The 4 foods that define America

Hello friends my name is JJ and a while ago I came into possession of these little guys they are for toys that you could get if you ordered a McDonald's Happy Meal in the fall of 1993. now most Happy Meal toys exist to push some movie or TV show but this particular set was sponsored by the American dietetic Association of all things it was part of a nationwide campaign to promote healthy eating habits to America's youth which I suppose made McDonald's a logical Target for a number of reasons so we've got Slugger the steak man notice the sandwich Ruby the apple Lady and the lazy Milk Carton and they of course represent the four food groups meat fruits and vegetables Dairy and grain I know that the whole idea of four food groups is an increasingly discredited way to think about a proper diet but give them a break it was the 1990s we thought Ace of base was good but anyway looking at these four buddies got me thinking about the four specific foods that they represent and just how familiar these four specific foods are to us in this part of the world they are so familiar to us that we barely think of them as unique or special Foods at all they're more like our generic default food symbols incredibly basic boring things that we presume everyone has always eaten but this isn't true apples steak milk and sandwiches are actually relatively new things for people to eat and only really became mainstream Staples of the American diet over the last 150 years or so and in that sense the steady rise in popularity of these four Foods forms an important part of America's distinct cultural heritage a series of stories shaped by all sorts of unique variables and circumstances particular to life on this continent so let's Tell those stories okay foreign [Music] so beef came to America from two different directions the first person to bring cows to the new world was Christopher Columbus himself who brought some to the Caribbean on one of his voyages from there the Spanish introduced them to their colonies in Mexico beginning in the 1520s in those days the preferred Spanish approach to cattle rearing was to let the cows graze in Wide Open Spaces making the sprawling a Mexican prairies an ideal place to build up a robust cattle ranching scene and that's what they did and it's also why incidentally so many of the words that we associate with American Cowboy culture are just anglicizations of Spanish words like Bronco lasso rodeo and even Ranch over time the Spanish settlers in Mexico would create a distinct Fusion culture with the indigenous people there including a blending of food traditions so the komal which was the traditional wood fire grill of the Aztec people was used to cook the Flesh of Spanish cows and this is often held up as the embryo of modern Midwestern State culture though Texas Roadhouse was still many centuries away on the east coast of North America meanwhile cows were brought over by the Dutch and British nearly a full Century later in the 1620s but despite their comparatively slower start they too established a bunch of cattle Farms of their own in fact to this day many of the most common breeds of cow in the U.S and Canada remain Dutch or British in origin although following the U.S conquest of Spanish America in the 1800s a lot of these breeds were crossbred with Spanish Longhorn cattle in the annex territories which sort of made the American versions of these European breeds into their own thing anyway cattle farming really thrived during this continent's early colonial period and the degree that this made beef available to people of all walks of life was was held up as something that made America this very exciting utopian Place given that beef had historically been a bit of an elite food back in the old world but it wasn't until the latter half of the 19th century that things really took off and beef became almost absurdly abundant in America a fact which has kept America the world's biggest beef producing region ever since in this great history of American beef raising steaks by Betty Fussell Betty says that beef became a full-blown industry almost overnight in the mid to late 1800s due to two big factors corn and trains starting in the 1840s or so American settlers began migrating into these western territories which the U.S had annexed from France and Spain and what they found were yet more enormous Open Spaces that were not only a great place to raise cattle but also grow an enormous amount of corn a plant in indigenous to this continent that the white man had learned about from the Indians quite some time ago now these days it is of course very popular to blame the corn heavy diet of Americans for our high levels of obesity given that corn is pretty dense with carbs and sugar but this also makes corn a very excellent way to fatten up cattle now in one sense giving cow's corn is just another example of cultural Fusion feeding a staple crop of the new world to animals of the old but it is also the case that because corn isn't native to a cow's diet it can also give them a lot of health problems which we then have to mitigate by pumping them full of antibiotics but that's a another story the point is the American Midwest soon had more obese cows than it knew what to do with but luckily trains came to America around this time connecting these new settlements to the continents established population centers on the East Coast which were growing fast and craving more beef than their own local cattle Farms could provide and what wound up happening was any Midwestern city with a big railroad stop like Chicago Omaha Kansas City or St Louis became a major Hub of meat processing Midwest Farmers would bring their cattle to these big meat packing factories in the cities and their cows would be chopped up and shipped to the east in newfangled refrigerated Railway cars the new state of Texas formerly part of Mexico was initially cut out of this system and for a time they had to do these famous things called cattle runs where they'd Marge huge herds of cows all the way up to Kansas but eventually the trains came to Texas too and the beef industry exploded and beef became America's most valuable Agricultural Product which it still is and the beef processing companies became some of the first great corporate Titans of the Gilded Age with many of them like Swift and armor still around to this day and it was this abundant supply of beef in cities all across America that is usually credited with making steak in particular such a popular American food the latter half of the 19th century was also a period of growth for the American middle class A group with a growing amount of disposable income that allowed restaurants to emerge as a thing and going out for a nice steak dinner became one of the first popular restaurant meals now in theory steak is just a slab of beef and obviously wealthy Europeans and generations past eight primitive stakes in some form but beef Rich America really turns steak cooking into an art sizing up all of the different parts of the cow with these elaborate charts and inventing all sorts of new Cuts with great American names the years following the end of World War II heralded the dawn of the golden age of American chain restaurants with dedicated steakhouses like Sizzler and Mortons and Ruth's Chris popping up all across the country and often marketing themselves as special occasion type places but it was also the case that many of the lower end family restaurant chains that emerged in this era like Denny's or Cracker Barrel sold steaks as one of their standard menu items as well in fact today the American restaurant chain that claims to sell the most Stakes overall is Waffle House which brings us to the central Paradox of stake and modern American culture it is a food that is both highbrow and low brow simultaneously a dish you can get for 15 bucks or 200 bucks depending on where you go with prices determined by what are honestly pretty subtle distinctions and cut in cooking and presentation over the centuries Americans have eaten so much steak it has not only made us the world's biggest steak consumers but the biggest steak snobs as well [Music] foreign of course came to this continent the same time that cows did with the Dutch cows that were brought to the east being primarily used for dairy in contrast to the Spanish cows in the South that were primarily used for beef and that is unto itself revealing because what do we know that the Dutch like to eat a lot of that's right jeez so in the old days the only way to make a living is a Dairy Farmer living in the Pastoral American Countryside was by selling cheese or butter you couldn't sell milk because milk spoils very quickly and in an era before Refrigeration there was no way to transport or store it drinking milk in early America was thus considered mostly a farmer thing or a luxury for rich people living on giant Estates with their own personal dairy farm in the late 1700s however the educated men of science back in Europe were giving increasing attention to this idea of healthy food with a lot of these early dietitians starting to push the benefit of raw cow's milk it was seen as having all sorts of miraculous properties because it was so pure and natural and of course very conceptually similar to the first food many of us ever eat these theories became quite popular But ultimately resulted in what Ann Mendelson author of this very interesting book about milk history calls one of the biggest mistakes in the history of modern nutrition and this was because contrary to how American food culture usually evolves the growing demand for milk among health-conscious Americans in the late 18th century occurred in spite of The Limited technological capacities of the time to provide it since there was no safe way to transport milk from the rural Countryside to the city the solution that people came up with was to just bring the cows to the cities and this led to the weird phenomenon of so-called Urban Dairy Series where they'd keep cows in small confined buildings in the middle of the downtown and these became these notoriously disgusting places where the cows ate literal garbage and their milk was full of dirt and grime I was equally grossed out to learn that the most common way to buy this milk was from a big open tub in the middle of the store that you would just Ladle out into your own pitcher and that system lasted until refrigerated rail cars were invented in the 1870s allowing milk to be brought in from the much more sanitary dairy farms out in the countryside which now put extra effort into being sanitary with new procedures like pasteurization but it would still be a while before these things Supermarket refrigerators went mainstream so how did ordinary Americans buy this milk why from the Milkman of course he was the guy that went door to door delivering milk in these nice clean beautiful individually sealed glass bottles that were not full of urban filth and grime at all during the Victorian age a lot of homes had these weird little compartments built into them known as milk boxes the Milkman would open them and put the milk in where it would stay at least somewhat cool until the housewife needed it whereupon she would open the door from the other side which connected to the kitchen the electric refrigerator was invented in 1913 but it didn't become super mainstream until after World War II in both homes and supermarkets alike but when it did it heralded not only the downfall of the Milkman but also these bottles which had become a far too expensive way to package a product that by 1945 the average American was drinking 45 gallons of per year this steady increase in American milk consumption which had been rising for at least a century was due to a number of discrete factors one was just that there was a lot more milk being produced a new breed of cow the iconic Holstein had been imported from Holland in 1852 and they were capable of producing over a hundred pounds of milk a day which was more than double the output of previous leading breeds harnessing these Mighty Udders was in turn assisted by the 1917 invention of the vacuum pump automatic milking machine this thing enabled milk production to be industrialized at a truly massive scale where it remains to this day and that industrialization was very well timed given that the expert consensus that drinking a lot of milk was critically necessary for good health had only become more unanimous by the turn of the 20th century children were given milk in schools workers were given milk in cafeterias and the Kellogg brothers who were two of America's leading health and wellness crackpots of the Victorian age invented a newfangled thing called breakfast cereal to get more milk into people's diets these days of course the medical consensus on milk has shifted a fair bit and there are now plenty of experts including the author of this book prepare to argue that an excessively milk heavy diet causes more problems than it solves and that's without even getting into the ethical considerations of industrial milk production which some say is an even more grotesque spectacle than industrial beef production but these sorts of debates are themselves a product of a particular sort of American culture that only arose in the first place because of a fateful decision made over 400 years ago by the Dutch thank you all right now let us consider the humble sandwich a story which cannot be told without first telling the story of bread bread is one of the oldest manufactured Foods in human history and probably even predates agriculture with some historians estimating that it has been eaten in some form or another for over 20 000 years which makes sense on some level grains are an abundant Food Source on this planet but we humans are not very good at chewing or digesting them so we invented bread which is a kind of hardened goo made of ground up grains and if you don't like me referring to Brad is hard and goo all I can say is they're called pastries for a reason now early breads were mostly dense and flat a nice light puffy loaf of bread which requires harnessing the power of yeast to create is a comparatively newer Creation in the sense it is only around for like three thousand years but in any case bread has long been the food that much of humanity especially in the west has derived the majority of our calories from as we have discussed the late 19th century heralded a dramatic rise in our ability to produce many new and exciting Foods at a massive scale and it is interesting to think that we probably could have taken this opportunity to phase bread out of our diet I mean like I said it was historically something that we ate to survive rather than because we saw it as something inherently worth eating what saved bread in considerable part was the fact that the rise of new foods allowed bread to shift from something that people ate on its own to a component part of more elaborate and exciting meals which brings us to the sandwich sandwiches are British in origin one of many cultural Traditions from England that made its way to the United States in the 1800s a period in which British influence remained quite strong in America even though of course the political bonds had long since dissolved I'm sure you've heard about the guy that supposedly invented the sandwich and 18th century British politician literally named The Earl of Sandwich he was either a workaholic or a compulsive gambler but either way he thought it would be helpful to put some random food between two slices of bread so he could eat lunch with just one hand while keeping the other one free now this is one of those stories that seems too cute to be true and as a general rule I think we should be very skeptical of Legends that trace the root of some ordinary thing to a single eccentric weirdo but according to this very well researched book on the history of sandwiches there was actually surprisingly little evidence that sandwiches existed before that Earl came along I mean putting stuff between two pieces of bread doesn't seem all that revolutionary and the author speculates that people surely must have done it on an informal basis before the Earl but the idea of a sandwich as a single standardized recognizable named item of food doesn't seem to exist in the historical record before the Earl is purported to have invented it in the 1740s OR 50s now since the Earl was an aristocrat early sandwich culture in Britain and America was initially an exclusively upper class thing the big shots would nibble on these tiny little dainty crustless sandwiches made from thin slices of white bread filled with small amounts of the various classy foods of the time like shrimp or anchovies and later cucumbers and cream cheese you can still buy these types of sandwiches today if you visit some aggressively anglophilic brunch spot offering high tea but alas by the middle of the 19th century knowledge of this Elite meal had fallen into the hands of the working class who made much more rough and Hearty sandwiches to satisfy their their working class appetites they'd take big thick slices of their cheap Mixed Grain working class Breads and fill them with equally thick slices of their greasy working class meats and cheeses the Earl's great Insight that sandwiches were a highly portable meal that you could eat without a table also made them the ideal food for day laborers in the age of industrialized capitalism who could eat them while sitting in the back lot behind the factory or on a suspended girder over a construction site as the case may be the early Decades of the 20th century saw American Sandwich culture strengthen even further as technology marched on the author of this book about the history of bread identifies the late 1920s as the pivotal era that was the era in which these rectangular factory made loaves came to represent 90 percent of all bread consumed in America as well as being the decade that saw two new revolutionary Contraptions emerge from the Midwest the automatic bread slicing machine and the pop-up toaster sandwiches became so quick and easy to make they not only became the default sack lunch for working man and school-aged children but also a cheap meal that could be easily mass-produced and sold at delis cafes train stations and corner stores this ubiquity then helped Foster the Golden Age of American Sandwich experimentation and Innovation people looked at all of the other exciting mass-market foods of the time and decided to make sandwiches out of them with the PBJ BLT and egg salad eventually emerging as the big three of the post-war American Sandwich Cannon now today I kind of feel like American Sandwich culture has come full circle while cheap mass-produced sandwiches like this one that I bought at 7-Eleven still exist it is also more common than ever to buy high-end artisanal sandwiches full of fancy ingredients at hip restaurants and expensive cafes the irony is that today is fancy sandwiches with their thick cut bread and Hearty ingredients more closely resemble the working class sandwiches of the Victorian era while some of today's store-bought lower middle class sandwiches like these Smuckers Uncrustables look more like this sort of sandwiches that would have been eaten by 18th century aristocrats [Applause] [Music] so check this out my friend bought me this bag of apple flavored Sour Patch Kids the other day which I thought were pretty cool we got three fun flavors apple juice caramel apple and cranberry apple which I think nicely encapsulate the diverse roll that the Apple has come to play in modern American food culture it is worth noting however that the rise of the apple as one of the most iconic American fruits is actually a much more recent phenomenon than you might think so there are a few types of apple which are native to North America but they're mostly the small and bitter things known as crab apples which aren't particularly good eatons even the ever resourceful Native Americans often had to spend a lot of time drying or roasting them just to get them soft and sweet enough to choke down the European apple trees that the British brought over weren't much better and well into the 1800s the dominant American understanding of Apple goals was that they were mostly gross but that didn't wind up being a problem because early generations of European Americans didn't really think that the point of apples was for eating anyway no they were a drinking fruit there was a famous fellow in early 19th century America called John Chapman but everybody called him Johnny Appleseed his thing was traveling around those newly acquired Midwestern territories and selling apple trees seedlings to Pioneer families so they could grow their very own Orchard demand proved to be high and Johnny grew very wealthy earning himself a place in the history books as the man who played a critical role in making America one of the world's great Apple producing superpowers in the 20th century pop culture kind of softened Johnny's image into this wholesome character who just wanted to help midwesterners make more apple pies and things [Music] apple cake yep you can cook them anyway there's Apple there's an apple that the recipes it's in your hats but in reality the main reason he was so popular was because he gave the settlers away to make this stuff apple cider perhaps the most popular form of liquor at the time American wine as they called it as I learned from this excellent book that discusses the history of the American Apple more than anything else Johnny was beloved for bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier apple cider remained a popular form of booze into the 20th century to the point where apples actually became a somewhat demonized symbol among alcohol prohibitionists once that started to become a thing some of the more militant prohibitionists would even chop down apple trees or set apple orchards on fire to prove how hardcore they were that didn't last long but this guy says that it cast along shadow in fact he posits that this whole idea of apples is this very wholesome All-American fruit you know as American as apple pie and apple a day keeps the doctor away giving apples to teachers and all of that was basically just a post prohibition PR campaign dreamed up by the Apple industry to rebuild an image that had become sullied through its association with liquor it is true however that by that time there had already been a successful movement to make apples a more delicious thing to eat a project that had been assisted by the growing awareness of Botany and Horticulture that characterized late 19th century America apple trees are a very malleable plant that really rewards experimentation and cross-pollination and grafting and as all of this became known the late 1800s were said to Herald the dawn of the golden age of American apples in which many of our most iconic breeds like red delicious Golden Delicious and Macintosh were developed by Farmers on this continent as we know this was also the era in which refrigerated rail cars became common and these allowed apples grown in the Midwest and soon California and Washington State too to be shipped to big cities across the country where they became a beloved staple of the American lunchbox alongside roast beef sandwiches and two percent milk today we are said to be living in the second golden age of American apples just because our knowledge of Apple breeding has gotten so sophisticated that we are able to make apples so delicious they really make these 19th century ones taste like literal puke at my local supermarket alone I was able to pick up such modern bioengineering Miracles as pizzazz sunrise ambrosia honey crisp and of course the Hope Diamond of modern apples Cosmic crisp all of which have been especially bred on this continent within the last decade so there you have it the story of four Great American foods and the role that they've played shaping American history and culture I just want to close with one final thought because in reading all of these great books on the history of these Great American foods I noticed that one word tended to come up a lot and it might not be a word that you expect it was Democratic today we tend to think of democracy as an entirely political concept you know voting and all of that but in earlier times it was common to speak of America's Democratic culture and the importance of building a culture in America that was every bit as Democratic as the political system was supposed to be and one manifestation of this was the idea that just as every American has the same amount of voting power so too was it good and proper for every American citizen to have access to the same sort of consumer goods accordingly whenever a new consumer good emerged that became very common and popular the Patriotic intellectuals would get all delighted and poetic because this thing could now be used as a symbol of how in America everyone got to enjoy the same modest luxuries regardless of who they were or where they lived or what have you apples steak milk and sandwiches have all at various times been described as deeply Democratic foods and I think that's fair they are indeed things that Americans of all social classes and walks of life and joy and that's definitely an accomplishment to be proud of given how common it was for much of human history for food and even these Foods specifically to be a marker of social division that said there of course also ways in which these four foods have come to embody problems in modern American society especially the rise of technology and making our food less healthy and ethical and more corporate and soulless but I want to hear what you think steak milk sandwich Apple do you have a favorite any special memories or hot takes that you want to share let me know in the comments below and I will see you next week girlfriend [Music]

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 198,538

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Id: G5OIW6Zsu-Y

Length: 28min 46sec (1726 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2023