A Toast

So it seems to me that cake mixes are really about American marketing. It triumphs. Speaking of which, wasn’t your dad in marketing, Joanne?

JOANNE: Yes, indeed. My dad was a market researcher who worked for a while for General Foods. And we would always get the food that was trying to be marketed. But, of course, for us to be able to give as kids, the Freeman kids, honest feedback about the food like any other sort of focus group, we would get like three boxes of, say, a snack food. And one would be marked A and one would be marked B and one would be marked C.

And our cupboards were full of things with white wrappers and letters on them. But we would have to taste the different A, B, and C snack food, and then sort of come up with what we thought was how did it taste to us, what did it make us think about, kind of like the Freedman Family Focus Group. And then my father would absorb that kind of stuff. And then somehow, it would get twisted around and end up being marketed as this spontaneous expression of how wonderful this food is, it’ll make you feel x. It’ll make you feel y.

NATHAN: So your flair for language, then, came from having to taste test everything under your dad’s watch. No, but It’s an amazing example though, too, of the way in which these big questions about identity and nation end up coming back to like the family breakfast, lunch, and dinner table. You know?

JOANNE: Right.

NATHAN: For me coming up, I mean, having cereal in the morning on Saturday while watching cartoons seemed like a quintessential American thing to do. But my Jamaican grandmother, you know, coming from a British background, just wanted to have tea and something very different, right, in the morning. So that was a kind of culture clash, I guess one could say, in my house.

BRIAN: And I was just amazed by the American mainstreaming of the bagel. I mean today, you, in Washington D.C. or even in small towns, you’d be hard-pressed to not find a bagel chain.

NATHAN: Right.

BRIAN: You know when I was a kid, the bagel was a pretty exotic food and you had to go to the delicatessen in certain neighborhoods, certainly to get a good bagel. And I think the embrace by a broad cross-section of Americans of any ethnic food certainly is a marker of having arrived. I mean, I am just blown away by the variety of Mexican food that all Americans consume as a regular part of their diet, or virtually all. And, of course, the ultimate confirmation is the chain. The Taco Bell, right? You really made it, right? An entire international corporate chain built around an ethnic food that might have been very hard to find in a lot of places in America, really just 50 years ago.

NATHAN: Right. And I recall in South Florida where there’s a huge number of West Indian groceries and obviously a large West Indian population, that the arrival of Bahama Breeze, which was this kind of mainstream corporate take on West Indian food that you would find, you know, in the parking lot of a giant shopping mall, that that didn’t really feel like you had made it, right? That it felt like an adulteration of really good kind of down home food.

And certainly wasn’t owned by Caribbean people, just based on what they had done with the menu. So it’s a fraught relationship, I would say, where on one level, it’s nice to believe that you can have a Taco Bell, a KFC, and a Bahama Breeze on the same stretch. And that means you are now a part of the main stream, but it also means you’ve lost a whole lot in terms of the actual stuff that goes into the original take on some of this food.

JOANNE: Well, right. And then, you’re teaching people that that version of it is the it. Right, that what you get at a Taco Bell is, that is the definition for many Americans of what a taco really is.

NATHAN: And it’s not.

BRIAN: Right.

JOANNE: Well, and then to close the circle, right? So then you have whatever the chain is that has created the sort of Americanized version of some other kind of food. And then that gets exported from America to overseas, and then we teach them that that’s what a taco is, too.

NATHAN: Tastes like America. That’s going to do it for today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your burning history questions. We know you have some. You’ll find this at backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at backstoryradio. And feel free to review the new show in the iTunes store. Whatever you decide to do, don’t be a stranger.

JOANNE: This episode of BackStory was produced by Bridget McCarthy, Nina Earnest, Emily Gadek, and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Millner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Julie Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Sequoia [? Carillo, ?] Robin Blue, Angelie [? Bishash, ?] Emma Greg, Courtney [? Spania, ?] and Aaron [? Tealane. ?] Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketsa, Podington Bear, and Jazzhar. Special thanks this week to John Lohmann of the Virginia Folklife Program. And thanks as always to the Johns Hopkins University Studio in Baltimore.

BRIAN: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the provost’s office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs.

Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.