Chinese Laundry Belts

Food in American Literature

The months between the cherries and peaches

Horns of plenty that are full of spills

Fruits red and purple, dark, black-flowered;

Then the fields by the rich and the beaches of the frozen river

We'll trample bright persimmons, while you kill

Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and white back.

Elinor-Wylie1

I ate another apple pie and ice cream, it's practically all I eat it all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.

-Jack Kerouac2

In October 1998, Jiao Tong, the literary editor of China Times, Taipei, Taiwan, invited me to write an essay on American food in American literature for presentation at the First International Conference on Food and literature that was held in Taipei in May 1999. I thought I would find many books of secondary sources on this subject. After extensive research of the net and communications with several professors of American literature at the University in the United States and Canada, I was very surprised to find no book release on the subject. Not only was there no book on this subject there was also no single article that directly addressed my issue. The absence of secondary sources, explains why most of the references in this essay are primary sources. The limitations of time and space to write this also explain why I limited my study of American literature, novels, short stories and poetry. I tried to make a representative selection among the novelists, poets and novelists including the authors of almost two hundred years of American literature, both sexes and a variety of ethnic groups. Because there are so many versions of primary works that I cite, I have limited citations to the author's name, book title and an inner part, such as worms, chapter, or the article and omitted the page numbers of the particular versions that I used. lesser known works, collections and anthologies receive standard citation format.

To bring order to this vast quantity of material, I created three themes around which I can build what I find American food in American literature: continuity and discontinuity, purity and impurity, and the abundance and scarcity. These three themes provide several important truths about the American experience in time to appear as the concerns of its authors as well. For example, major changes undergone by the land and indigenous peoples were accompanied by attachments, deep and sustainable European food habits. In addition, the extraordinary abundance of natural resources and artificial wealth in America has long coexisted with the land devastated and destitution. The greatest American writers like Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck, have repeatedly recognized and sanctioned these two extremes in their plots and characters just as they are enrolled in daily life and personalities of Americans.

As part of introduction to my presentation, I would like to give some possible explanations for the lack of secondary sources. First, I think the most famous and popular American foods, like pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers and ice are derived from European food. The pizza came from Italy. The hot dog is a version of the German sausage. Hamburgers are reformed meatballs with bread that is joined as old as civilization itself farming. And the ice cream also has its counterparts in the kitchen of European nations. So the first reason for the lack of secondary sources is that most American foo.