Bite by Bite: American History through Feasts, Foods, and Side Dishes

To every librarian fighting for young people’s right to read, learn, explore, and think

—M. A.

For Caleb, Lila, Alfred, and Joshua

—P. F.

INTRODUCTION

If you were a visitor from outer space and got your sense of the United States from commercials, you might think all we ate were burgers loaded with bacon and cheese or pizzas topped with curling islands of pepperoni. Millions of burgers and pies are sold each year. But what if your own favorites are never advertised as typical American food? Where did pizza and burgers come from, anyway? How do we get a real sense of the many kinds of food we enjoy? And what do those food choices say about all of us? Take the phrase As American as… apple pie (an English dessert with European and Turkish roots not considered typically American until the 1920s), hot dogs (German), corn on the cob (Mexican), Thanksgiving turkey (venison and eel were far more important to the Pilgrims). These old and mistaken images of all-American favorites assumed that one kind of family in one neighborhood with one taste stood for all of us. That was never true.

What is American food? It depends on who is asking and when you have the conversation. In the early 1900s, Italian immigrants were warned not to persist in eating the pastas and tomato sauces of their homeland because they were not good for you, but now pizza is second only to burgers (named after Hamburg, Germany) in national popularity. At one time you could eat Mexican food only in the Southwest and try Chinese foods just in major cities on the East or West Coast. Today it may be easier for you to find a chain selling tacos or orange chicken than a diner (originally called night wagons, as they were stationed near factories and served workers between shifts) offering grilled cheese sandwiches and, well, apple pie.

What we eat tells us where we live, how we move from place to place, how we grow our foods, and which advertisements we see. If we look carefully at how different Americans have gathered ingredients and then cooked and shared meals, we really can see many of the key stories in American history—laid out for us bite by bite.

Generally, and mistakenly, the history of the United States begins on the East Coast with the failed Roanoke Colony or with Jamestown in 1607 and the arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619. Historians have long known that the first people to arrive in the Americas came from what is now Siberia in Russia. Experts endlessly debate exactly who those new arrivals were, where they came from before arriving in Siberia, and when they crossed over. But we do know that human settlement in the Americas—and thus the true sources of American food—began more than ten, perhaps twenty thousand years before 1607, in the Pacific Northwest. Then the first great transformation of American food—the arrival of corn—took place thousands of years before the Europeans arrived. European and African contact with North Americans—and thus more and new forms of American food—moved from the south to the north, through the southwest, nearly a century before Jamestown. If not for the success of the Haitians in defeating first British and then French armies, the center of North America might well have been French-speaking, with the English trapped on the Atlantic coast. In the 1800s each wave of immigration to North America added new questions, debates, and choices to the American kitchen and table.

This book treats the Englishness of American food, culture, and society as a constantly contested question, one we still debate today. Looking carefully at food gives us the chance to uncover the true histories of the many Americans and Americas.

PART ONE

FIRST FOODS—FOUNDATIONS

1

Celilo Falls: First Salmon Feast

10,000 BCE to Today

To begin this pageant of food, North America, and history, we need to start where it all began: the Pacific Northwest. Carefully studying the DNA in ancient skeletons and working closely with modern Native American peoples, scientists have assembled some of the key pieces in the story of how humans first came to the Americas. At one time the land connecting what are now the Americas and Russia was a large, wide, and open area. This was not a narrow bridge but rather a reasonable place to live—when much of the nearby land was covered in ice. Scholars call the land now entirely submerged underwater Beringia. Some of the more restless, though, did leave and spread down the coast on foot or by boat, the first to enter the new continent. Whether they slowly walked the strips of land between sea and ice or more rapidly rode the waters in and out of the jagged coastline, they came to, and through, the Pacific Northwest. Some chose to stay and settle there. For more than ten thousand years (and this could be at least fifteen to twenty thousand years), these first Americans built their lives around the meeting places of land and sea, hills, and rivers, near this coast. And so, this is our place to start.

Moving inland from the coast, you reach the Columbia River Plateau. There, the Columbia and Snake Rivers cut through a landscape that was created through massive lava flows millions of years ago. For the peoples of the plateau, the rivers provide fish, while in the higher elevations, there are animals to hunt and bushes whose roots and berries offer both tasty treats and medicines.

Tatum Willis is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) and also descends from the Yakama, Nez Perce, and Oglala Lakota nations. The CTUIR include the Cayuse, the Umatilla, and the Walla Walla. The three separate groups each lived in their own distinct areas until recently. The Cayuse moved throughout the year in a wide circle through areas of what are now Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The men were known as particularly brave and skilled horsemen and developed the distinct Cayuse pony. Disease, as well as conflicts with white newcomers and soldiers, diminished the Cayuse until, in 1855, they agreed to share a reservation with the Umatilla and the Walla Walla. Much of the distinct Cayuse language has been lost—so Tatum is studying Nez Perce, which is similar.

She recounted a version of the tale of how the Native people came to live along the rivers and inlets of the Pacific Northwest. Wishpoosh, the monster beaver, was killing the people and not letting them settle on the land and fish in the rivers. Coyote battled with Wishpoosh to protect the people and then fooled him by turning himself into a branch, which Wishpoosh swallowed, then turned back into himself and carved the beaver up from inside. Then he tossed the pieces, and each became one of the Native peoples of the area. As another version of the same story explains,

From the head of Wishpoosh, Coyote made the Nez Perces, great in council.

From the arms, he made the Cayuses, powerful with the bow and war club.

From the legs, he made the Klickitats, famous runners.

From the ribs, he made the Yakamas.

The people were placed in specific lands, which became their homes. In 1855, at the treaty council that created the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Cayuse leader Ictixec said, This is our mother, this country, as if we drew our living from her. More recently, an elder named Jim Yoke could still name 270 individual spots along the Cowlitz and Naches Rivers where Coyote had placed fish or berries, and defeated dangerous beings to prepare the land for the arrival of the people. Hundreds of generations of ancestors, E. Thomas Morning Owl, general counsel of the CTUIR explains, have known this land intimately from living on it for thousands of years. Every creek, spring, pond, swale, saddle, box canyon, draw, and peak witnessed our people’s long history here, and our people knew all the features of this land. This sense of being deeply connected to a specific place defined their relationship to food.

Knowing the land, walking it, observing it, valuing it, the Native peoples treated the foods they gathered and hunted as part of their own living world. Plants and animals gave humans the gift of themselves, and the people in turn honored them. Food was not a packaged object; it was another life in a shared world. That does not mean the Native peoples had a limited diet—they also met to trade, which gave them access to favorite berries and roots, fish and meats that were not available in their lands. The center for trade along the Columbia River (which now separates Oregon from Washington) was Celilo Falls, home to the First Salmon Feast.

The CTUIR is about an hour and half away from Celilo, where the First Salmon Feast has been celebrated for thousands of years. Salmon are born inland, swim out to sea, then return upstream to lay their eggs in the same place where they were born. To reach the spawning grounds the fish needed to swim up the thundering waters of Celilo Falls. Virginia Beavert, a Yakama elder, recalled that:

To me, the falls at Celilo were like a live human being.

When we used to arrive at the Columbia River, you could hear the sound of the waterfalls.

The sound of the falls would envelop you and you would become deaf.

It’s like the sound permeates your entire body.

In the 1950s the United States government decided to expand a decades-long project of dam-building on the Columbia River. In order to provide electrical power—both for a growing population and for the expanding military-defense industries—and to manage water flow, they built a dam that destroyed the falls. While this was beneficial to many, it threatened and transformed a central event for the Indian peoples of the Pacific Northwest.

Chief Tommy Kuni Thompson led the very last feast held while the waters still cascaded over the rocks. He shared a description of a ceremony a few years before the dam with author Martha Ferguson McKeown. Here are some highlights of his account:

Tommy’s adult son Henry sat on a wooden platform built over the falls, holding a long wooden pole with a net at the end. The first hint that salmon were coming would be flights of birds called mud swallows—for they arrive just ahead of the fish. Henry saw the mud swallows, still the salmon did not come. Soon Henry’s place was taken by