To cultivate a better understanding of American Nutrition I am going start out by giving a brief history of our diet beginning in the 19th century. The early 1800s were a time of frontiersmen, merchants, and farmers. Industrialization had yet to occur on a large scale and fast food was a foreign term (1). On the frontier people only had access to indigenous plants and animals, however they stocked supplies including flour, beans, and sugar at regular intervals. They would eat on average three meals a day comprised of foods like corn bread, hot cakes, boiled eggs, sausage, stew and calves' head (2). Farmers and merchants had access to a greater variety of foods including larger quantities of fruits and vegetables and a significantly larger amount of animal products as compared to the frontiersmen. According to Alex Soyer's "Modern Housewife" a farmer or merchant's diet in the 1800s would consist of coffee, butter, eggs, meat, bread, soup, and cheese. The 1850s brought the California gold rush and a plethora of new recipes to America influenced by the Chinese, Spanish, and Mexican immigrants. Westerners dined at cheap eateries and ate similar to the farmers and merchants back east. The mid to late 1800s also are responsible for the advent of soft drinks and cereal. In 1865 C.W. Post developed his first cereal called Postum (3), Coca-Cola was invented by Dr. John S. Pemberton in 1886, and in 1898 Pepsi-Cola was invented by Caleb Bradham (4).
The 19th century diet was transitional. In the beginning foods were largely unprocessed. Soda Pop and Cereal were the first heavily processed goods introduced in America. In Part 2 of A Lesson in History I will continue the transition into the 20th and 21st century.
2 comments:
It is interesting to think about how Americans use to eat in the 19th century. One of the huge factors of the diet back then was due to their surroundings. And if one was a farmer, the staple of his/her diet would be what that farmer would grow. Now, many of Americans do not grow our own foods. Food is readily available to us and the majority of the foods that we now intake are processed. But we have a huge variety of foods to choose from. Is this better than having the same type of food every single day?
We have a large variety of foods to choose from. More than any farmer in the 19th century could hope for. However, I believe that the quality of food in the 19th century would be much higher. Corn wasn't bred for high levels of high fructose corn syrup and animals weren't bred for unusually high amounts of fat and pumped with antibiotics. If you think about it, all of the center isles in a grocery store are filled with highly processed foods. Thats about 80 percent of the store that is comprised of food that is not going to have very much nutritional value. Processing sucks the nutrients right out of food. It breaks down the molecules and completely changes the components into something generally unhealthy. A great example is modern milk. Pasteurizing and homogenizing changes milk completely changes its molecular structure making it liquid junk food. A 19th century farmer's milk would have better nutritional value than modern day milk.
Post a Comment