Fired Up

JOANNE: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Backstory.. Welcome to BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

NATHAN: I’m Nathan Connolly.

JOANNE: And I’m Joanne Freeman. We’re going to spend the next hour talking about food. And since we’re a history show, let’s start things off in the 18th century with a fiery newspaper essay written by Benjamin Franklin. Now, Ben Franklin had strong opinions about almost everything, including what Americans ate.

KATHARINA: OK let me see that I can do my best Ben Franklin impersonation here.

JOANNE: This is historian Katharina Vestar. She says that in his essay, Franklin rushed to the defense of an American food that a British writer had mocked.

KATHARINA: Benjamin Franklin with a German accent. OK, here we go.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Pray let me, an American, inform the gentleman who seems ignorant of the matter that Indian corn, take it for all in all, is one of the most agreeable and wholesome grains in the world.

JOANNE: That’s right, corn.

NATHAN: That it’s green leaves roasted are a delicacy beyond expression. That samp, hominy, succotash, and [INAUDIBLE] made of it are so pleasing varieties. And that Johnny or hoecake, hot from the fire is better than a Yorkshire muffin.

BRIAN: Samp, hominy, [INAUDIBLE]?

KATHARINA: Samp, hominy, succotash, and [INAUDIBLE] are all corn-based dishes.

BRIAN: And why is Ben Franklin defending their honor?

JOANNE: Well by 1766, when Franklin wrote this piece, Great Britain’s relationship with its American colonies had started to fracture. The English levied taxes that Americans basically didn’t want to pay. Colonists responded by trying to organize boycotts of British goods. It was in this context that Franklin came across the offending item in the British press.

KATHARINA: Claiming that the English don’t have to be afraid of a boycott staged by the American colonies because to eat their indigestible corn mush for breakfast, they need English tea to swallow it down.

NATHAN: What? That’s cold.

JOANNE: This infuriated Franklin, so he fought back with his pen. Vestar says the Europeans often mock the way that American colonists ate.

KATHARINA: Their food habits, their etiquette, their table manners.

JOANNE: But going after corn was a bridge too far. Indian corn, as Franklin called it, was indigenous to the American continent and it was a staple of the colonists’ diets.

NATHAN: And who could possibly not like corn?

BRIAN: Yeah, what’s with those English?

KATHARINA: In Europe, corn was considered to be animal fodder or food to feed the very poor.

JOANNE: The fact that it was Indian corn was also part of the problem in European eyes.

KATHARINA: And so, it was often confronted with being savage. And so if you ate a food that was indigenous and it was connoted for savagery, the idea was that it would turn you a savage yourself.

JOANNE: Franklin turned these ideas on their head and offered a challenge of his own.

KATHARINA: Benjamin Franklin answers, defending American food, but also making a political point at the same time. All this corn eating that the Americans do in different regions is something that connects them, so there is something that unites the colonies. That is, of course, not only corn, but it’s also political agency that basically uses food as a metaphor to bring this point home.

JOANNE: After the Revolution, Vestar says corn became the signature food of the new nation, enjoyed by rich and poor alike.

KATHARINA: Embracing corn also meant that Americans distanced themselves from their European heritage and embraced a New World Heritage. And for this, they heavily appropriated Native American culture. It’s ironic after the European settlers in the New World have committed genocide, but there is also a late recognition that they also owe to the New World their culture.