With millions receiving pink slips and many of us turning from Angus beef and free-range poultry to dried beans and peanut butter, there could hardly be a better time for the release of Pat Willard’s America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA–the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts that Define Real American Food.¹

The WPA (Works Progress Administration) was a monumental government endeavor during one of the most dismal periods in American history–the Great Depression. Its main goal was to use the gifts of nearly nine million unemployed people to aid in the preservation and development of American culture.²

During the Depression, one section of the WPA was assigned the task of documenting “group eating as an important social institution” and describing the “authentic art” of “American cookery” in the face of “mass production of foodstuff and partly cooked foods and introduction of numerous technological devices that lessen labor of preparation but lower quality of the product.”³ Amen.

The results of this assignment were never published. Willard found the resulting collection of materials in the Library of Congress. She selected writings from various categories then crisscrossed America in her car to see which events were still in existence and to see how subsequent generations understood them.

The Depression-era accounts in America Eats! contrast sharply with the increasingly isolated nature of contemporary lifestyles, where many of us look at a screen many more hours a day than we do another human face. Shifts like this spur the anxiety, panic and doom that these difficult times can motivate. Not surprisingly, we are seeing signs of an increasing desire to live life unplugged from the maddening assault of electronics. Likewise, in the realm of cooking, many are turning from processed or semi-prepared food to the Slow Food movement and the heralding of simple pleasures, such as The Whoopie Pie.⁴ These are the kinds of pleasures that America Eats! celebrates.

The book eloquently teaches us how people once used food to welcome strangers to their communities, help neighbors find work, and provide ways for the poorest in their communities to receive nourishment, with dignity, alongside the wealthiest. It brings readers into a simpler time when farm families lent a hand to neighbors on threshing day, with their only payment being a feast prepared by the grateful family that received the benefits of their hard labor.

These food gatherings illustrate the role that food played as the salad bowl of cultures that comprise the United States created networks of community support and social interdependence. They also show the ways in which breaking bread functioned as a vehicle for achieving community.

The variety of the writers and the forms in which they wrote make reading the original accounts feel fresh and varied. Some are simple lists of the menus and attendees of a gathering. Others take the form of short stories, where we can dress ourselves in the time period, smelling and tasting the culinary delights and experiencing the pain and joy of everyday life during the Depression. They are as diverse as a booya picnic in Minnesota, a pig foot supper in Virginia, a political barbecue in Mississippi, chuck wagon suppers in Texas, the funeral cry feast of the Choctaw Indians in Oklahoma and wild game dinners in Oregon.

Many of the accounts do not have an idyllic tone or setting. To Willard’s credit, she does not clean up the racial slurs or political incorrectness in the original writings, allowing them to provide crisper views of life in a nation more blatantly divided by racial and class barriers.

These food-related gatherings and events show us how deeply the social fabric of our United States has changed. We vicariously peer into the life of African-American families that attended the Big Quarterly in Wilmington, Delaware. The event preserved the feasting and, more importantly, the gathering of this community. The Quarterly began in the early 1800s when it was the “custom of slave owners in Delaware and nearby states to allow slaves to have a day of freedom quarterly to worship or do as they pleased, and many slaves were provided with carts and ox teams to make the trip to a common gathering place.”⁵

Willard describes the disconnect that has increased as the years have passed since the heyday of the Big Quarterly. Even within the African-American community, there have been factions that have sought to dissolve the Quarterly. Police and city officials in the 1960s accused the Quarterly of being a stronghold of the Black Power movement. Willard quotes a local clergy, Bishop Jarman, speaking about the August Quarterly (as it is now known), “You can tell what a culture’s values are when you look at their celebrations and the August Quarterly was the foundation of the building of our culture. We remember how our forebears not only persevered, but made the best of a worse situation than any of us will know.”⁶

An account from Nebraska describes a Fun Feed as “merely events of hilarity for local people who bring a covered dish or two into a local meeting place and listen to take-offs and stunts. There is very little seriousness injected into the program…” Another account says of the Fun Feed, “Into the towns the country people come. They bring their food. The ‘covered dish’ is plentiful. No one goes home hungry.”⁷

As she did her modern-day searching, Willard hoped to find Fun Feeds still going strong. Although, she was not able to find contemporary events that paralleled them, she reflected on their pertinence to our current situation. She writes that it was

an event where all kinds of people in a community, people who wouldn’t in general have much social interaction with one another, got together to amuse themselves for the simple reason that there was nothing else to do. That, and they were all in the same boat, in regard to a situation such as the Depression, and thus the corollary need for a few laughs to muddle through.⁸

America Eats! also inspires us to remember the sensory pleasures of baking one’s own bread, canning jams of sweet summer berries or corn fresh from the cob. The descriptions of preparing animals and fowl on a farm (or from one’s one backyard), reestablish the origins of that steak or chicken breast we are accustomed to selecting from a plastic-wrapped Styrofoam tray in a cooled case in the supermarket. Being reminded of the origins of our foods should make us more aware of what we put in our mouths, how we nourish our families and friends, and the agriculture industry and local farms that support our national food supply.

We can’t always control the forces that affect our retirement plans, investments or even job security, but we can plant a garden (on a windowsill or a corner of a yard) whose harvest we can share with our families, neighborhoods, and communities. Even the new family in the White House has planted one!⁹ Whether through growing or raising our own food, or thinking creatively about the basic staples we get at the local mega-market, we can model the Lord’s table through our preparations and our gatherings.

Let’s set an example to our neighbors and welcome them to share our “bounty” in the spirit of America Eats! May we respond to our common struggles with mutual support and community in these times that surely demand a Samaritan’s heart.

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¹ Pat Willard, America Eats! (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).
² Ibid., 3.
³ Ibid., 4.
⁴ Micheline Maynard, “Whoopie! Cookie, Pie or Cake, It’s Having Its Moment,” nytimes.com, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/dining/18whoop.html?_r=1&ref=dining. <3.24.2009>
⁵ Willard, America Eats, 158.
⁶ Ibid., 162.
⁷ Ibid., 210–211.
⁸ Ibid., 211.
⁹ Marian Burros, “Obamas to Plant Vegetable Garden at White House,” nytimes.com, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/dining/20garden.html?sq=white%20house%20garden&st=cse&adxnnl=1&scp=2&adxnnlx=1237910691-Y1JAW3rmSPuZuMi2II34UQ. <3.24.2009>

Jean Simmons directs marketing, web layout and culinary services for The Gospel & Culture Project.