A Square Meal A Culinary History of the Great Depression

Jane Ziegelman, Andrew Coe

eBook - 2016

James Beard Foundation Book Award WinnerFrom the author of the acclaimed 97 Orchard and her husband, a culinary historian, an in-depth exploration of the greatest food crisis the nation has ever faced—the Great Depression—and how it transformed America’s culinary culture.The decade-long Great Depression, a period of shifts in the country’s political and social landscape, forever changed the way America eats. Before 1929, America’s relationship with food was defined by abundance. But the collapse of the economy, in both urban and rural America, left a quarter of all Americans out of work and undernourished—shattering long-held assumptions about the limitlessness of the national larder.In 1933, as women struggled to feed their fam...ilies, President Roosevelt reversed long-standing biases toward government-sponsored “food charity.” For the first time in American history, the federal government... more