of competition, personal power and individualism. His powerful male characters, as almost divine architect in Atlas Shrugged, face problems and situations that demand for power, individual creativity and mass production.

The fact that the creation and production also consumes energy, resources, time and money was not a major concern until the beginning of the environmental movement in the late '50s and early the 60s. The fact that the creation and production often result in emotional and physical deprivation of less independent beings, as children, animals, women, the poor, and members of minority ethnic groups was not a central concern of American writers and critics until the end of 50 and early 60. The early writers felt compelled to produce and reproduce the feelings, impulses, images and characters of male-oriented, creating of individualistic and production in his writings. As a result, many of the facts of life such as eating, drinking, digesting, excreting and care were systematically absent, implicit, gloss or ignored.

These at least four reasons why there is a scarcity of secondary sources on the subject of American food in literature U.S.. It is indeed a book waiting to be written.

Fortunately, however, there are many cases of food in American literature and shown Some interesting patterns and features. I created three themes that focus these patterns and characteristics: continuity and discontinuity, purity and impurity, and the abundance and shortages. First I will describe briefly the contents and justification for each item and then proceed with the literary material, particularly illustrated and illuminated with each issue.

A. Continuity and discontinuity. The first European settlers on the east coast of the United States saw several discontinuities and began creating others. Crowded European cities and agricultural lands that came to the big, sparsely inhabited forests, mountains and valleys. stiffness of intolerant societies century 16 and 17 many European countries, they reached a land whose societies, indigenous peoples, were completely unknown and closed to them. From a life of poverty and shortage that came to a land that gradually and diffusion of resource wealth beyond your wildest dreams. Since ancient times, settled areas of Europe that had long since been tamed by the sword, the plow, the cross and the crown that came to the desert that seemed oblivious to the greatness and traditions of civilization Europe.

Within these discontinuities also created discontinuities in the lives of indigenous peoples, war, trade and intermarriage. In the natural life cycles of the new land, but also began to create discontinuities in the invasive activities of logging, agriculture, mining, urbanization, hunting and fishing. The cultivation of the extremes that have

become parties of American life began at this time. Americans had I loved the wilderness and indigenous ways and shed as many of their European ways as possible. There were Americans who hated the desert and the native customs and worked both to change or destroy them. The latter, among the first settlers insisted on the continuation of religions and European languages, official protocols, forms social customs and all that food you could do at the new world, such as bread, or sent from Europe, without waste, such as tea.

Indigenous peoples lost to the biggest waves of mostly Europeans firmly believes that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. For example, it is estimated that in 1600 had approximately 10,000,000 indigenous peoples living in different groups or tribes in the Americas. In 1900, under an official U.S. policy government extermination, the total had fallen to about 500,000. The impact of the new inhabitants of the land has not been as strong. In 1600, most of the land east Mississippi River and west of the Rocky Mountains was covered with timber and mixed deciduous forests. In 1990, less than 3% of the original trees remained standing.

Besides the clash of Europeans and indigenous peoples, the growing population of Americans cultivate land for crops, especially cotton and snuff, which is sold to a growing consumer population in Europe provided a market for human labor-slaves. The slave trade initiated by the Dutch and persecuted by almost all Western European countries experienced sailor, created extreme discontinuities in many aspects of African life that are outside the scope of this essay. However, the importation of Africans as slaves created a whole new wave of U.S. two hundred years subject to conditions Planting of starvation, which invented and innovated with the edible material poor access. His creativity has helped with many different types of different foods Americans, such as Chitlins, greens and a variety of foods targeting the marshy area of Louisiana known as Cajun food. Along with original contributions made by indigenous peoples to early settlers and pioneers of the diets', such as corn, some of these food products that have lasted longer than the institution slavery itself have also found places in American literature.

B. Purity and impurity. The first settlers on the East Coast of America brought about a profound fear of hell and a deep desire to purify the life of the elements that impede the practice of true Christianity. True Christianity means for them a literal reading of the Bible and a literal interpretation of human social life around the teachings and principles of the Bible. Red, for them, was the color of the devil, color color evil and indigenous peoples. pure black and pure white were the colors of your choice.

Those Americans who loved the desert, however, quickly adopted the use of different colors animal skins for clothing and natural dyes to dye fabric or skin. Therefore, not only historical accident that the American cultural revolution of the 60 adopted wildly colored clothing, vehicles, hair and clear language as a significant and dramatic against the dark suits, white shirt, dark tie and dark shoes creation figures. It was a historical accident that the beatniks and hippies reached out by the foods that differed greatly in flavor, color, smell, taste and texture of white bread, grilled meat, boiled potatoes, oatmeal, milk and tea. He was also a historical accident that some of the most influential writers of this era, such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, who is deep and lasting inspiration of literature and food of the lands and peoples far beyond American shores.

C. Abundance and scarcity. From 1895 to 1915, approximately 23,000,000 immigrants moved from Europe to the United States. These people came from all over Europe. Are living on the left is characterized by poverty, political unrest and oppression and the lack of any opportunity for improvement. America was a land that promised to make their dreams of prosperity, wealth, abundance and freedom come true. Many of these immigrants have made their fortunes in America and returned with them to their families in Europe. But many others stay in the U.S., had their families there and began to contribute flavor, color and flavor to a scene increasingly heterogeneous U.S.. This period of intensive migration saw the beginnings of neighborhoods in the Large cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. These were ethnic enclaves for the Italians, Poles, Germans, Jews and blacks trying to find an alternative to the defeated militarily but racism still powerful, his former masters in the south, or others whose strong sense of group identity always brought food special were amplified by the increasingly large scale of American life.

At the same time, the rapid growth of manufacturing large scale in factories that employ tens of thousands of immigrants who were poorly paid and allowed only a minimal education beyond the background its European origins, he became one of these neighborhoods in the slums and ghettos First American. Extremely low wages, no social services, the waves unemployment and increasing pressure from large families and newcomers often as many of these new Americans at the edges of malnutrition, hunger and even starvation. The abundance and shortage began to appear as poles of a socioeconomic oscillation driven not by such institutions as slavery obvious, but by the beliefs, prejudices and attitudes about the superiority and inferiority of different types of people, along with well-established patterns of access and lack of access resources. The negative impact of World War I was followed by positive euphoria of the '20s. In that decade of unprecedented prosperity and national expansion was followed by the Great Depression of the 30s. America clearly moving in the vanguard of a world order whose extremes ranging from the genocide of the population explosion, from hunger to rot surplus and feet of clay used in the absence of nail polish on satin shoes polished marble.

A first look at the issue of continuity and discontinuity can be seen by comparing the two quotations at the beginning of this essay. Elinor Wylie lived from 1885 to 1928. Jack Kerouac lived from 1922 to 1969. Ripe fruit edible food appears as a tree in the poem of Wylie and standing as an ingredient in Kerouac's novel. Wylie cherries and peaches are closer to nature without transform of baked apple pie Kerouac. Wylie poem means to firmly establish the first European settlers in a land that provided ample food. Kerouac's novel means concern of urban Americans for whom food had become an interesting need.

Wylie's poem, is abundant and so Thus the value of the big, without the addition of the speed that played such an important role in the life of Kerouac's character Dean Moriarty.

In fact, Dean Moriarty was based on the real man, Neal Cassady. In 1964, I was living in Palo Alto, California, after leaving Stanford University to try my hand at writing fiction and poetry. I met a beautiful young woman who was a freshman at Stanford and invited to a party. The party was in a house on the east side of Palo Alto that is increasingly known as a place for nonconformists and the beatniks. Match of the few people who neither my friend nor I knew with much wine. She also had some very unusual. At one point during the party were drinking wine in the kitchen, well lit. In an uproar of laughter, people talking, a young man with a radiant smile and laughing call, whose feet seemed scarcely able to stand on the floor, clouds, and flew around the room while the man who had invited me to the party I introduced him as Neal Cassady. He recognized me and disappeared out the door another. I never saw him again, but kept up the day of the vivid impression of light and speed also seems to have given Kerouac.

Wylie continuity between the poem and the novel Kerouac indicated by the American saying: "It's as American as apple pie!" Another kind of continuity seems, moreover, when the verse after the above Wylie's poem is considered:

Even the Puritan marrow of my bones

There is something in this richness that I hate.

Me love the look, austere, immaculate,

Landscapes drawn in pearly monotonous.

There's something in my own blood that has

Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,

A trickle of water, shake Galaxy series

Streaming through slanted pastures fenced stones.4

Overall, this verse and quoted at the beginning of this essay spectacular display of three items. There is continuity and discontinuity between the doctrines of European religious heritage, Puritanism, which highlighted major achievements mundane, but as evidence unworldly as possible. One of the most important Max Weber's contributions to the understanding of modern Protestant view is its clear delineation of the conflict in Protestantism between the acquisition of great wealth for mean being in favor with God and show humility to the world only, without ostentation pietists material, the Puritans, the Luddites and many other Protestant groups found so distasteful in Catholicism.

Weber argues convincingly, I believe that the "Puritan, like every rational type of asceticism, tried to allow one man [sic] to maintain and act on their motives constants, especially those who taught himself against emotion. "5 The aim of this action would take some kind of life "free from all worldly temptations and all the details dictated by the will of God, and be certain of their own revival [in the sky after the final trial] of the external signs manifested in their daily conduct. "6 In the Bible, and of all religious literature, success in difficult tasks is a clear sign of God's favor. For Protestants, these signs do not guarantee salvation, but they are closest to the guarantee that a Protestant can get. In fact, that "God Himself blessed His chosen through the success of his work was undeniable … … to the Puritans." 7 This doctrine that successfully combines asceticism in worldly places the Protestant efforts to be the driving force behind capitalism and religious creations and accumulation of material wealth that have occurred in modern times. But the fact remains that this combination can be a rhythm, an oscillation, a confusion or conflict. This combination clearly provides much of the historical substance to our themes of abundance and scarcity and purity and impurity.

A condensed example of the oscillation between wealth and the austerity of American Puritanism can be seen in a brief passage from the novella, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). This passage also underscores the way in which foods and activities around food have been treated by many of the greatest writers American men as an inevitable but interesting, even in a fictional framework: "The table was superbly set. Charging plate, and more full of delights. The profusion was absolutely barbaric. It was enough meat to have feasted the Anakim. Never in all my life, having witnessed so lavish, so wasteful of the good things of life "8.

The tension between the narrator and his hosts in the story of Poe echoes the tension between the narrator and protagonist of On the Road. Jack Kerouac's appointment is part of the first-person narrative of the novel by Sal Paradise support, secondary character based on Kerouac himself. For the duration of his cross-country hitchhiking trip, he lives in the apple pie and ice cream. This diet not only reflects the poverty of salt, but also clearly places the novel in a continuing American tradition that emphasizes the of – the body, the physical world or material. A discontinuity, however, occurs between the naturalness of the fruit in the poem of Wylie and the impersonal, processed foods that Sal Paradise ate. A discontinuity even more apparent in the fact that Sal is taking its food on the road, running, speeding, while Wylie is a painting of the persons involved with the trees which by its nature can not move from where they are.

Wylie poetic picture is drawn from her life in New England. Many of the first settlers remained in or near the coast, allowing them to continue the seafaring life and occupations who had practiced in Europe and, since it offers an abundance of food. However, his Puritan ideology was often in life that was lived to the extent that the abundance of silver "cold Wylie in a sky of slate." Another American poet, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), born in Massachusetts and raised by his grandparents in Nova Scotia, the Eastern Province of Canada navigation. His life partly overlap Wylie and she also paints the spirit of that particular area in terms of food but with an emphasis on the austerity of their diet:

From narrow provinces

fish and bread and tea,

Home tidal long

when the bay leaves the sea

twice a day and

the herrings long rides, 9

Moreover, the abundance that hates Wylie is also rejected by Kerouac in a low hand, quite casually, as if the less time a man dedicated to something as mundane as better food or more than one person he was. However, the oscillation between abundance and scarcity appears in Kerouac's novel in the contrast between Sal Paradise and the main character in On the Road, Dean Moriarty.

"… But Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love, did not care one way or another, 'so I can get that lil girl that Pillar lil ole there between her legs, boy ', and' so long, we can eat, son, y'ear me? I'm hungry, I'm starving, we go eat now! "-and we'd rush to eat, which, as Ecclesiastes says," It is their portion in the Sun "(Chapter 1 (italics in original))

It is also certainly worth noting in passing that in both writers, differentiated by gender, origin, and by the time there is a strong connection between religion and the food. This coincidence and clearly this continuity are produced in a traditional day American holiday of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. characteristic of three unusually large and long lunches, and strong connections with Christians, Protestant history of the early settlers of America, settlers and pioneers. As with bodily functions mentioned above, bringing the theme of food and literature in the foreground also illuminates the strong presence of Judeo-Christianity in American life and literature. Again, this issue proved to be an innovative powerful lens to see a wide range of meanings that occur repeatedly and omnipresent in American literature.

Moreover, the theological basis of hatred Wylie of "this wealth is the Puritan soul struggling for the liberation of all its annexes, implications, and concerns tangles with and in the material world. metaphysics battles are fought on battlefields empirical. In this case, the battle between the ontological metaphysical powers of good and evil is fought on the battlefield empirical the relationship between a poet and food, natural fruits. The apple represents man's fall from the hand of the woman. Hatred of "The Wealth" is therefore a self-hatred that drives women beyond impure nature more intangible purity of austerity, unadorned Protestant soul. The continuity of the human body with the nature, is displaced by the discontinuity of the immaterial soul with the body. The abundance of human bodies and souls is displaced by the scarcity of the elect, the Protestant doctrine of chosen by God from the foundation of the world to survive the final decision and live eternally in heaven.

Serious reflection on the relationship between food and literature leads to a series of signifiers that underpins all the literature, namely, religion. Why? For written originally served to transmit the most valuable at the point of view and experience of the group. The most valuable asset of all is undoubtedly promotes the survival of the group. All groups humans discovered long ago that human beings depend on greater powers for survival. All human beings need air, water, food, warmth and sleep. The fear, respect for, worship and sacrifice to the powers that govern life, both visible and invisible, is the ancient substance of all religions. The old truth and the message dominant of all religions is the dependence of humans on the powers, including the power of reproduction which is represented in the ancestor worship. embodies the religion, ritualized and carries out fundamental truth of human dependency. The denial of that dependency can lead to creativity in innovative and largely profoundly transforming spirituality as well as destruction of self and madness. Humans can imagine the absolute freedom, but to try to live, as Nietzsche showed, only leads to self-destruction and madness.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) problems with the madness of life, and finally ended his life by suicide. The following poem opens with the sort of hymn to the natural wealth that we saw in Wylie poem and ends with a sense similar vacuum and cold silver. The contrast between the words "nothing" and "dwells" in the first line means the tension between the abundance and emptiness. This in turn connects significant with the tension between purity and impurity through the signifier of nowhere as a convenient and advanced spiritual state and as the material condition of spiritual devotees on earth. In this poem, these issues are again led by cement, local wild foods and abstract images created that moves the reader away from the presence of an abundant for absent but implied a purity above or beyond the physical land:

Moras

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries

Blackberries on both sides, though mostly right,

A BlackBerry alley, down in the books, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, panting. Blackberries

Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges fat

Blue with red juice. These they squander on my fingers.

I had not requested that blood brotherhood, but must love me.

They fit my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks —

Bits Wheeling paper burned in a burning sky.

His is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

I do not think that the sea appear at all.

The high green meadows are glowing, as if lit inside.

I come to a bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.

The feast of honey from the berries has stunned them, because I believe in heaven.

One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels me,

Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

I follow sheep path between them. A last hook brings me

To cope northern hills, and the face is orange rock

That gives nothing, nothing but a large space

From white lights and tin, and a roar as silversmiths

Knocking and hitting an intractable metal.10

Nothing is random, in this perspective, Neal Cassady, the person living behind Kerouac's character Dean Moriarty, died of an overdose drug in the warm, bright steel rails of a railroad track in central Mexico. Drug use in all groups traditionally associated with personal and adaptation the group of more powers for the purpose of expanding the capacity of the group to survive. Court of its traditional moorings in religion, drugs have become a way of experiencing with physical, mental and spiritual absolute freedom. The fact that many drugs, including LSD, cocaine, methamphetamine and opium, which the user feel they have no need of food or other natural supports for their existence, shows just how they fit into the attempt to deny dependency and achieve absolute freedom. The discontinuity of the American experience in relation to older traditions, the abundance of material wealth and generally unacknowledged background ideal of a pure soul, Heritage have worked together to produce literature on its characters as Dean Moriarty who make life and death, stepping on the border between innovation and self-destruction.

Or to condense our themes in poetic language and expressive quintessentially American by William Carlos Williams: "The pure products of America go crazy" (from "On The Road To The Mental Hospital")

Apple pie and ice cream, but also provided Kerouac, with the opportunity make a value statement that clearly shows abundance as big: "I ate apple pie and ice cream-it was better as I got more in Iowa, bigger pie, ice cream richer. "(Ch. 3)" better "," deeper "," bigger "and" more rich "work together to define a value system that the U.S. was both larger and better-depth romantic and richness.11

The the subject of plenty can be found at all periods of American literature. The by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, for example, a character which is the "father of Customs, the patriarch, not only of his small team of staff, but I dare say, respectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States, was a certain permanent Inspector. "12 The Customs officer was the federal government office responsible for inspection of all cargo arriving the country by ship and determine what if any law had to be paid. In the novel, this particular custom-House is located on a pier in the port of Salem, Massachusetts. In this particular character, Hawthorne means one of the most important aspects of the American diet, which also appears repeatedly in the literature, the consumption of large quantities of meat. The Inspector had the rare ability to remember in great detail

"The dinners well that it had made no small portion the happiness of his life to eat …. To hear him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster …. I've always been happy to listen to expatiate on fish, poultry and meat from butchers, and most eligible methods of preparing for the table. His memories of good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring the flavor of pork or turkey in one of the nostrils too …. A Fillet of beef, a hind quarter of beef, a pork sparerib, in particular a chicken, turkey or praiseworthy, perhaps adorned his table … be remembered … '13.

The predominance of meat in the American diet can be seen in several ways. One of them is the following list of specialty foods in the thirty individual franchises fast-food companies in the U.S.:

Type of Food Franchise Number

Chicken 8683

Hamburger / Hot Dog / Roast Beef 29,600

Pizza [usually served with a

beating meat] 11,593

Tacos [usually served with a

meat filling] 3,620

Seafood 2630

Pancakes / Waffles [usually eaten

bacon,

sausage or ham] 1.63014

Another view of this American food habit is to consider the quantities of meat consumption and production in the United Kingdom states. For example,

"Americans spend about 25 percent of their food budget in red meat. The per capita consumption of beef the U.S. has increased steadily, while that of pork has declined …. Only in Australia, New Zealand and Argentina's per capita consumption higher than in the United States. The United States normally produces about 27 percent of the world's meat. "(Ibid., (13) 190)

In the House United States of Commerce, the source of these statistics, Compton's Encyclopedia and since the 19th century work of Hawthorne, we can pass the late 20th century. In the years 1980, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, a California writer, Fannie Flagg, was published. In the first section of the novel, a reproduction of an article in the weekly newspaper in the fictional town of southern U.S. of Weems, Flagg described the basic menu of the newly opened Whistle Stop Cafe:

… The Breakfast is served 5:30-7:30, and you can get eggs, grits, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham and red eye gravy, and coffee ….

For lunch and dinner you can have: fried chicken, pork chops and gravy, catfish, chicken and dumplings, or a plate of barbecue, and their choice of three vegetables, biscuits or corn bread, and drink and dessert ….

… The vegetables are: creamed corn, fried green tomatoes, fried okra, cabbage or turnip greens, black-Eyed Peas, candied yams, beans or Lima beans.15

Later in the novel, the elements of a particular food served to a client that are described as "fried chicken, black-Eyed Peas, turnip greens, fried green tomatoes, cornbread and iced tea." 16

Fat, abundance and purity of the meat in the American diet have also been used by some authors as a check to another kind of scarcity and impurity. Sylvia Plath uses the tradition of a large meat meal on Sunday, as once a week special meeting for American families, which often has a large roast turkey, for contrast with other types of oven:

Mary Song

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.

Fat

Sacrifices its opacity …

One, the window of golden saint.

The fire makes it precious,

The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,

Expel the Jews.

His thick palls float

The scar of Poland, burnt

Germany,

They do not die.

Gray birds obsess my heart,

Ash from the mouth, the ash from his eyes.

Are installed. At high

Precipice

That emptied one man into space

The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,

This holocaust I walk in,

O golden child the world will kill and eat.17

One of America's most talented and enigmatic contemporary poets, the winner of the Prize Pulitzer John Ashbery (1927 -), becomes the abundance of America in a matrix of the impurity, but the scarcity and lack of security:

Just nothing grows here,

However, the barns are full of food,

The sacks of flour stacked to the ceiling.

The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;

Birds darken the sky. Is it enough

The dish of milk is collected at night

We think of him sometimes

At times, always with mixed feelings? 18

Besides the importance and the priority of the flesh, Plath's poem and lists of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe foreground an important continuity and discontinuity than American food. The continuity of important is the fact that the early settlers and pioneers, trying to live in a strange land before it was developed to agriculture, mainly bread made its locally available grains, especially maize. Wheat and other related grains were too difficult to grind by hand and requires strong, the mill complex that early settlers could not carry with them. Corn became a staple as important to the early European settlers as it was for the Indians:

Young, ripe corn is consumed as corn. In winter, the shells of the grains were soaked off with bleach to make grits. For breakfast and dinner was not cooked maize-meal porridge. Sometimes, the slurry is fried and served with butter or lard. The dish common, however, was hot cornbread. Baked on a piece of hoe before the fire, they called this hoe cake. Mixed with water into a paste firm and covered with hot ash, ash is cake. It came as the Dutch oven cornbread or cornbread. cakes small cornbread cornbread called 19

In the passage from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, both fish and turkey are mentioned along with pork and chicken. The chicken and turkey were most likely captured and shot in their natural habitats. Pork and chicken were more likely raised and slaughtered in a pet to keep. This combination of beef and wild and domestic animals began with the first settlers and continues to this day today. In fact, the pioneers who traveled on foot, by car and horseback from the east to west in the Americas found an abundance of wild game for meat. However, tried to carry enough family, nutritious foods that will last for the trip to their new home and to carry out the periods when wild game was not available. A typical charge for an adult traveling by ox-cart to the west, was:

"… 200 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of pilot bread, 75 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of rice, 5 pounds of coffee, tea, 2 pounds, 25 pounds of sugar, half a bushel of beans, a bushel of dried fruit, 2 kilos of baking sodium, 10 pounds of salt, half a bushel of corn flour. And so half a bushel of corn, roasted and ground. A small barrel of vinegar also should take. "20

In many rural or sparsely populated parts of America, the mixture of wild and domestic meat continues to this day. In Alaska, for example, where I lived for many years and is a third of the area around the contiguous forty-eight states in the U.S., many people still depend on hunting for much of its meat supply. John Haines, past Poet Laureate of the State of Alaska Alaska and poet best known, began homesteading near Fairbanks, Alaska in the 1950s. I know him personally for many years and read poetry with him on stage Loussac Library in Anchorage, in 1986. His poetry reflects clearly how the dependence on bushmeat could crystallize the issues of wealth and purity in an identification with the predator:

If the new Owl Calls

sunset

of the island in the river,

and is, not too cold,

I'll wait for the moon

to increase

then take wing and glide

to join him

We will not talk,

but hooded against the frost

shoot above

floors alder, searching.

with brown eyes

And then we sit

in the shade and spruce

collect the bones

of mice neglected

while the long moon drifts

to Asia

and the river murmurs

in its bed of ice.

And when the morning rises

limb

we part without a sound,

fulfilled, floating

home as

the cold world awakens.21

Long before Haines or any other European countries were established in Alaska, however, indigenous people have long lived as meat animals that could kill and prepare. In fact, when the first French explorers and was met with indigenous peoples in the north of what is now Canada, who were so impressed by the dominance of raw meat in the diet was called "Esquimeaux" which in French means "eaters of raw meat." Further down the coast of Canada and Alaska, however, run into the millions of salmon to large rivers, are captured and used by local people. These Americans now eat salmon after being smoked or cooked, as stated in the following poem, "Keep # 2" by Andrew Hope, III (1949 -), of Sitka, Alaska:

Dog salmon

Bright

Sun Afternoon

Incoming tide

Beach Cleaning

Brightness dog salmon

Flash Silver Purple

Arrive

Lifting a large

For the tail

Marea

Beach Cleaning

Time to eat

Salmon fried dog

For dinner22

There are five types of salmon that migrate to inland waters of Alaska and used for food. Each type has its own name and some types have different names in different areas Alaska. Thus, over the discontinuities of time in preparation-from raw to cooked, occurred along the discontinuities in the time between practices appoint the same foodstuff. dog salmon are so named because it once used by the thousands to feed the many dogs in which Alaska Natives relied for transportation during the long winters. This type of salmon, however, is perfectly fit for human consumption and now that many indigenous peoples in travel Alaska only by motor vehicles in all seasons, dog salmon have become a staple of human nutrition.

These discontinuities contact discontinuity of meanings for the ingredients of the food in the first and second budgets Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe that variation of regional foods. Grains, for example, is a type of cereal or porridge of maize and wheat is coarsely ground. Grits is considered by most Americans to be a food characteristic of South America. His public presence in northern cities is usually the result of the south to the north and restaurants the opening of such a characteristic South American cuisine. Other typical regional foods of America is the cod associated with seafood in the Northeast, cake Lemon associated with the cuisine of the Florida Keys, tortillas and red beans associated with the southwest of kitchen waste from the U.S. Hispanic heritage, and salmon associated to the kitchen and northwestern Alaska.

One poets Alaska Native, American, Charlie Blatchford, a Yupik Eskimo who personally knew and deceased, stated in the case of meat in a simple way in one of his few poems published:

Forgotten Words

Our language, I know,

was prepared

with wisdom and grace.

The thin skin of pulp has been

and is on the side.

The casings have been carefully

been exposed.

Its sweet flesh

ready for party.

The meat, the staple of life,

is consumed with satisfaction …

Our need for sedation

for new words.23

In the hands of contemporary poets who are not Native American, as Charlie Blatchford, the Meat continues to mean substantial food and is often accompanied by a type of substance that could serve as a separate item with toxic substances such as food alcohol and drugs. In Whitman, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and many other writers, wine, beer and other mind-altering substances that often accompany food and especially meat. This range of meanings of consumption has a story in all literature that is as old as interesting and as important as the meat and other foods. Of Indeed, making light of the interests of food has highlighted once again a major power in the lives of all people who might serve as a subject of more extensive research, discussion and writing. In many poets, the connection between meat and wine are made short, as in the fourth verse of "asylum" Herman Fong (1963 -):

In foods that just feeding,

give the smallest pieces of meat,

especially fat, and a few drops of red wine.24

A concentration on the details of daily life that characterizes the style of many American writers, the older and younger. John Steinbeck, Nobel laureate and one of the pre-eminent American literary voices of the 20th century, often drew his characters and shaping the daily lives of people in California. Some of his best and most popular works, including novels like Cannery Row, Grapes of Wrath, and De mice and humans, and the story collection The Long Valley, feature characters and settings of the California coast, the south and central. Tortilla Flats characteristics of the life of "civilians" who lived near the central California coast city of Monterrey. According with Steinbeck, a fellow was a "mixture of Spanish, Indian, Caucasian bloods of Mexico and assorted" (Chapter 1). The main character, Danny, and their friends, meet a wrecked ship on the nearby coast. They go to the beach and floating debris for salvaging the wreck then sell it. The sale puts five dollars in possession Danny, an unusually large amount of money:

The five dollars of the salvage fire had remained in the pocket of Danny, but now know what to do with it. He and Pilon went to market and bought seven pounds of hamburgers and a bag of onions and bread and sweets a big project. Paul and Jesus Torrelli Mary went to two liters of wine, and not a drop they drink at home, either. (Ch. 5)

Part of the genius of Steinbeck as a writer and one of aspects of their histories that distinguish them from other writings of America is the intentional use of food and activities for the characterization and plot development. Omelette Flats is an example of his style, and continue to demonstrate the importance of meat in the American diet across all geographic regions and ethnic groups:

Danny was pretty straightforward business. He approached the back door of a restaurant. "Do you have stale bread that I give my dog" he asked the cook. And while the unsuspecting man was wrapping food, Danny stole two slices of ham, four eggs, a lamb chop and a flyswatter.

"I will pay you at some point," he said.

"There is no need to pay for leftovers. I throw them away if not take them."

Danny felt better about the theft then. If that's the way you feel, on the surface he was innocent. Torelli He [the wine merchant], negotiate the four eggs, lamb chops and the flyswatter for a grappa glass of water and retired to the forest to cook dinner. (Ca, 1)

The issue of food particularly of onions appear in the first passage of Tortilla Flats as a small detail that involves a series of regional foods in the American Southwest first settled by European colonists from Spain not England. Among the burgers and onions are both continuity and ease of preparation and consumption of meat the discontinuity of the regional cuisines of America. Another great American literary voice, that of William Carlos Williams, was also carried out this series of signifiers in the southwest of its single and only trip to that part of America. In addition to a fine ear for the peculiarities that distinguish American English from all other English classes, Williams also had an eye for small details of place that brought the reader close to Williams's writing. The following passage is from "The Desert Music" which is based on Williams' trip in the Southwest and his pilgrimage in the cities at that time, Hispanics were much Caucasus:

– Paper flowers (for the saints)

Red clay utensils, painted

blue, silver,

dried peppers, onions, printing products, children

clothing. The desert place, but all

for a few Indians squatting on the

booths, unnoticing (do not you think)

as if he slept there 25

The use of activities around food to develop plot and character is also part of the style of another American writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Faulkner (1897-1962). From the deserts and valleys scattered in the southwest of the lush forests, wetlands and grasslands in the Deep South, American literature, literature as lasting of all languages, has always insisted that the physical location and its features are part of the story. In the following passage of light in August, Faulkner attempt to use Mrs. Joe McEachern to feed as a reflector for both characters:

He was lying and, back, hands crossed on his chest like an effigy of the tomb, when he again heard feet on the narrow stairs ….

Without turning his head the boy heard Mrs. McEachern fatigue slowly down the stairs. He heard her approach on the ground. It seemed, however after a while his shadow came and fell on the wall where you could see and saw carrying something. It's a food tray. He put the tray on the bed. There was once looked. He had not moved. "Joe" he said. He did not move. "Joe" which, he said. He saw that his eyes were open. She did not touch.

"I'm not hungry," he said.

She did not move. He got standing with hands on her apron. There seemed to be looking at him, either. He seemed to be talking to the wall beyond the bed. "I know what you think. Not that. I never said it to you. I thought I was doing. He does not know. Not all the food we send. "He did not move. His face was calm as a recorded looking towards the steep slope of the ceiling board. "You have not eaten today. Sit down and eat. It was not what he told me to take you. He does not know. I waited until he was gone and then I fixed myself. "

He then joined. Watching him, got up from bed and took the tray and took to the corner and flipped it over, dumping the dishes and food and all on the floor. He then returned to bed, carrying the tray empty, as if it were custody and a bearer surplice cut his underwear that had been bought by a man to wear. It was seeing now, though he had not moved. His hands were still wrapped in her apron. He returned to bed and lay back again, eyes and even on the ceiling. He could still see his shadow, formless, a little tilted. Then left. You could not see but could hear his knees in the corner, gathering the pieces back into the tray. Then she left the room. It was quite still then.26

Faulkner lived and wrote in the Bible Belt. The Bible Belt meaning that most people in the south were fundamentalist Protestant Christians, which was protected with the spirit of austerity and supernatural longing for a haven of simplicity and peace so strongly articulated by the writers of New England as Wylie and Bishop. While food often occurs in Faulkner's work is rarely sufficient, develop or lost. Usually serves to highlight the shortage of physical and moral condition of thin people living on the edge of a society whose wealth rarely appears in his work:

And Judith. He lived alone. Perhaps he had lived alone since the day of Christmas last year and last year, before and after three years and then four years ago, because although Sutpen was gone now … she lived on nothing but solitude, what with Ellen in bed in the locked room, which require constant attention a child as she waited with astonishment and incomprehension person to die, and she (Judith) and Clytie make and maintain a school garden to keep them alive, and Wash Jones, who live neglect and decay in the fishing camp at the bottom of the river that Sutpen had built after the first wife, Ellen-entered his house and past the deer hunter bear came out of it, which now allows Lave and his baby daughter and granddaughter to live, do heavy yard work and the provision of Ellen and Judith and Judith with Fisheries and hunting occasionally, even now in this house until Sutpen was, had never approached closer to the scuppernong arbor behind the kitchen, where in the evenings Sunday Sutpen and drink from the demi-John and the bucket of water which wash By almost a mile away … '27.

Another indication of genius Faulkner is his ability to see an event as common as ordering a young pie and coffee from a waitress who secretly want some kind of relation to the possibility fine, deep drama. Faulkner's preference for poor nutrition and food remains small to display the issues of scarcity and purity that were unavoidable in their social and historical environment. In the following passage, Faulkner describes Joe, the boy in the passage just given, which has come to a restaurant to be served by the waitress, in clear terms that call into play the signifiers of purity as intangible dimension and food as the need for unity, the heavy equipment:

He believed that men in the back … were laughing at him. And he was still in his chair, looking down, the dime clutched in his hand. He saw the waitress to the bulky two hands appeared on the desk before him and sight. He could see the calculated pattern of a dress and bib apron and both hands bigknuckled lying on the edge of the counter as a perfectly still, as if they were something she had brought from the kitchen. "Coffee and cake, "he said.

His voice was low, quite empty. chocolate coconut lemon. "

In proportion to the height from which came his voice, his hands could not be hands at all. "Yes," said Joe.

The hands did not move. The voice did not move. "Chocolate coconut lemon. What kind". The others they have seemed very strange. Facing each other over the counter dark, stained, and greasecrusted frictionsmooth must have looked a little as if in prayer: Young countryfaced in the laundry of Sparta, with a clumsiness that invested him with a worldly quality and innocent, and the woman opposite him, dejected, still pending, due to its smallness also participated in the quality of his, something beyond of meat. His face was highboned, skinny. The meat was very tense in all its

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