“How Unripe We Are”

Abstract

This article demonstrates the political and cultural consequences of food production as they played out during the Revolutionary era. The Seven Years' War and the Revolutionary War itself demonstrated that access to food was inseparable from access to freedom. After delineating this political education, the article goes on to show how Americans drew heavily on a specific intellectual construction of food in order to distinguish themselves from what they were coming to condemn as European luxury, sloth, and indulgence. In the process, their constructions—if European accounts are to be believed—gradually came to fruition as Americans began to highlight the virtues of a “frontier” style of cooking and eating that emphasized rusticity and practicality.