Ever wonder where the food on your plate came from? That’s the question Toni Gilpin asks the 27 undergraduate students enrolled in her new food history class, Food, Diets and Cultures, now in session at Lake Forest College.
She wants them to understand that the French fry once lived as a potato on a Midwestern farm and to see how cans of soda pop depend on corn, which provides the syrup to make it sweet.
“I am interested in finding ways to make these connections, to get people just to recognize that all our consumer goods have costs,” said Gilpin, a part-time lecturer for the college. “I want my students to think about that as they eat their lunch.”
Food is a great way to frame history, she said, because “it’s one of those things that everyone can talk about.”
This realization came to her last year while organizing a potluck dinner at Lincolnwood Elementary School in Evanston, where her two daughters attend. The point of the potluck was to attract parents and kids who didn’t usually participate in school events. The turnout was fantastic, which got her wheels turning.
“As a historian, I began to think about how food draws people together,” Gilpin said. “But food is also something we know so little about, where it comes from and how it’s produced.”
Gilpin’s musings coincided with a call from Michael Ebner, the chairman of the history department at Lake Forest College, who wanted ideas for a new class. Ebner loved Gilpin’s idea for a food history class, which he said falls in line with other department offerings that address students’ contemporary interests such as the History of Sport, Popular Music and American Society, and American Cities courses.
A first for food
“Food, Diets and Cultures” is the first food history class offered by the college and also a first for the professor, who is a labor historian by training.
In the course of her research, Gilpin discovered that food history is so immense that “you could go in a million different directions.” To keep the scope manageable, Gilpin focused on the Americas, from pre-Columbian times to the present.
The required reading includes Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation,” a recent best-seller about fast-food industry, and Betty Fussell’s “The Story of Corn,” which attempts to tell the whole story of the staple crop, from Central and South American myths to society’s current dependence on corn as a food and industrial material.
Other readings include “Sweetness and Power,” by Sidney Mintz, about the introduction of sugar into the European diet; “Dust Bowl,” by Donald Worster, which theorizes that the dust storms of the 1930s were a manmade ecological disaster; and “Fasting Girls,” by Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a history of anorexia nervosa.
Gilpin also is assigning some novel projects. At the beginning of the semester, she assigned students to write a food memoir, in the tradition of Marcel Proust’s trip down memory lane triggered by his fictional character’s famous nibbling of the madeleine, a small French cake shaped like a scallop shell, in “Remembrance of Things Past.”
Next, she asked them to keep a food diary (“They discovered they eat too much candy and not enough variety,” she reports). She had students take a survey of foods-I-have-eaten (“Everyone has tried bagels and all but one likes them”).
She wanted them to sample a cuisine they’ve never tried before at an ethnic restaurant in Chicago and “assume the mantle” of a food critic, writing up a review as homework.
Multifaceted field trip
In February, Gilpin took her students on a field trip to a farm in Glenview, the Chicago Board of Trade and Berghoff restaurant in the Loop. Fourteen students showed up at the Wagner Farm, an 18-acre former dairy farm now owned and operated by the Glenview Park District as a kind of museum.
Standing in the wood-shingled barn, program coordinator Dee Hilbert explained to the students that field corn, grown to feed livestock, would have been shucked by hand on a small farm such as this one and then added to pig slop. But some of the corn might have fed the family, too, in the form of hominy or grits, after the kernels had soaked in caustic lye water to remove their tough skins.
She led the group into the middle of a field to inspect a whorl of bundled corn stalks. “The deer have gotten to this one,” Hilbert said, turning over a desiccated cob that had been picked clean, underscoring the urgency of harvesting crops at the right time.
The students, four of whom had never been to a farm before, listened attentively and stamped their feet to keep warm. Standing within earshot of the clucking and flapping from the chicken coop, Hilbert told the students that the farm once spanned 150 acres, a typical size for a 19th Century sustenance farm on the prairie.
“This is a beautiful picture of what Illinois looked like 100 years ago,” she said.
The next stop was the Chicago Board of Trade, the grain futures exchange. While standing at the corner of LaSalle Street and Jackson Boulevard, Gilpin told her students how the Board of Trade evolved from a private consortium of grain sellers in 1848 to the dizzying electronic marketplace it is today. She pointed to the statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, which is mounted at the crown of the building.
“It’s far away but you can see that she has a sheaf of wheat on one side and a sack of corn on the other,” Gilpin told her students, faces upturned. Inside the hulking tower, mesh-jacketed traders standing in pits moved grain, using just hand signals, from farms to the food producers of the world, resulting in as many as 400,000 contracts a day. The pits are where “grain becomes money,” Gilpin said.
On the way through the Art Deco lobby, Gilpin pointed out the how the architect had cleverly incorporated a wheat motif in the ironwork amid the black and cream marble.
“It’s all about merging the city with the land,” she said to the students.
The final destination was The Berghoff Restaurant. Gilpin chose the German restaurant, founded in 1898, because it is the only 19th Century restaurant left in Chicago. At the turn of the century, the restaurant served traditional German fare to the city’s office workers and, until 1969, featured an “all male” stand-up bar where in the early days men ate free sandwiches and drank nickel beer.
“Having social places to convene is part of what makes a city,” said Gilpin, who ordered wiener schnitzel and the restaurant’s famous creamed spinach. Lunch, as they say, is served.
