It’s my birthday today. I’m holed up in the house I haven’t left since Saturday thanks to approximately 20” of snow dumped on us with more on the way. I’m in the midst of making myself a birthday brunch (hash browns, bacon, runny fried eggs, orange and grapefruit supremed salad). Later I’ll make myself a rhubarb birthday cake for myself to share with coworkers who have never tasted rhubarb.

But even though I’m entering the second year of my 40s (41, thanks), a time I should be savoring, I don’t feel much like celebrating anything. Normally I would throw myself a big birthday party. Not this year. This year I feel worn out (to quote Bilbo Baggins), like too little butter scraped over too much bread. Some of that is my work schedule (40 hours/week plus a 75-90 minute commute - each way), which as you’ve likely noticed is the reason why I’ve been so radio silent this past year. A big part of it is the energy expended enduring the fascist regime, which is designed to wear you down. But while it isn’t exactly a new year’s resolution, I’m trying to give myself more time for research and writing.

As a historian of the Progressive Era and now the American Revolution and colonial era, today’s resemblance to the past is ever-present in my mind. Our current political regime may wish it were post-Weimar Germany, but it echoes our own past, too - enslavement, Indigenous genocide rebranded as “Indian wars,” and the anti-immigrant and anti-socialist sentiments that riddle the Progressive Era. We’re also echoing the income inequality of colonial era manor lords and plantation owners, of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, of robber barons and monopolists. History rhymes because we’ve never really solved the problems that have plagued us since the beginning.

America is a paradox. On the one hand, our founding documents highlight our highest ideals: freedom, equality, liberty and justice for all. On the other hand, our country was built on might-makes-right - in taking Indigenous land by hook or by crook, in kidnapping people and forcing them into hereditary chattel slavery, in exploiting the poor for profit.

The modern “conservative” right-wing politicians across the globe want to bring back might-makes-right (and not just in the US). It’s why they so often hearken back to Western antiquity, or the Medieval period, when warlords and emperors ruled and peasants suffered.

But if you look at human history, while there are plenty of warlords and emperors, there are also plenty of communities living communally - including in the Medieval period and the ancient world, and especially in Indigenous communities around the globe. People generally supporting one another, respecting women and children and the earth. Not to romanticize Indigenous history, but there’s a grain of truth in cultures that center the community - instead of the individual.

On the other hand, American individualism has resulted in a great many protections for people who might otherwise be subsumed or persecuted by the majority.

I don’t have the answers to all of our problems, but I do know that we can find possible solutions by looking to the past.

I grew up in North Dakota, in Fargo, right on the border of Minnesota. I spent many a summer “at the lakes” with my relatives growing up - coincidentally both sets of grandparents had little single wide lake “cabins” on the same small lake. I went to undergrad in Minnesota - although technically Concordia College was even closer to my house than NDSU - and I visited Minneapolis-St. Paul (or “the Cities” as well called them) many a time growing up and in high school and college. My heart is with all of my friends and relatives suffering from the occupation of Minneapolis by ICE. But I’m also aware of how well-suited Minnesota is to resistance.

The upper Midwest has a long history of Scandinavian socialism. I’m researching the Non-Partisan League in North Dakota for an article right now. Minnesota’s Iron Range had a socialist mayor in the 1920s (the great-grandfather of a friend of mine) and has a long history of both Finnish socialism and union organizing. Minnesota doesn’t have a Democratic Party - it has the DFL - the Democratic-Farm-Labor party (just like North Dakota’s Democrats are technically the Democratic-Nonpartisan-League party). Wisconsin had Bob LaFollette and the Wisconsin Idea influenced many of FDR’s policies. More recently, Minnesota had progressive Senator Paul Wellstone, who died tragically in a plane crash before his third term, but whom Minnesotans still reference.

The upper Midwest also has what has become known as “Minnesota Nice.” Having grown up “out west” and also having spent the last 17 years in the highly-populated Northeast, I’ve come to understand what marks the profound cultural differences between them. If you’ve ever experienced New York’s “Fuck you” brand of directness that Midwesterners consider rude, you might understand the role that higher population and resource competition plays in how they interact with their neighbors, and why tiny towns whose borders touch can have such heated rivalries (no, not that one). New Yorkers and New Englanders can afford to offend their neighbors. If they need help, they can call on nearby relatives or neighbors they actually like.

But in the upper Midwest, populations are small and towns are few and far between. In the Northeast, a farm of around 200 acres is average. In North Dakota, the average farm size is 1,500 acres. In that situation, you don’t have the luxury of offending your neighbors, because you might need their help. Historically, if your barn burned down, or you got injured and couldn’t harvest or plant your crop, your neighbors stepped in to help you, no questions asked and no compensation requested. In practice (historically at least), it led to a “live and let live” attitude on controversial topics. An, “I won’t bring it up if you won’t,” sort of social pact. On the one hand, this is at the root of Midwestern nice and polite behavior. The “nice” that extends to asking walkers in rural areas if they need a ride, or pushing a random stranger’s car out of a snowbank with other random strangers, or banding together to sandbag peoples’ houses in a flood. The downside is that bad behavior, including family abuse, often gets ignored, and people who bring up differences (especially LGBTQ+ folks) by living their truth can get shunned.

The other element at play here is that most people in Minnesota can trace their ancestry back only a few generations to immigration. Minnesota has a strong Indigenous culture because of relatively late European settlement, and while most immigrant Minnesotans will proudly share their cultural heritage from other countries, they also don’t have the same level of “we were here first” attitudes that pervade the Northeast. Even New York, for all its storied immigrant diversity, has plenty of townies (including in Manhattan) who proudly claim their ancestors came over on the Mayflower, or have been in New York since the 17th century - as if staying in one place for generations makes for superiority.

We’re seeing that play out in Minneapolis right now - as plenty of upper-middle-class White folks identify their own immigrant heritage with their more recent immigrant neighbors, and start to use their privilege (and their bodies) to defend them.

I know you’re probably wondering where on earth I’m going with this, given the title of this article. I think what’s happening in Minnesota is that folks are realizing that the police abuses and “might-makes-right” mentality of people in power which has been applied to people of color for generations, is now applicable to everyone. Folks are waking up to their white privilege, and standing in solidarity to push back. They’ve realized that if things continue as they are, they’ll have nothing left to lose. If the federal government is willfully ignoring the Constitution, what else is there?

This happened in the past, too. When looking at the protests in Minneapolis, I’m reminded of the food riots in the lead up to and during World War I. There were riots all over the place (including in Russia - women’s bread riots in February of 1917 ultimately led to the October Revolution). But in New York City, the riots happened primarily on the Lower East Side, where Jewish immigrants with socialist political leanings organized ordinary people into boycotts and ultimately riots to protest food inflation and an administration that did nothing to stop it.

For these women, they really did have nothing left to lose. They weren’t in danger of being disappeared by secret police. But they and their children were starving. Food prices had skyrocketed while wages remained stagnant (called stagflation - sound familiar?). Even the cheapest foods like cabbages, onions, and potatoes, went up by as much as 200%. Meat and milk were unaffordable. The first protest was a march of 300 women, most clad only in shawls, marching in the rain to city hall to request an audience with the Mayor. He was either otherwise occupied or refused to see them. They asked for municipal markets and bakeries to help lower the cost of food, especially for their children (I’m actually working on another article on Mayor Mitchel and his municipal markets). That was in mid-December, 1916.

By mid-February, 1917, things came to a head. On February 21st, in response to increased prices from pushcart operators, over 1,000 women rioted, overturning and even burning carts, before marching on City Hall. The next day, over 5,000 women and children turned up for an organizing rally in a hall that held around 1,000. Those who were kept out broke down the iron gates outside, while the speakers and organizers struggled to be heard inside. The riots got national attention, being debated in Congress the next day (in which several Congressmen pointed out the extreme income inequality in NYC), and food riots also broke out in Philadelphia and Boston on February 22nd.

These women were not homeless, their husbands were not unemployed. Wages that used to support their families adequately simply did not stretch enough to feed them anymore. Sound familiar?

The phrase “Bread for all, and roses for all” was first published in 1911 by suffragist Helen Todd writing for American Magazine about her efforts to promote women’s suffrage by automobile, but it was attributed to of all things a pillow owned by labor organizer and activist Mother Jones. Inspired by a speech Todd gave on suffrage, poet James Oppenheim published a poem entitled, “Bread for all, and roses, too” (also in American Magazine and also in 1911). “Bread and roses” became the rallying cry of labor activists at the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile mill strike in early 1912, which became known as the Bread and Roses strike. New government regulations reducing the workweek had led Lawrence mill owners cut pay accordingly. Unable to survive on less, the mill workers struck violently, and eventually managed a 10% pay increase, even on reduced hours. Strikes continue to be put down violently throughout the Progressive Era, and plenty of states call out militia and plenty of factory owners hire private detectives or private armies to violently suppress the strikes. The federal government also sometimes got involved, almost always on the side of the owners. During the 1894 Pullman Strike President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to end the strike and get the railroads running again. In 1914, the Colorado National Guard participated in the Ludlow Massacre. In 1919, during a steel strike in Gary, Indiana, the US Army took over and declared martial law. A 1921 West Virginia coal miner’s strike ended when Warren G. Harding sent in the US Army.

In the 1930s, the federal government issued legislation protecting unions and union membership. Still, the violence persisted. On Memorial Day, 1937, while Chicago steelworkers protested over a union contract, the Chicago police dispensed tear gas and shot at the protesters for refusing to disperse, killing 10 people.

The modern-day events in Minnesota are certainly nothing new to union organizers, but this is perhaps the first time federal agents have acted so indiscriminately, gassing whole neighborhoods, beating and kidnapping without cause, warrants, or even verbal warnings. The casual brutality of the killing of nonviolent protestors Renee Good and Alex Pretti finally seems to have shocked the nation into action.

Because of that pushback, the tide is turning. Just today, the news that Border Patrol commander (and wannabe SS officer) Greg Bovino was being recalled from Minnesota, and taking some Border Patrol units with him. The GOP candidate for Minnesota governor has pulled out of the race, citing the Trump regime’s actions in Minneapolis. Even Trump himself is starting to waffle, aware of the public relations nightmare and the backlash against the obvious lies of Kristi Noem and other Department of Homeland Security officials.

Every protest and strike moves us forward, however incrementally. I think about the progress that folks in the past have made, and the sacrifices they made to get us where we are today, and the sacrifices people are making now to get us someplace better in the future.

James Oppenheim’s poem was set to music in 1976 by Mimi Farina. Please listen to this gorgeous rendition by Judy Collins. You won’t regret it.

More recently, the Marxist wing of the Democratic Socialists of America call themselves “Bread and Roses,” and Zohran Mamdani had Lucy Dacus perform the song at his inauguration.

Here’s the full text of the poem (or song lyrics, if you will):

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,

A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray

Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,

For the people hear us singing, “Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.”

As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men —

For they are women’s children, and we mother them again.

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes —

Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead

Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;

Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew —

Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for Roses, too.

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days —

The rising of the women means the rising of the race —

No more the drudge and idler — ten that toil where one reposes —

But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

As a staunch home cook, who loves to cook for others, and as the daughter and sister of florists, we do need bread and roses, and I don’t mean just literally (although I love homemade bread and garden roses).

We don’t need stagflation and AI slop, working paycheck-to-paycheck for corporate overlords who would replace us in a heartbeat. We need living wages and free time to pursue creative endeavors. And we need lives free of secret police kidnappings and fascist violence, too. Bread and roses, bread and roses.

Dear Readers,

Thank you those of you who have stayed the course and those new readers who have been waiting an eternity for a new post. Most of my creative flow has been stolen by the mental weight of living through yet another historic moment (shout-out to my fellow Millennials!), and what little I have has been spent making slow progress on history articles on the Progressive Era.

It’s been almost 4 years since I started this substack, with my first post being on the agriculture and food (or rather, hunger) relationship between Ukraine and Russia. It’s hard to believe that conflict has been slogging along for four years now. Why do military leaders always think invasions will be short?

And now the Trumpian US is contemplating its own invasions - in Venezuela and Greenland. They’ve already started in Minnesota.

While I could go on at length about banana republics in comparison to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s visions of techno-fascism, I don’t have the time or energy.

Instead, I’m spending my time on historical comparisons that might benefit us. There really are so many historical parallels right now it’s not even funny.

I realized the other day that the 2010s were not our century-later Progressive Era, and the 2020s are not our Roaring 20s. Instead, I think the 1990s were the 1870s, when Reconstruction lifted millions out of poverty and helped usher in a new era of racial progress, even as it failed to live up to the expectations of 40 acres and a mule. Of course, the growth of the 1990s was built on exploitation - while we made progress on environmental and labor exploitation, we also hurtled toward the planned obsolescence, privatization, and corporate consolidations and monopolies that came with the 2010s, mirroring the 1870s’ slide from Reconstruction into the Gilded Age. Remember how the election of Barack Obama was hailed as the end of racism? I’m sure the newly-elected Black Senators from Southern states in the 1870s felt similar levels of victory. Victories that reactionary white conservatives quickly unraveled (with the Daughters of the Confederacy/KKK mirroring the Tea Party movement). The 1870s profited off of stolen land from Indigenous people (the Western “frontier”) and cheap fossil fuels. The 1990s profited off of the new Internet frontier and less-cheap fossil fuels. The crash of 2009 was our version of the Depression of 1893. The 2010s and 2020s were (and are) our Gilded Age.

But while people associate the Progressive Era with the 1910s, magically happening thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, the reality is that the Progressive Era was a culmination of a long slog, as is all progress.

Think for a moment about the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It’s famous for protecting American foods and drugs from dangerous adulterations. But the first book about food adulteration was written in 1820. And the push for federal regulation of food started in the 1860s, as Temperance-minded, upper-middle-class white women fought swill milk dairies that were killing babies with contaminated milk. Even the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, victory that it was, wasn’t given any way to enforce the laws until FDR’s Administration in the 1930s. So over 100 years between first identifying the issue and actually doing something about it.

And of course, today, we have RFK Jr. trying desperately to please his corporate overlords by loosening or delaying restrictions on food contaminants and additives (formaldehyde and forever chemicals, anyone?), and prop up the struggling American beef and dairy industries with his new “nutrition” guidelines.

My point is not to depress or frustrate, but to recognize that progress is a long, slow slog. I’ve been working a lot with the history of the American Revolution at my day job. And that was a much longer, slower slog than anyone likes to admit. Over a decade between the first protests and actual revolution, with the roots of revolution going back much further than that. A civil war that lasted 8 years of official conflict, where families fought each other in their back yards, and burned each others’ houses, and stole each others’ property.

We’ve never lived up to our high-minded ideals, but I’m actually more hopeful now than ever that we might someday make them a reality. Historian Jon Meacham said on Stephen Colbert last night that the Declaration of Independence is our mission statement and the Constitution is our guidebook. I don’t know that I agree with the first (people forget that the Declaration includes 13 grievances, few of them pretty or idealistic), but the second is certainly true.

Trump is not the first president to risk the Constitution, although he is the first to treat it with such contempt. But I think about the years of the First World War, where Americans who called for peace were derided as “slackers” and cowards, or even seditionists and traitors, some of them blackballed by their businesses or neighbors.

I also think of the Progressive Era marred by anarchist bombings, and the use of “socialism” and “bolshevism” as a scare tactic to keep the “lower orders” in line, even as it was used to justify progressive legislation, the better to prevent socialism from taking over entirely.

I have long thought that we can learn so much about ourselves, and our future, by looking to the past. To that end, I’ve got two in-progress articles I hope to have out in the coming weeks (or months, depending on what life throws at me). One is on the first “boy mayor” of New York City, elected in 1913. The other is on the most famous Black food demonstrator of the war. Both will add nuance and context to the book I hope someday to finish.

I still have hope that a Progressive future, where everyone has the same rights and opportunities, is possible. The people getting involved now, pushing back against ICE invasions, protecting their neighbors, contributing to their community however they can - this gives me hope.

A lot of times when people talk about American history, they talk about all the negative things that have happened - slavery, stealing Indigenous land, oppressing women and children, violence, war, etc. And while all of that is true and needs to be acknowledged, I still have hope. Because I know that for as long as people have been fighting to oppress others, people have also been fighting to free them. From the beginning of enslavement, we had abolitionists, from the beginning of colonization, we had people who argued for peace and just treatment of Indigenous people, people who treated women and children and people of color like human beings and fought to protect them, people who protested against war, against violence, against exploitation. They were mostly not the majority, but they still fought however they could. Most of them did not live to see the difference their efforts made.

Like Carsie Blanton sings, “A hundred years, a hundred more, we throw our weight against the door, and even if we don’t survive, we keep the little flame alive.”

I was raised to think that all people were created equal, and that anyone could do anything they put their mind to. And while I’ve realized that in this day and age, that isn’t true, I hope someday it will be.

And if, like me, you’re finding the life and energy sucked out of you by living through times that try our souls, I hope you can get some rest and regroup.

Here’s to a new Progressive Era growing out of the ashes of fascism in America. Let’s work to make it sooner rather than later.

Hello dear readers! I finally have an extra few days off where I don’t have to spend them doing the 8 million tasks that usually take up my “free” time these days, so I thought I’d catch up on some writing with a lot of things that have been percolating in my head for months now.

It’s also the day before the US presidential election, and I wanted to address something I think the media is not covering well: grocery prices.

Top Democrat and presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to go after price gouging on groceries. The media has largely scoffed. But laws about price gouging and struggles with high food prices during global emergencies are nothing new. Most states in the US (but not all) have price gouging laws on the books. There is no federal law on price gouging, although there is at least one bill currently in Congress.

But what is price gouging? Price gouging is when a purveyor artificially and excessively inflates prices in times of emergency or economic disruption, generally on essential goods. Unscrupulous people can take advantage of disruptions and need to make enormous profits. Think people who bought up pallets of hand sanitizer to resell at a huge profit early in the pandemic.

There are, however, federal laws against price fixing, which is when two or more companies collude to fix prices at a certain level, usually to corner the market and artificially increase profits. This is a violation of anti-trust legislation and can lead to investigation and criminal prosecution.

Most media outlets have blamed price increases on inflation, which has a variety of factors, not limited to increased demand for limited supply, supply chain cost increases, increased wages leading to increased prices, etc. But that is not the whole answer.

Price gouging and inflation are nothing new. Food prices skyrocketed during the Civil War, especially in the South. Food prices also rose significantly during the first decades of the 20^th century, thanks to industrial depressions and World War I. The “high cost of living” bedeviled millions of Americans. During the First World War, the U.S. Food Administration was eventually given wartime powers to regulate the entire food chain, although Food Administrator Herbert Hoover was careful to avoid both mandatory rationing and over price controls. Instead, the United States became the largest purchaser on the market, and set prices that way. Newspapers also published price lists of what regulators considered fair market prices for a variety of essential goods. Consumers were warned that anyone pricing in excess of published prices was price gouging.

During the war, entire industries, including the meat packing and dairy industries, were investigated by Congress for price gouging and price fixing. Business leaders were called before Federal boards of inquiry and to testify in Congress, opening their books to inspection and explaining everything from staff salaries to production costs. In both instances, little evidence was found, although there were real concerns about corporate consolidation of meat packing. Post-war, dairy cooperatives were again taken to task, this time prosecuted under anti-trust legislation for cooperatives and accused of price fixing and collusion. The lack of evidence resulted in a new law exempting agricultural cooperatives from being prosecuted under anti-trust legislation.

During the Second World War, the US Office of Price Administration oversaw rationing and set price controls on everything from foodstuffs to rent. It was immensely popular with everyone except business leaders, who first weakened it and then forced it to shut down shortly after the war.

Does any of this sound familiar? Today, we also have anti-trust issues with food production and retail – a problem that long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve often said that the food history trend of the 20^th century is corporate consolidation. And indeed, the variety of choice on our supermarket shelves seems to belie that, including some very old food company names. But while the number of food companies in the late 19^th century exploded, by the mid-20^th century, so many of them had been bought up by competitors that they had been consolidated from hundreds of local and regional brands into just a few national brands. Today, that number is even smaller. Just a few corporations – Mondelez International, Unilever, Kraft-Heinz, and the world’s biggest – Nestle – own the majority of food brands across the world. A single company can even own brands that seem to be in competition with each other – but the profits all go to the same company. In the U.S., meatpacking is dominated by just four companies – Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef - who control 85% of the market. McDonald’s just sued all four of them for price fixing.

There certainly have been extenuating circumstances in the last five years – supply chain disruptions were real, demand shifted enormously as restaurants and theatres were closed, and peoples’ purchasing habits changed. But the majority of the media coverage doesn’t seem to want to admit that real price gouging took place. For instance, in September, 2024, NPR took a deep dive into companies’ accounts and showed around 1% increasing in profits. But nowhere in the article did they address the issue of stock buybacks.

According to the Harvard Business Review, stock buybacks are when companies take profits (or sometimes go into debt) to purchase their own stock on the open market. Why? Generally, best practices with profit are to raise wages to reward productivity, invest research & development, and/or expand the company. Instead, stock buybacks reward senior executives with increased stock prices (since stock is often part of their compensation packages), and reward shareholders with increased dividends. Stock buybacks took a brief hit in 2020, but have exceeded pre-pandemic levels nearly every year since.  

Companies also haven’t been trying to hide their new economic strategy. According to Forbes in February, 2024, companies are flat out admitting that as demand declines, their plan it to simply raise prices as high as they can to make up the difference.

Food production has always had limits. After all, unless the population increases, food consumption levels are going to stay relatively flat. But creative companies found ways to make money. First, companies profited by adding value through processing (i.e. canned goods, candy and soda, breakfast cereals, pickles). Then, companies took advantage of government policies and technology to lower their costs (i.e. price floors on commodity crops that allow companies to buy crops for less than they cost to produce, and then transform them into ultra-processed foods). Then, companies increased sales by increasing demand for food items like fast food, snacks, soda, and other ultra-processed foods by making them deliciously addictive. But people can only consume so many foods, and health-conscious consumers are starting to turn away from ultra-processed foods like chips, candy, soda, and cereal.

Companies got used to very high profit margins and are increasing prices to maintain those margins. However, ultra-processed foods were previously among the less expensive, so the poorest Americans are the hardest-hit by price increases.

There are other disruptions at play besides corporate greed. The war in Ukraine made international agricultural additives prices skyrocket. Climate change is hitting a variety of crops hard. Wildfires, hurricanes, drought, excessive heat, excessive rain, early or late frosts, and flooding are all negatively impacting crops around the world, including blueberries, oats, olives (and therefore olive oil), chocolate, and tree fruits like cherries, oranges, almonds, and more. Even though our globalized food supply should in theory help us weather these… well, weather events, the consolidation of production into monocropping in concentrated areas has meant that one hurricane or flood can wipe out the majority of a crop. And when multiple natural disasters across the world hit? An entire food chain can be disrupted.

At the heart of all of this disruption, however, is still corporate greed. Even when supply changes and wages increase, no corporation is willing to reduce profits by even a little bit. So instead of taking a hit, they pass on every price increase on to the consumer. And instead of rewarding employees with higher wages for increased productivity, they use the profits to buy back their own stock to artificially increase the price (by creating demand where there otherwise is none) and inflate their compensation packages and keep their shareholders happy.

The quieter story is that the 2017 Trump Administration corporate tax cuts weren’t invested in wages or research & development or decreasing consumer prices either – they were almost exclusively used in stock buybacks.

So while food prices are incredibly complicated, and there are lots of factors at play - corporate greed is still a major concern. And when it comes to essential goods like food, that’s just wrong. The past 10 years have seen increased wealth transfer from the working and middle classes to the highest echelons of wealthy – through tax breaks, stock buybacks, market consolidation, and yes even price fixing and price gouging.

I don’t think any one person – or the government – can fully control the markets. Nor do I think they should. But consumers need protection from predatory business practices. And I know which party is going to support more consumer protections and which party wants to remove all the guardrails for corporations and the ultra-wealthy (and, according to experts, tank the economy) at the expense of working people. Do you?

Tomorrow I’m voting for a saner, more stable future where ordinary Americans’ needs are put above record corporate profits. I hope you’ll vote, too.

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The Food Historian

In the United States, the months of September, October, and November are dominated by “fall” and “autumn.” Those words call to mind deciduous trees with color-changing leaves, harvest time and fall hunting season, autumnal foods like pumpkins, apples, and cranberries, waning daylight, chilly weather, migrating birds, and coming frosts. It means Halloween and Thanksgiving, sweater weather, wool socks, the last hurrah of seasonal ice cream and seafood shacks. These are the things we associate with “fall” across the United States.

But for most of the U.S., the third quarter of the year rarely reflects all that. In more southerly states, fall comes late, if at all, and 90-degree weather in October isn’t uncommon. Cranberries and most varieties of apples won’t grow at all, and pumpkins aren’t particularly well-suited to tropical climes either. Some very southerly areas are where northern migrating birds migrate to. In agricultural states with two harvest seasons, fall can be planting time.

In the more northerly states, “fall” may last as little as two weeks – sandwiched between the heat of late summer and the onset of winter snows. Some of this is due to climate change. Summers are longer and hotter, and cold weather sets in later and less often. Some of it is due to location or elevation. Growing up in North Dakota, it wasn’t uncommon to get snow on or before Halloween.

So why then does “fall” always mean New England’s version in our culture?

If you guessed “racism,” you’re at least partially right.

Becoming America

The development of “American” culture really began in the first half of the 19^th century. The disparate colonies of what would become the United States were not particularly united at the time. Even among English colonists, varying cultural practices developed around foodways, usually due to limitations of local and seasonal availability of produce and game. But once the states became United, White elites like President George Washington were interested in creating a new culture to match the experimental democratic republic they had founded. But while the Federalist style of architecture and furniture spread across the country, there was no real “American” style of food or cooking. Foodways remained seriously regional, although the development of canals in the Northeast helped start the trajectory toward homogenization.

The first half of the 19^th century also saw a rise in interest in American history. Writers starting in the 1820s began recording histories of 17^th century colonies, old family genealogies, and the American Revolution. The peaceful years following the War of 1812 allowed industrial development, the rise of public education, and an interest in looking back as folks were looking forward.

New England, in particular was developing a more robust regional foodway centered on Indigenous foods like corn, pumpkin and squash, cranberries, turkey, shellfish, and potatoes alongside traditional English ingredients like wheat, dairy, beef, onions, turnips, beets, cabbage, and apples. Many of the most populous cities – Philadelphia, New York, and Boston – were located in the Northeast, although only Boston would be considered truly part of New England. A majority of the White American population lived in those states, although Virginia was among the most populous of the original thirteen colonies.

People like Lydia Maria Child helped define New England cuisine. A staunch defender of Indigenous rights and an abolitionist, Child published an iconic cookbook – The Frugal American Housewife – and the poem that later became known to generations of children as “Over the River and Through the Woods,” but whose original title was “A New England Boy’s Song of Thanksgiving.” Although pumpkin pie, cornbread, and cranberry sauce with turkey had been featured decades earlier in Amelia Simmons’ American Cook, they gained more widespread use thanks to books like Child’s. But although other cookbooks published at this time period also emphasized regional foodways like The Virginia Housewife, Kentucky Housewife, and the Carolina Housewife, only the New Englanders like Child and Simmons claimed “American” in their titles, or made no reference to their states or regions at all.

The Civil War

The Civil War proved a turning point. White Southern planters argued for their own supremacy – in Congress, in society, in culture – and in their right to impose their cruel, racist, and extremely lucrative system of exploitation on the rest of the country, whether they liked it or not. In the North and West, things were more complicated. Lydia Maria Child, who lost her job as a magazine editor in the years leading up to the war once her abolitionist beliefs became clear, was more the exception than the rule, even among New Englanders. Most Americans in the North opposed secession, but not necessarily slavery, and certainly the idea that men and women of African descent were the equal of their White counterparts was laughable to most of society’s powerful White elites, regardless of the state they lived in.

During the war, Union soldiers from all over the North were brought together in close quarters, largely eating the same food. Men who’d never left their home counties found themselves relating to others from thousands of miles away. The spread of railroads and the development of canned foods for the military helped homogenize American diets, to a point.

In popular culture in the North, the idea of bringing a nation of disparate states together in unity became increasingly important. Sarah Josepha Hale (who tried unsuccessfully to save the periodical Child had been forced to resign from as editor) had been badgering politicians for nearly two decades to implement a national holiday of thanksgiving. In the fall of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln finally acquiesced. But the resolution only applied to the Union states, as the Confederate states had their own rebel government. Thanksgiving traditions elsewhere began to be superseded by New England foodways. About the only things to survive were minor variations in stuffing and pie.

The emphasis on a union of states also led to an increased interest in American history, notably that of the colonial and Revolutionary War period. American history books had begun to be published as early as the 1820s, as the United States proved itself on the world stage in the War of 1812. But during the Civil War, the idea of a single nation, with a single identity, became even more important.

Postwar, Reconstruction promised a new era for a country torn apart by White planter arrogance and racism. But White elites in the North were eager to sweep the past under the rug and heal a nation torn apart by war. As former Confederates were allowed to vote and run for office again, Reconstruction was undone, and the rise of Jim Crow set the rights of African Americans back by decades. Northerners wanted a united “American” identity – one that could stand up to the supremacist ideas of Europeans, who they saw as both inspiration and rivals. So they hearkened back to the earliest days of what became the United States as they knew them – the 17^th century colonies of New England. Claiming that the ideals outlined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights reflected the “religious-freedom-seeking” Puritans who braved the harsh climes of the Massachusetts colony to establish their “shining city on a hill” was much more convenient than admitting to the spoiled and indolent second sons of Virginia’s early history, the complications of Dutch and Spanish colonies, the extreme violence of settler colonialism, and the prevalence of slavery in all of the thirteen colonies, including New England. That messy and complicated history just didn’t fit the American ideal White elites were trying to concoct.

By the second half of the 19^th century, Americans had their own dictionary, their own diverse religions (although mainline Protestantism was preferred by elites), massive industrial accomplishments, artistic movements, music, etc. But while some foods were becoming known as American overseas (notably steak, corn, and cocktails), the majority of U.S. residents still ate based on regional foodways, especially in the more established parts of the country.

Yankee Foodways Go National

That started to change with the advent of two important 19^th century innovations: cookbook publishing and nutrition science. The explosion of cookbook publishing following the Civil War meant that Americans had more access to printed recipes than ever before. A proliferation of periodicals, notably women’s magazines and rural and agricultural publications with women’s sections, as well as newspapers with women’s sections, meant that recipes were shared widely across the country. Fashionable recipes like lemon pie and lobster Newburgh made their way into community cookbooks across the country, regardless of the local availability of lemons and lobster, because both could be easily acquired if you lived anywhere near a rail line.

Most cookbook publishers were located in the Northeast and so were their authors. Some of the most popular and prolific cookbook authors and teachers of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries were from New England and neighboring states: Amelia Simmons (unknown, but likely Connecticut or New York), Eliza Leslie (Philadelphia), Lydia Maria Child (Massachusetts), Catharine Beecher (New York), Juliet Corson (Boston), Maria Parloa (Massachusetts), Mary J. Lincoln (Massachusetts), Sarah Tyson Rorer (Philadelphia), Fannie Merrit Farmer (Boston), Janet McKenzie Hill (Massachusetts), and Ida Bailey Allen (Connecticut). And they tailored their cookbooks to both their individual experiences and their audiences. Rarely were locales featured in commercially published cookbooks anymore (aside from Lost Cause cookbooks glorifying the pre-Civil War South), but their flavors were distinctly New England, even if the titles didn’t say it.

At the same time, nutrition science as in its infancy by the end of the century, and the majority (though not all) of its research was centered in New England. The calorie was applied to food at Wesleyan College in Connecticut. Mother of Home Economics Ellen H. Richards studied at Vassar College in New York and MIT before founding the Journal of Home Economics in upstate New York and doing research and writing in Boston. The term “home economics” was coined at Lake Placid, NY at a conference hosted by New York librarian (and staunch racist) Melville Dewey and his wife Annie and attended by Ellen H. Richards, Maria Parloa, and others.  

None of this evidence is meant to reinforce the perceived supremacy of New England foodways – merely to outline how dominant it was in the culture of this time period and how influential in the minds of the people who were making the biggest impact on American food at the time – cookbook authors and scientists.

These authors and scientists were also deeply steeped in the so-called “science” of race. American interest in scientific endeavor was focused on improvement. Improvement of machines, improvement of agricultural crops and livestock, improvement of people. Nutrition science was part of that, as were motion studies, sociology, psychology, and even researching into raising human offspring. “Better baby” contests were held (segregated, of course), childhood nutrition, education, exercise, and more were examined. It wasn’t called the Progressive Era for nothing – people were interested in progress. “The betterment of the race,” was a huge part of the conversation for White elites, everyone from college students to President Theodore Roosevelt.

A few weeks ago, Anjali Prasertong wrote this article for Well + Good, with the help of some wonderful food historians and researchers. It illustrates how closely tied nutrition science was to racist ideas like eugenics. But it also misses the bigger story: that “American” food is deeply tied to the idea that New England (read: White Yankee) foodways are superior to others.

Let’s look at some anecdotes.

In 1876, Juliet Corson opened the New York Cooking School. Like the Boston Cooking School, it was largely designed to train lower class women to be housekeepers and cooks. Although she had to ultimately close the school due to poor health, she went on to become a regular columnist for New York City newspapers, including the New York Times, where she worked for the rest of her career. Corson believed keenly in the power of good, economical cooking, and her Puritan background no doubt had a huge influence on her ideas and ideals. She famously published a number of cookbooks for the poor, including Fifteen Cent Dinners for Families of Six. According to her New York Times obituary, she published an edition of 50,000 copies specifically to give away during the height of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Her books were immensely popular, their promise of healthful meals for little money was an important one in a time of robber barons and tenements. Interestingly, although she promoted the basic understanding of nutrition at the time (carbohydrates, protein, and fats), she offered a substitute for the cow’s milk so highly prized by nutritionists at the time – broth, which she encountered on her travels in France. But the remainder of her recipes in this booklet are stolidly New England – boiled meats, root vegetables and cabbage, beans, cooked cereals like cornmeal mush, dairy products like milk, cheese, and butter, and bread. No leafy greens or green vegetables, tomatoes, or fruits feature in her menus, except apples. A few dried herbs and spices and flavoring tinctures to be made at home (lemon, orange, vanilla). She even notes that dried or preserved fruits are for holidays only, and nuts are difficult to digest and so “they do not come under the head of the necessities of life.”

In 1890, Ellen H. Richards, with assistance from Mary Hinman Abel, debuted The New England Kitchen of Boston. Designed to serve Boston’s poor immigrant population with ready-made meals and teach them economical and nourishing cookery, the Kitchen was well-funded and with the benefit of medical professionals, scientists, and equipment manufacturers to assist Richards and Abel and conduct research.

“After a long series of studies, the following foods were placed on sale by weight or measure: beef broth, vegetable soup, pea soup, corn meal mush, boiled hominy, oatmeal mush, pressed beef, beef stew, fish chowder, tomato soup, Indian pudding, rice pudding, and oatmeal cakes.” Clearly, its proponents were certain that these typically New England foods were the most nutritious and best options. However, the local immigrant population in Boston was less convinced. According to The Life of Ellen H. Richards published in 1912, just one year after her death, the Kitchen, like many others, ultimately failed to convince “the poor” that the food on offer was both cheap and good. “’Their death knell was sounded,’ to quote Mrs. Richards, ‘by the woman who said, ‘I don’t want to eat what’s good for me; I’d ruther eat what I’d ruther’.’ The man, too, from Southern Europe who defiantly said, ‘You needn’t try to make a Yankee of me by making me eat that,’ pointing to baked Indian pudding, may have helped ring the knell.”

Like Corson, Richards and Abel were attempting to get poor and immigrant families to eat for survival, not pleasure. Both argued against alcohol, and while Corson embraced a more French style of eating for her middle-class cookbooks, salad vinaigrette was clearly out of the purview of the urban poor.

And therein lay the problem. Immigrants of all backgrounds did not want to be divorced from one of the few connections to their homelands they still had: food. And, as many people have argued before and since, English foodways aren’t always the height of culinary achievement, especially not when produced “economically.” But for these Progressive Era reformers, immigrant foodways were inferior. Messy, smelly, complicated, and probably causing all kinds of indigestion (the horror of meat- and white-bread-obsessed White elites everywhere). Mixed foods not only represented racial and ethnic mixing, they were also made calculating calories and nutrition components much harder to determine. The ”best” foods were simple, lightly seasoned, and served separately – hallmarks of many New England style foods. “Meat and three” if you will. And “Americanizing” immigrants didn’t mean teaching them about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It meant assimilating them to the dominant culture of the time, which was largely White, Protestant, and based in New England.

These ideas were carried forward into the 20^th century. They remained the backbone of nutrition advice in World War I, World War II, and the postwar boom, even as scientific advancements made clear the importance of vegetables and that immigrant and African American foodways were not nutritionally inferior to White Yankee foodways. Old ideas and habits died hard, encouraged by the continued prevalence of White supremacy in American culture. It was not until the 1960s and ‘70s that the idea that other foodways might have value trickled down to the mainstream, although even then it was often in highly Americanized form, either created by American immigrants themselves, or by home economists working in corporate test kitchens.

So how does this all relate to fall? New England foodways weren’t the only things to dominate our national culture. When American thought leaders and elites were inventing what it meant to be “American,” they lifted almost wholesale the culture of New England, including Protestant work ethic, Puritanical ideas about pleasure, and yes, even its distinct seasons. So when you see stuff about “what’s in season” for each month, they’re usually not talking about what’s in season in California, or Oklahoma, or Florida. They’re talking about the Northeast.

What About the South?

The South has just as long and distinct a food culture as New England. So why wasn’t it the chosen one? Well for one, although the South had its rebrand post-Reconstruction, largely courtesy the Daughters of the Confederacy and their Lost Cause Movement, treasonous secession wasn’t exactly the ideal the White elites of the more populous Northeast wanted to emphasize (comparisons to the American Revolution aside). Besides which, the food culture of the South was much more diverse. In addition, part of the revival of the racist Ol’ South was an emphasis on the role of genial Black cooks and “servants” in the magic of Southern food and hospitality. African foodways were much more in evidence in Southern food, and the still-racist North valued White supremacy just as much as it did New England supremacy.

African-Americans, however, existed and continue to exist in large numbers in the North, some of whom can trace their family lineages back to the earliest days of the colonies. Throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, they were relegated primarily to service jobs, even after legal slavery ended in the North. They were the ones cooking for taverns, hotels, and spas, and on board steamboats and railroads. Many Northern families employed people of color as household servants as well, although by the end of the 19^th century White German or Scandinavian servants were preferred. In addition, Black Americans were far more populous in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania than in Massachusetts and other traditionally New England states. They just did not fit into the “shining city on a hill” narrative White Progressives wanted to embrace.

The large Black population in the South didn’t help either. Southern food did enjoy a late 19^th and early 20^th century revival, thanks in part to the Lost Cause movement, which sponsored not only Confederate statues and textbooks, but also helped Southern cookbooks proliferate. Not all of them exploited their African American contributors, but most did, and nearly all reinforced negative stereotypes about uneducated, “magical negroes” who were happy to serve their White masters.

While Lost Cause cookery did encourage a positive view of the South, it also helped other it. Slow Southern recovery following the Civil War, its reliance on agriculture (particularly sharecropping), its reluctance to industrialize, and its highly stratified Jim Crow society all helped brand the South as “other” – that is, part of America, but not really American. Southern food was a novelty in the North and West – not an everyday staple. This is a dichotomy that persists even today. For instance, we have many Southern restaurants, but few New England restaurants. Most of New England’s foodways are simply presented as “American.”

As American as New England

Colonial revivals in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s all helped reinforce New England foodways as “American,” even as cognizance of the decline of other regional foodways helped spur attempted revivals in the 1930s and 1970s-90s. By the time of the Second World War, “American” food had become pretty firmly entrenched, and it was largely derived from New England foodways. Roast beef and pot roast, roasted turkey and chicken pot pie, mashed potatoes and gravy, mashed turnips, creamed onions, baked beans and succotash, Harvard Beets, cranberry anything, apple and pumpkin pie, gingerbread cake and molasses cookies, Boston brown bread and Parker House rolls – these foods all have their roots in New England Yankee foodways.

Today, the popularity of many of these foods has waned. But the New England influence lingers on in pumpkin spice lattes and plaid scarves in 90-degree weather, in pumpkin patches and U-pick apple orchards across the country, and in Halloween and Thanksgiving traditions totally divorced from local food conditions.

Someday I hope we’ll be more realistic about both local conditions and the White supremacy behind a lot of these “traditions.” The United States is an incredibly diverse place. And while “American” food is starting to change, we’re not quite there yet. I look forward to seeing where it goes next.

Bibliography & Further Reading

“Eugenicists Shaped the Pathologized Way Many Americans Think About Nutrition Today” by Anjali Prastertong for Well + Good, 2023.

“Are Nutrition Science and Nutritional Guidelines Racist?” by Sarah Wassberg Johnson, The Food Historian blog, 2023.

“Institutional Racism and New England’s Food” by Meg Muckenhoupt, NYU Press Blog, 2020.

Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture by Megan J. Elias (2017).

Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century by Helen Zoe Veit (2015)

How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working Class Meals at the Turn of the Century by Katherine Leonard Turner (2014).

Linoleum, Better Babies, and the Modern Farm Woman, 1890-1930 by Marilyn Irvin Holt (2006).

97 Orchard Street, New York: Stories of Immigrant Life by Linda Granfield (2001).

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Note: Friends, if I’ve seemed quiet lately it's because once again I've been having issues with posting articles to Substack. This has sat in drafts for weeks, frozen. I'm now scheduling it from my phone (the only way to access it), and minus most of the links I'd hoped to include. So I hope you'll accept my apologies! If anyone has a contact for Substack please let me know. This issue has been persisting across machines, browsers, and IP addresses. Thank you and hope you enjoyed the read!

I've been getting lots of interview requests to talk about ice cream lately, which has sent me down some rabbit holes. I've been tracking down ice cream's ancient origins, presidential ice cream history, inventors, and more.

I did a talk last year on ice cream history for Archaeology Now which you can watch here if you want the whole overview of my research thus far.

But in trying to track down details about Augustus Jackson (the "father of ice cream") and Sallie Shadd (the "mother of ice cream") here in the US, I stumbled across this horror on JSTOR: "Ice Cream From Crude Oil," by Edwin E. Slosson, published in Science News-Letter October 2, 1926.

Here's the text (I’ve bolded a few choice passages):

The chemists of America recently celebrated the semi-centennial of their organization with a meeting at Philadelphia. Dr. Edwin E. Slosson, author of "Creative Chemistry," etc., in this article tells of some of the achievements and hopes of modern chemistry as revealed in the sessions.

Ice cream made from crude oil is one of the many marvels forecast by Prof. James F. Norris, president of the American Chemical Society. Edible fats, the same as those in vegetable and animal foods, and other fats equally nutritious but not found in nature, can be obtained by breaking up the molecules of mineral oil and rearranging the atoms to form new compounds.

This cracking process has been applied to petroleum for many years to obtain a larger yield of the gasoline distillate, but the investigations recently carried out by the Petroleum Institute have shown that it is possible to attach oxygen to the cracked molecules and so produce alcohols and acids of all sorts. Aromatics, flower perfumes, fruit flavors, drugs and dyes in infinite variety may be made by such methods. This suggests that petroleum which has hitherto been used for fuel and lubricating may be found in the future to be even more valuable as a source of substances for which man has hitherto been dependent upon the chance bounty of nature. Glycerin, which is not obtained from the decomposition of soap fats, can be produced from petroleum, and transformed into nitroglycerin for dynamite. Synthetic plastics like rubber and bakelite may also be manufactured from the same raw material. It is unfortunate that we should come to realize the possibilities of petroleum only now, when the Government Oil Commission announces that the known oil reserves of the United States will last only six years at the present rate of consumption.

But Dr. Norris has his answer to that objection, for he foresees the utilization of the limitless stores of energy confined within the atom, as manifest in radium.

“When I saw not long ago in the laboratory of Dr. S. C. Lind a tiny drop of colorless oil that had been formed from methane - the chief constituent of natural gas - as a result of the action of this form of energy upon it, I felt a new era in chemistry had dawned,” Dr. Norris said. “That droplet meant a supply of combustible liquid to run our automobiles where petroleum is exhausted. We can make methane from carbon and hydrogen when the supply of natural gas fails us. The sun will always be able to convert carbon dioxide into a form from which we can get back carbon.”

Dr. E. J. Esselen demurs to the suggestion of synthetic ice cream and expressed a preference for the old-fashioned method of feeding the cellulose to a cow. But in his own field Dr. Esselen was quite as radical in his prophecies as Dr. Norris. He goes so far as to surmise that the synthesis of cellulose may some day be accomplished in the factor as it is now in the field from the free raw materials of air and water.

Cellulose, which is the woody stuff of trees and other plants, now requires months or years to grow, but if the chemist once learns how to make it he may turn out a purer product in a few days or hours. Already the first steps toward this achievement have been taken. It has been found possible to make glucose artificially by the action of ultraviolet rays on water and carbon dioxide, that is, on “soda-water.” It is easy to convert cellulose into glucose, and if only we knew how to reverse this reaction synthetic cellulose would be possible, though whether it would be profitable or not remains to be seen.

Wow. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Petroleum products would go on to dominate our everyday lives. Not just with plastics, but also with food additives, notably artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives. And while we have certainly expanded our oil reserves globally since the 1920s, peak oil is still an as-yet undealt-with issue, alongside climate change. But the article illustrates both the benefits and dangers of this kind of science.

Someone pointed out yesterday that Soylent Green was set in 2022, and quipped that they would not be consuming any fake meat anytime soon. I laughed, but knowing how some fake meat like Impossible burgers are made (with artificial, not human blood), I had to sympathize.

We’ve already been eating petroleum for a while. The other day I revisited an article I wrote last year on French Dressing, and recalled that the whole reason the FDA was regulating the standard of identity for salad dressings in 1950 was because mineral oil was an increasingly popular substitute for vegetable oils in salad dressing. Odorless, colorless, and flavorless, mineral oil is not digestible by the human body (and therefore is often prescribed as a laxative). For dieters, this seemed ideal! Have delicious salad dressings to perk up your sad raw vegetable diet without the calories! The infamous artificial fat Olestra (a.k.a. Olean) had similar effects, which is why you rarely find it today.

Petroleum products still make it into foods. Petroleum wax is a main ingredient in chewing gum, and edible paraffin wax is often found as a coating for cheese, fresh fruits and vegetables, and is even an ingredient in chicken nuggets. You can also see it (along with mineral oil) as an ingredient in some older candy recipes, usually combined with chocolate for dipped candies. Lipstick, toothpaste, and even over the counter pain medications like aspirin also contain petroleum products.

Petroleum is a carbon-based substance, so it’s not beyond the realm of comprehension that we could eat it. But humans generally can’t metabolize foods made from petroleum, which is why that headline about ice cream was such a shock to me. I can only imagine the effects of eating such a product, no matter how it tasted.

About a week ago the Washington Post published a story about ultra-processed foods and their impact on human health. In particular, they looked at how the breakdown of molecules in foods that underwent high-pressure, high-heat environments (like those that make, for instance, cheese puffs) and how the body metabolized them. Because these broken-chain molecules are essentially pre-digested, they can be absorbed by the body right from the stomach into the blood stream - skipping the microbiome in the gut.

Some researchers posit that these ultra-processed foods might be the smoking gun of the so-called “obesity epidemic.” Others remain less convinced. I personally think that, like climate change, obesity is the result of a multitude of issues with modern life, including but not limited to, epigenetic changes, exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, the twin stresses of poverty and racism, a disinvestment in pedestrian-friendly architecture, a national chronic lack of sleep (including in children), changes in gut bacteria, changes in the nutritive values of crops through soil depletion and over-irrigating, AND the prevalence and cheapness of ultra-processed foods.

In speaking about ice cream in preparation for a podcast interview today, I talked about the changes in agriculture, technology, and public policy over the course of the 20th century that made our industrial food system today possible. That 1926 article just brought home both the naïve optimism of the past, and also how divorced Western science was (and often still is) from the natural world.

I don’t have any particular message today, other than to share this tidbit of history that I stumbled across and all of the connections to the modern day it made me think about. Here’s more reading if you’re interested in any of the topics I mentioned today:

Alicia Kennedy has written a new book coming out next month called No Meat Required, in which she examines the history of plant-based eating, particularly meat substitutes. She includes a deep-dive into the history behind folks like Beyond Meat and the Impossible Burger. She also wrote this week on the corporatization of American food.

My globe-trotting friend Tereneh Idia has written about pedestrian-friendly (and un-friendly) architecture across the world.

I’m always interested in reading more from folks who like to take deep dives into complicated topics, so drop your Substack recommendations in the comments!

Until next time, friends.

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