H-Net Review: Trudy Eden on Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America

0atwong • 25th Oct 2006 • Conversation Pieces

H-Net Review: Trudy Eden on Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America
Food history, like all historical fields, has had its active and dormant periods. Historians in the first part of the twentieth century explored it avidly. Many of them sought to give an expansive view of the cultivation, distribution, preparation, and/or consumption of a particular product. Examples of this type of macro-view history include Edward R. Everson, Beverages, Past and Present 1908, William J. Ashley, The Bread of Our Forefathers 1928, and William G. Panscher, Baking in America 1956. While providing an understanding of food supplies, practices, and habits over long chronological periods and broad geographical spaces, these texts come up against a major impediment to in-depth analysis. For much of human history, food has been a local thing. People have grown and distributed much of their food supply locally and have prepared and consumed it according to local custom. This tendency does not mean that local customs cannot be compared and classified in a larger context–there are such things as “French cuisine” and “British food” to use the problem addressed by Stephen Mennell in All Manners of Food [1985], but within each of those categories there exists a universe of variety and meaning. While it is important to understand the larger picture, the drawback of many such studies is that they miss the sociological, chronological and geographical variety in the enterprise of eating.