A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America.

A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America. By James E. McWilliams. Arts and Traditions of the Table. (New York: Columbia University Press, c. 2005. Pp. [viii], 386. $29.95, ISBN 0-231-12992-0.)

A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America casts a wide net. James E. McWilliams describes how early Americans grew, caught, shot, and bought their food and speculates about the meanings of foods in the lives of early Americans from the early seventeenth century to the American Revolution and beyond. McWilliams unifies his wide-ranging study around several themes, including a focus on how foods were produced, whether sugar, tobacco, rice, tuckahoe, cassava, butter, or cider. Also, McWilliams suggests how European foods and techniques were blended with those of Africans and Native Americans in a process that varied by region. Finally, he sketches the rough outline of an American cuisine that was articulated in opposition to European models. Written for a general audience (there are no footnotes, but sources for quotations are included) and based on published primary sources and familiar secondary works, McWilliams's book offers a broad framework for incorporating the study of food habits into early American history. But McWilliams breaks little new ground.

The core of A Revolution in Eating is a region-by-region survey. Beginning with the West Indies and moving from there to New England, McWilliams establishes the culinary poles of the English Atlantic world: "New England's was a cuisine of abundance, but the West Indies' was a cuisine of survival" (p. 11). McWilliams then describes the Chesapeake (a "land of culinary negotiation"), the Middle Colonies ("a cuisine of diverse moderation"), and Carolina, whose connections to Barbados ensured its "unusually liberated and tolerant approach to food" (pp. 129, 12, 132). (The Maritime colonies are not included, although their reliance on the cod fishery and Atlantic trade would have made a welcome addition.) McWilliams's characterizations of each region's food habits describe the peculiar demands of staple crop and food production, labor systems, and the region's connections to Atlantic markets. This central portion of the book is clear and concise, but the influences of Africans and Indians on the development of regional foodways are more often suggested than shown.

The final chapters survey three themes that have received a great deal of scholarly attention: alcohol (especially rum), the eighteenth-century "world of goods," and the republican rhetoric of the Revolutionary period. In these chapters, McWilliams suggests how regional cultures became unified through consumption and trade and how they fused into an American cuisine alter the Revolution. But in extending the secondary literature on these topics to include food, McWilliams encounters some difficulties.

One of these is his reliance on individual choice to explain food habits. Since the early period's "frontier attitude wasn't permanent," he writes, eighteenth-century colonists were free "to do what New Englanders thought they should have been doing from the start: eat like proper Englishmen" (pp. 203, 211). In this way, McWilliams suggests that a desire "to replicate the general ways of England" was an impulse bottled up by frontier conditions and released by the commercial expansion of the eighteenth century (p. 211). Sociological and anthropological approaches to food habits, including Stephen Mennell's All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, Eng., 1985) and Sidney Wilfred Mintz's Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985), have suggested that emulation and "taste" are not as simple or stable as McWilliams suggests.

It is also difficult to determine whether McWilliams sees food reflecting larger forces, shaping them, or both. For example, he states that in the eyes of the Revolutionary generation "food and political independence were intimately linked phenomena," but the precise nature of those linkages is difficult to determine. Food was certainly part of the story--if tea and molasses are food, this is even more true--but the Jeffersonian vision was based on much more than producing food (p. 283).

Overall, James E. McWilliams has contributed a valuable book to early American history, one that focuses on the same things around which early Americans (especially women) themselves centered their lives: producing, preserving, preparing, consuming, and exchanging food.

MICHAEL A. LACOMBE

Adelphi University