Talk:Cuisine of Antebellum America

This article is meant to follow and compliment that on The Cuisine of the Thirteen Colonies. It also begins to fill a gap left in the article on American Cuisine, which touches on the colonial and revolutionary period and then on the 20th century with nothing in between. An abbreviated overview and a link still need to be added to that article. Aaron.Sullivan (talk) 13:19, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

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Moving this here until a better article is found for it:

The United States quickly established themselves as differing in their eating habits from Europe. American mannerisms were viewed by foreign travelers as crude and barbaric.

Writer James Fenimore Cooper noted that "Americans are the grossest feeders of any civilized nation... Their food is heavy, coarse, ill-prepared, and indigestible... There is not, perhaps on the face of the globe, the same number of people among whom the good things of the earth are so much abused, or ignorantly wasted, as among the people of the United States." One French tourist wrote in 1804 that Americans "swallow almost without chewing". Another, Constantin Volney, argued that Americans’ habits "ruined the Yankee stomach, destroyed the teeth, and extinguished health". An Englishman complained that even members of Congress "plunged into their mouths enormous wedges of meat and pounds of vegetables, perched on the ends of their knives."

Andrew Barr argued that Americans' haste while eating was based on the abundance of food available, which led to their failure to appreciate their meals.

Spudlace (talk) 05:15, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

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