Food Bloggers of 1940

(NYTBR) - ... Writers fanned out across the republic to document — via field reports, essays, stories, poems, recipes and interviews — what academics have taken to calling “foodways.” Among the topics covered were New York soda-luncheonette slang, Georgia possum cookery, Minnesota lutefisk, geoduck clams in Washington State, Montana’s fried beaver tail, Colorado food superstitions (“You will receive mail from the direction in which your pie is pointing, when it is set down at your place at the table”), a Choctaw “funeral cry” feast and “a Los Angeles sandwich called a taco.” Throughout 1940 and 1941, raw copy flowed into Washington, D.C., where it was farmed out to rewriters — including Nelson Algren — for shaping into book form. Then came Pearl Harbor. The Federal Writers’ Project — “one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state,” as W. H. Auden described it — morphed into the Writers Unit of the War Services, and “America Eats” went down as a war casualty. Continued

Photo: "Serving up the barbeque at the Pie Town, New Mexico, Fair," Octorber 1940, Russel Lee (FSA/OWI/LOC).