SOCL 4252: Food in American History and Culture

The food biography of Chicago is a story of not just culture, economics, and innovation, but also a history of regulation and regulators, as they protected Chicago's food supply and built Chicago into a city where people not only come to eat, but where locals rely on the availability of safe food and water. With vivid details and stories of local restaurants and food, Block and Rosing reveal Chicago to be one of the foremost eating destinations in the country.

Kansas City: A Food Biography explores in fascinating detail how a frontier town on the edge of wilderness grew into a major metropolis, one famous for not only great cuisine but for a crossroads hospitality that continues to define it. Kansas City: A Food Biography also explores how politics, race, culture, gender, immigration, and art have forged the city's most iconic dishes, from chili and steak to fried chicken and barbecue.

Blending history with expert reportage, author Cynthia Clampitt traces the disparate threads that have woven corn into the fabric of our diet, politics, economy, science, and cuisine. At the same time she explores its future as a source of energy and the foundation of seemingly limitless green technologies. The result is a bourbon-to-biofuels portrait of the astonishing plant that sustains the world.

Margaret Walsh's pioneering study traces the course of that development, shedding light on an unexamined aspect of America's economic history. Using a diverse array of primary materials to document the rise of this important early industry, the predecessor and in many ways the precursor of the great industrial complex that still dominates today's midwestern economy.

In Vikings in the Attic, Eric Dregni tracks down and explores the significant--and quite often bizarre--historic sites, tales, and traditions of Scandinavia's peculiar colony in the Midwest.