Culture Shock

While in both the chapters on Ireland and on Italy, women were the primary cooks, their role in Italy seemed much more valued than in Ireland. Diner describes women as “custodians of the family’s money and guardians of its larder” – implying some amount of power for Italian women based around their ability to prepare food. However, as in Ireland, and despite a cultural idea of family meals as central to community life, men and woman ate separately, with men getting the better share. Women brought ideas about food and cooking from upper-class households in which they worked, giving them a central role in determining the cuisine of the lower class.

Meanwhile, when Italians immigrated to America – mostly men at first, it seems according to the sources cited by Diner, though perhaps men were just more frequently writing about food – the regional cuisine of immigrants’ native villages morphed into a much different “Italian” food. Again, women as cooks for both families and community events seems to be a central part of Italian food culture in America.

If the Irish didn’t have a cuisine, it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying – and most of that effort was targeted at women. For example, Diner discusses United Irishwomen, founded in Ireland in 1908, which hoped to improve Irish cooking – which, it’s clear throughout the chapter, was seen as the domain of women, and one they weren’t very good at, since cooking potatoes requires very little in the way of technical skill or creative preparation. Meanwhile, in America, Irish women were cooking in middle class kitchens, and being roundly joked about as the worst cooks ever, even by the most sympathetic authors. In Ireland, cooking was a simple chore to keep off starving, not something with emotional associations or family rituals. In America, Irish women learned middle-class American food habits, which they took as American food practices rather than claiming them on their own. They learned about Jewish food and German, opened grocery stores and restaurants… but never adapted any of these as uniquely Irish American food.

Meanwhile, Irish men developed their own set of stereotypes… as frequent visitors to the local Irish pub. Where little habit and sentimentality developed around food, Irish pubs were the center of Irish-American social life, and they were primarily masculine environments. Men affectionately described their fathers sending them to fetch beer in a way that they never discussed their mother’s cooking. Drinking was seen as uniquely Irish in a way meals were not. When this abundance of alcohol became a problem, the conflict was a gendered one; Diner describes local Irish American priests and groups of women urging their men towards temperance.

I wonder where these gendered patterns of consumption originated. For example, in Ireland, Diner reports how men and women ate separately, with men eating first and women eating from the leftovers, and in some sense a pattern of separate mealtimes – due to large amounts of unmarried single women immigrating to the United States by themselves, or because women ate while the men were away at the mines – seems to have carried over. Irish women didn’t bond over cooking together, and Irish families didn’t bond over shared meals… but still their foodways (and drinkways) developed gendered patterns, which don’t seem to have ended well for anyone.

In the first chapter, Mintz talks about dietary changes, and how remarkably resistant to change they are – people are more likely to add new things than get rid of old ones. (24) This got me wondering: does diet change more rapidly now than it used to, at least in America? I’m so used to seeing articles adn advertisement suggesting I change the way I eat every week, for health or the environment or wahtever, and there’s much more variety available now for trying new habits than there used to be.

I found her explanation of cuisine confusing until she laid out the definitions at the end of the second chapter. By her definition of cuisine, speaking of “American cuisine” wouldn’t work for a lot of reasons, including vast difference in available regional food, and a lack of agreed-upon staple ingredients and techniques and the like. There’s been a recent revival of interest in “locavorism” – eating locally grown/prepared, seasonal food – and “slow food,” as in using traditional cooking techniques and not just microwaving everything. Could that be said to be creating a cuisine, or is it not widespread enough to matter?

Mintz’s point on page 116, with a long list of all the foods Americans have been introduced to in recent years, addresses what I was thinking about earlier regarding quickly changing diets. I wonder how our national ideas about health fit into this all – she points out the foods which provide the most calories in America are ones most people would consider unhealthy, and that government policy to encourage healthy eating hasn’t been very effective. She also talks about how class-bound eating habits in America are – are concerns about health equally class-bound?