跨学科历史杂志, xxxix:3 (冬天, 2009), 323–348.
THE GASTRODYNAMICS OF DISPLACEMENT
Knut Oyangen
The Gastrodynamics of Displacement: Place-
Making and Gustatory Identity in the Immigrants’
Midwest Between 1830 和 1920, millions of Europeans ar-
rived on the prairies and plains of the rural Midwest. Scholars tend
to stress the surprising cultural continuity in the lives of these men
and women, but immigrants were, 实际上, forced to adapt to
changing circumstances from the moment when they left their old
homes. The study of immigrant food and foodways exempliªes
this transition and exposes the social, 经济的, and environmen-
tal restraints on the transplantation of culture. Immigrants often
discussed the signiªcance of eating (and drinking) differently in
their writings, and in recent years, historians have begun to take an
interest in this aspect of the immigrant experience. This article
provides a theoretical and historical introduction to the social, psy-
乔逻辑的, and symbolic meaning of food, with special emphasis
on the issues raised by food and foodways in an immigrant con-
文本. It draws from contributions by psychologists, sociologists,
and anthropologists, as well as the ªndings of historians, devising a
framework that can be used to interpret the food stories that im-
migrants told in their letters, diaries, and memoirs.
The act of eating joins together universal, 社会的, and individ-
ual aspects of human existence. All humans must eat; all humans
follow certain group norms for eating; and every human fulªlls the
needs of an individual organism by ingesting food. 根据
Simmel, eating is a uniquely individualistic activity: Any person
can read what another has read or see what another has seen, 但
not eat what another has eaten. But as Simmel also pointed out,
this singular aspect is precisely what makes eating all the more sus-
ceptible to social regulation. Incorporation, the act of allowing
food into the body, potentially involves an anxious encounter be-
tween self and world, or the known and the unknown. The rules
of a food system relieve this anxiety; they sanction behavior by
Knut Oyangen is Researcher, Center for Business History and the Department of Innovation
and Economic Organization, Norwegian School of Management.
© 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
历史, Inc.
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324 | KNUT OYANGEN
providing nature with the imprint of culture. Biology determines
that people must eat; culture regulates what and how they eat.1
The tension between individual needs and cultural impera-
tives inherent in any food event makes the study of immigrants’
experiences with food particularly intriguing. A newly arrived im-
migrant was immediately faced with unfamiliar opportunities and
restraints in the realm of food. Due to the sheer complexity of any
food system—including the availability of foodstuffs, the proper
equipment and skills needed to prepare food “correctly,” and the
accepted circumstances of eating—immigrants had to adapt or ad-
just in some way to new culinary realities. Since food habits have
meaning only in relation to a sociocultural totality, preparing and
consuming the same foods in a new context is as much an act of
创新, assertion, and transformation as it is an act of repro-
ducing tradition. 的确, what passed for the unconscious repro-
duction of tradition was often a conscious performance of identity.
To examine individual immigrants’ perceptions, conceptions, 和
emotional responses to food and food-related events that collided
with prior experience and preconceived notions is therefore an in-
tegral part of analyzing immigrants’ adaptive behavior.2
Historians have long studied the production, 加工, 和
preparation of food from the perspectives of economic history, 这-
bor history, and women’s history. 最近几年, they have begun
to take an interest in the consumption of food as well. Works by
1 Georg Simmel (反式. Michael Symons), “The Sociology of the Meal [1910],” Food and
Foodways, V (1994), 345–350; Claude Fischler, “Food, 自己, and Identity,” Social Science Infor-
运动, XXVII (1988), 275–292.
2
Simone Cinotto, “Leonardo Covello, the Covello Papers, and the History of Eating
Habits among Italian Immigrants in New York,” Journal of American History, XCI (2004), 497–
521; Tracy Poe, “The Labour and Leisure of Food Production as a Mode of Ethnic Identity
Building among Italians in Chicago, 1890–1940,” Rethinking History, V (2001), 131–148;
Euridice Charon Cordona, “Re-Encountering Cuban Tastes in Australia,” Australian Journal
of Anthropology, XV (2004), 40–53; Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, 爱尔兰语, and Jew-
ish Foodways in the Age of Migration (剑桥, 大量的。, 2001); 中号. S. A. 饶, “保守主义
and Change in Food Habits among the Migrants in India: A Study in Gastrodynamics,“ 在
右. S. Khare and idem (编辑。), Food, 社会, 与文化: Aspects in South Asian Food Systems
(达勒姆, 1986), 121–140; Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, “介绍,” in idem
(编辑。), Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity
(Knoxville, 1984), 3–15; Susan Kalcik, “Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Perfor-
mance of Identity,” in ibid., 37–65; Mary Douglas, In the Active Voice (波士顿, 1982), 100–101;
Eugene N. 安德森, Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture (纽约, 2005);
Krishnendu Ray, The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households (Phil-
adelphia, 2004); Jitsuichi Masuoka, “Changing Food Habits of the Japanese in Hawaii,” Amer-
社会学评论, X (1945), 759–765.
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 325
Levenstein, Gabaccia, and Diner have established American food
history as a more prominent ªeld of study. 然而, there remains a
discrepancy between the signiªcance that immigrants attributed to
food and the attention that immigration historians have paid to it.3
Food “identiªes and symbolizes who we are,” is “imbued
with meaning,” and “mediates body and mind.” Ultimately our
foodways constitute “a system of communication, a body of im-
年龄, a protocol of usages, 情况, and behavior.” Thus, 超过
the mere biological notion of feeding, food and food habits occa-
sion some of the ways in which people understand themselves,
identify with others, and communicate their desires, 信仰, 和
claims to status. Food places individuals in time, 空间, 和社会的
hierarchies. But to conªne the study of food to the analysis of
symbols and meanings is impossible. What is needed is an “inte-
grative” approach that recognizes both the biological and the so-
cial aspects of eating.4
Psychologists have taken the ªrst step toward understanding
the social implications of biology as it relates to food. Early schol-
ars focused on physiological explanations, positing a homeostasis
theory in which the body seeks to maintain a stable state based on
hunger and satiety cues. 最终, 然而, it became clear that
the physiological responses of both animals and humans depend
on the prior experiences of each individual. 换句话说, eating
is a learned and a learning process. Experiments have demon-
strated that animals learn food preferences and feeding behavior
from conspeciªcs in a variety of ways; humans are not fundamen-
tally different in this regard. Notwithstanding the mediating role
of genetic predisposition, children learn to enjoy foods served in
positive contexts and dislike foods with negative social connota-
3 Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (新的
约克, 1988); idem, Paradox of Plenty: The Social History of Eating in Modern America (纽约,
1993); Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans
(剑桥, 大量的。, 1998); Diner, Hungering for America.
4 Millie Rahn, “Laying a Place at the Table: Creating Public Foodways Models from
Scratch,” Journal of American Folklore, CXIX (2006), 33; Paul Rozin, “Sociocultural Inºuences
on Human Food Selection,” in Elizabeth D. Capaldi (编辑。), Why We Eat What We Eat: 这
Psychology of Eating (华盛顿, D. C。, 1996), 235; Khare and Rao, “介绍,” in idem
(编辑。), Food, 社会, 与文化, 6; Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contem-
porary Food Consumption [1961],” in Elborg Forster and Robert Forster (编辑。), European Diet
from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times (纽约, 1975), 50; Fischler, “Food, 自己, and Identity,”
275–277.
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326 | KNUT OYANGEN
系统蒸发散. Even seemingly “natural” feelings of disgust and repulsion
are culturally conditioned to some extent.5
But the process of food learning is premised on the biological
fact of what psychologists call “the omnivore’s paradox.” Human
beings are omnivore-generalists, meaning that the number of their
potential foods is high. 因此, they are likely to exhibit neophilia,
the persistent desire to add new foods to the culinary repertoire.
然而, they also suffer from neophobia, a reluctance or skepti-
cism toward new foods—a trait shared by rats, their fellow omni-
vores, who in experiments use sophisticated strategies to deal with
the danger of toxicity. In the case of human beings, culturally
deªned questions of acceptability come into play as well. 期间
朝鲜战争, some American prisoners of war died of malnu-
trition not because they were fed too little but because they re-
fused to eat unfamiliar foods. 相似地, although early European
colonists’ beneªted from American Indian foodways, they often
suffered hunger and privation because they failed to identify po-
tential aliments as food. In the case of immigrants more generally,
the signiªcance of food learning and the ambiguity toward new
foods inherent in omnivore psychology reverses an old adage. 所以
far as food is concerned, “familiarity breeds liking rather than con-
tempt.” Thus, social and spatial displacement inescapably poses a
potential conºict between an altered gastronomical reality and the
inertia of learned food habits.6
The psychological concepts of food learning and the omni-
5 Capaldi, “介绍,” in idem (编辑。), Why We Eat What We Eat, 3–9; idem, “Condi-
tioned Food Preferences,” in ibid., 53–80; L. L. Birch and J. A. Fisher, “The Role of Experi-
ence in the Development of Children’s Eating Behavior,” in ibid., 130; Rozin, “Sociocultural
Inºuences on Human Food Selection,” 233–263; Bennett G. Galef, 小。, “Social Inºuences on
Food Preference and Feeding Behaviors of Vertebrates,” in Capaldi (编辑。), Why We Eat What
We Eat, 207–231; Bernard Lyman, A Psychology of Food: More than a Matter of Taste (新的
约克, 1989); Alexandra W. Logue, The Psychology of Eating and Drinking: 一个介绍 (新的
约克, 1991; orig. 酒吧. 1986).
6 Lyman, Psychology of Food, 24; J. A. Mennella and G. K. Beauchamp, “The Early Devel-
opment of Human Flavor Preferences,” in Capaldi (编辑。), Why We Eat What We Eat, 103–104;
Birch and Fisher, “Role of Experience,” 131, Rozin, “Sociocultural Inºuences,” 237; Logue,
Psychology of Eating and Drinking, 98–111; Fischler, “Food, 自己, and Identity,” 277–278;
Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 七, 4; Mark McWilliams, “Distant Tables: Food and the
in Early America,” Early American Literature, XXXVIII (2003), 365–366; 艾伦
Novel
Beardsworth and Teresa Keil, Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Soci-
埃蒂 (纽约, 1997), 51–52; Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat, 19–20. See also Stephen
Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the
展示 (纽约, 1985), 1–5.
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 327
vore’s paradox can be supplemented by insights from sociology
and anthropology. Simmel clearly recognized the social character
of eating and the social implications of the various “rules” that
structure a meal. Since eating has the potential of being a danger-
ously individualistic, egotistical affair, rules for appropriate timing,
命令, and gesture are necessary to impress the stamp of culture
upon each food event. Simmel argued that conversation is neces-
sary to lift the meal to the highest aesthetic order, because social
interaction disguises the bodily need for sustenance as the founda-
tion of eating. 相似地, the intervention of knife and fork be-
tween food and mouth creates a digniªed distance between nature
and civilization.7
The most ambitious attempt to understand how people relate
to food and how ideas about food reveal truths about society is
Levi-Strauss’ massive Mythology trilogy. In the context of Levi-
Strauss’ structuralism, the human mind is a “thing among things,”
deªned by “constraining structures” that unconsciously manifest
themselves through all of the cultural variations observed in hu-
man societies. Levi-Strauss was greatly inºuenced by structural
语言学, which emphasized the unconscious over the conscious
and the relationship between terms rather than the qualities of the
terms as such. He argued that other social phenomena are “of the
same type” as linguistic phenomena—that is, they are based on
general but implicit (unconscious) laws expressed in symbolic sys-
tems.8
Based on his studies of native myths in the Americas, 列维-
Strauss concluded that food and cooking have a special signiª-
cance among all social phenomena. Cooking, “a truly universal
form of human activity” (and thus similar to language), evinces
structural oppositions that can be used to describe human attrib-
utes in general. Such oppositions exist, 例如, in the “culi-
nary triangle” between the raw, which is natural and “unmarked,”
the cooked, which is the product of a cultural transformation, 和
the rotted, which is the product of a natural transformation. 然而,
Simmel, “Sociology of the Meal.”
7
8 Claude Levi-Strauss (反式. J. Weightman and D. Weightman), The Raw and the Cooked
(纽约, 1967; orig. 酒吧 1964), 10; idem (反式. Weightman and Weightman), From Honey
to Ashes (纽约, 1973; orig. 酒吧. 1966); idem (反式. Weightman and Weightman), 这
Origin of Table Manners (纽约, 1978; orig. 酒吧. 1968); idem (反式. C. Jacobsen and B. G.
Schoepf ), Structural Anthropology (纽约, 1963; orig. 酒吧. 1958), 34.
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328 | KNUT OYANGEN
as Levi-Strauss admitted, the speciªc interpretations of these cate-
gories vary from culture to culture, creating “concrete” triangles
that somehow relate to the triangle in the abstract. Through cook-
英, a society “unconsciously translates its structure” or reveals its
contradictions.9
Whereas Simmel had described the normative structuring of a
meal in concrete terms and with special reference to his own time,
地方, 和班级, Levi-Strauss cast a wider net and sought to show
that all people think about food in related ways (as a kind of lan-
规格) and that the symbolism of food reveals the underlying
structures of society (哪个, although variable, reºect the deep
structures of the human mind). Both emphasized the imposition
of culture upon natural processes through culturally deªned rules.
一般来说, people follow these rules unconsciously, with no ex-
plicit analysis of their meanings; as products of socialization, 他们
form part of the individual’s habitus.
Bourdieu’s landmark work, Distinction, analyzed the relation-
ship between taste and class structures in France. 根据
Bourdieu, the food habits of working-class people were funda-
mentally different from middle-class food culture. Whereas man-
ual workers ate and drank together, consuming ample amounts of
hearty foods in a convivial atmosphere, members of the bourgeoi-
sie spent less of their money on food and more on health, 美丽,
and fashion. 因此, the large body, brute manners, and “temporal
immanentism” of workingmen contrasted with the delicate bod-
ies and deferred gratiªcation of bureaucrats or school teachers.
简而言之, workers’ food habits emphasized being and doing in
the here and now, whereas the bourgeoisie escaped into forms,
appearances, and better futures (as they did in other aesthetic
ªelds).10
Food items become cultural items through the workings of a
set of rules (a language or grammar) that are unconsciously
adopted by individuals within a physical and social space. Food
roles and behavior, 反过来, reºect the social structure of a society
9 Levi-Strauss, “The Culinary Triangle,” in Carole Counihan and Panny Van Esterik (编辑。),
Food and Culture: A Reader (纽约, 1997), 28; idem, The Raw and the Cooked, 164; idem,
Origins of Table Manners, 478–495. For a critique of Levi-Strauss, see Jack Goody, Cooking,
Cuisine, and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (纽约, 1982), 17–29.
10 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (剑桥, 大量的。,
1984), 179–201.
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 329
and the differences within it. The question arises, How does this
process affect the gastrodynamics of migration? 换句话说,
what is the dynamic of the change that occurs when people move
from one gustatory context to another? Mankekar pointed out
that food “acquires a distinctive valence . . . in diasporic and mi-
grant communities” as food habits become markers of “cultural
continuity, difference, hybridity, and/or assimilation.” With the
ability to express both “oneness” and “otherness,” food is a partic-
ularly apt medium for the negotiation of new identities.11
Social scientists have used a wide variety of approaches to the
study of gastrodynamics in migration contexts. Masuoka’s work
pointed to one central feature: Cooking and eating can be a com-
plicated process of claiming status and identity in contradistinction
to a wide variety of others. In Masuoka’s case study, Japanese im-
migrants in Hawaii used and interpreted food to distinguish them-
selves from the Japanese in Japan and American haoles, 也
from members of other generations within their own community
or family. 相似地, Ray found that Bengali Americans used food
to distinguish themselves not only from mainstream Americans
but also from Bengalis in Bengal and other Indians in India or
美国. The maintenance of such boundaries is often accom-
plished through negative deªnition of the other, as when Bengali
immigrants expressed disgust with meat and meat products or crit-
icized what they perceived as faulty notions of hospitality and
proper meals in American culture. Bengalis thus tried to maintain
particularity amid the “universalizing project of capitalist moder-
nity” while at the same time telling tales of individually loving,
hating, or accommodating to “American” food. Their food be-
havior was, in this sense, both “complicit” and “resistant.”12
By situating the question of migratory gastrodynamics within
the context of the encounter between tradition/particularity and
modernity/cultural convergence, while also exploring the inter-
connections between the large-scale processes of globalization and
11 The term gastrodynamics was introduced by Rao in “Conservatism and Change,” more
than likely inºuenced by the use of the term gastropolitics in Arjun Appadurai, “Gastro-Politics
in Hindu South Asia,” American Ethnologist, VIII (1981), 494–511. Purnima Mankekar, “‘India
Shopping’: Indian Grocery Stores and Transnational Conªgurations of Belonging,” in James
L. Watson and Melissa Caldwell (编辑。), The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating (Malden, 大量的。,
2005), 203. Fischler, “Food, 自己, and Identity,” 275. See also Anna Meigs, “Food as Cultural
Construction,” in Counihan and Van Esterik (编辑。), Food and Culture, 103.
12 Masuoka, “Changing Food Habits”; Ray, Migrant’s Table, 1–2, 78–91.
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330 | KNUT OYANGEN
local and individual experiences, Ray broke new ground in the
study of immigrant food behavior. He described how each day
presented many Bengali Americans with “moments of modernity
and moments of tradition,” and how food helped to locate them
in time and place and to create a “home” in a land not their
“own.” Ray’s work demonstrates how an almost inªnitely large
and complicated topic can become clear through the lens of indi-
viduals coming to terms with their own identities and creating
their own narratives as they eat, cook, and garden.13
A number of scholars have addressed the social and cultural
meanings of food for immigrants in the United States—the best-
known case being that of Italian Americans. Many Italian immi-
grants had never eaten pizza or spaghetti with meatballs before ar-
riving in the United States. 实际上, the “codiªed” Italian cuisine of
pasta, tomato sauce, red wine, olive oil, ETC。, is largely an Ameri-
can amalgamation, a constructed or “invented” tradition. 铝-
though immigrants from Southern Italy might have known such
foods from communal feasts where the rich shared their wealth
and gastronomical habits, their deep poverty often meant that the
everyday diet consisted of bread and vegetable soup. Besides, Ital-
ian foodways, like the culture and identity of Italians in general,
were predominantly oriented toward the local and familial rather
than an overarching national pattern. But through consuming
meat, pasta, and white bread in America, Italian immigrants of
peasant backgrounds could claim a status that had been denied to
them at home. They could celebrate their new homeland for its
abundant and luxuriant meals, afªrming their newly constructed
identity as Italian Americans through foods considered uniquely
“Italian.”
This situation contributed to the creation of a “privatized”
ethnicity among Italian Americans, sheltered from the stigmatiza-
tion of immigrant culture in general, and food habits in particular,
within the public realm. The private sphere of the Sunday meal
fulªlled multiple social functions: It strengthened family feeling
and power relationships while locating the family in the (expan-
sively deªned) American middle class, and at a distance from the
American mainstream.14
13 Ray, Migrant’s Table, 131–135.
14 Cinotto, “Leonardo Covello”; Poe, “Labor and Leisure of Food Production.” For the
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 331
In what has become the standard historical work on immi-
grants and food, Diner described in detail the Italian immigrants’
transition from meals constrained by the poverty of local condi-
tions in the homeland to those featuring the codiªed “Italian”
food available in America. 更普遍, she emphasized the
role that hunger and the desire for more and better food played in
migration and in people’s interpretation of their own lives as emi-
grants and immigrants. In her two other case studies in Hungering
for America, she showed how the Irish and Jews from Eastern Eu-
rope also derived much of their migratory motivation from hun-
蒙古包. 然而, unlike the Italians, the Irish, who often viewed their food
habits and hunger as imposed by colonial oppression, 没有
identify with their old country’s food, and the Jews, in the tension
between religious regulations and American abundance, 经常
found themselves in conºict about food rather than united around
it like the Italians. Although the three cases were different in sev-
eral ways, Diner argued that each could be explained in terms of
class divisions in the home country, the details and purposes of the
migration itself, and the relative prosperity that many immigrants
found in America.15
Immigrants to the rural Midwest differed from the Irish, Ital-
ian, and Jewish immigrants whom Diner studied, most of whom
settled in the urban-industrial centers of the Northeast. The Mid-
western immigrants came primarily from Germany, Scandinavia,
and other parts of Northern and Central Europe, where the class
divisions were less pronounced, and the economies were more de-
veloped. Although they were more likely to speak of poverty and
wealth in terms of money and property rather than food, 因此
of immigration in terms of economic opportunity in general
rather than outright hunger, food and food habits played an im-
portant role in the negotiation of identity in the rural Midwest as
出色地.
The experiences of the Midwestern immigrants can best be
the European background. 他的-
understood in relief against
历史地, Europeans ate more meat than other agricultural civiliza-
系统蒸发散. A high point was reached in the late Middle Ages, after the
early twentieth-century professionals’ attacks on immigrant cooking, table manners, 食物
shopping, ETC。, see Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 103–106.
15 Diner, Hungering for America.
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332 | KNUT OYANGEN
Black Death had reduced the human population and allowed the
transformation of vacant land into pasture. Throughout the early
modern era, 然而, a period of “depecoration,” or decline in
meat eating, took place. Europeans also ate less butter and fewer
eggs, relying heavily on grain and potatoes as the population in-
creased and pastures were turned into ªelds. Swedish peasants, 为了
例子, ate less meat and vegetables and more porridge, rye
面包, and herring in 1800 比在 1600. 讽刺地, European agri-
culture overcame its Malthusian limitations through the same
structural changes that uprooted many rural people and drove
them to emigrate. Millions of people left the continent during the
second half of the nineteenth century, a time of qualitative and
quantitative improvements in diet and food availability.16
经过 1800, 甚至 1900, one of the most dramatic contrasts be-
tween the United States and Europe could be found in the ratio of
population to arable land. The relative opportunity for land own-
ership was a key factor in immigration to the rural Midwest, 但
the ratio also inºuenced the availability of various foodstuffs. 在
美国, the high status of meat was combined with easy access to
它. 一般来说, the quantity and variety of food in the United States
was greater than that to which a majority of immigrants were ac-
customed. Most immigrants saw this abundance as a great blessing;
some of those who arrived in the rural Midwest had known hun-
ger all too well in their homelands. 彼得·J. Smith remembered
在职的, at the age of eight, as a shepherd during the summer in
his native Denmark from six in the morning until sunset. He had
only one meal per day, consisting of two or three slices of rye
bread with lard and cheese.17
Croatian immigrant Peter Maretich also recalled a meager ex-
istence in the old country: “[我]f we had once a week meat to eat,
16 Fernand Braudel (反式. Sian Reynolds), Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. 我.
The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (伯克利, 1992; orig. 酒吧. 1979), 190–
202; Hans J. Teuterberg, “General Relationship between Diet and Industrialization,“ 在
Forster and Forster (编辑。), European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, 64–65; idem, “这
Diet as an Object of Historical Analysis in Germany,” in idem (编辑。), European Food History; A
Research Review (纽约, 1992), 109–128; Mats Essemyr, “Nutritional Needs and Social
Esteem: Two Aspects of Diet in Sweden during the 18th and 19th Centuries,” in ibid., 256–
277; 约翰·E. Bodnar, The Transplanted; A History of Immigrants in America (布卢明顿,
1985), 23–30.
17 彼得·J. 史密斯, “Memories of the Life of Peter J. 史密斯,” unpub. 多发性硬化症. (Eau Claire, Wisc.
n. d.).
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 333
that was lucky. For breakfast we used to eat corn meal with milk,
or corn mush . . . and for dinner, maybe it was cooked potatoes
and probably some noodles . . . no meat, a little bread with it and
no butter. . . . Perhaps if the men were working out in the ªeld
real hard, 出色地, some of them probably had a chicken killed so
they could get a little chicken soup and a little chicken. . . . 在
Sunday they might have a little meat. . . . But when we get to this
country we had meat every day if we want to.” When the inter-
viewer from the Ethnic History of Wisconsin Project asked Maretich
about political or religious persecution in Croatia, he replied,
“不, they didn’t force them to this country, but they forced them
他们自己, because they were hungry.”18
然而, even the American custom of eating “roast and
cake, everyday,” as Niels Hansen repeatedly put it, was subject to
interpretation and reinterpretation depending on an individual’s
feelings about the new country. 汉森, a Danish weaver, arrived
in the United States in the 1890s already in his sixties. He and his
wife had come to the Chicago area to be closer to their grown-up
孩子们. Hansen ªrst used the phrase “roast and cake” in an 1894
letter to his brother, where he noted that “the children live as the
custom is here, with roast and cake, everyday.” This matter-of-
fact remark seemed unrelated to his own dreary and uneventful
existence as an unemployed newcomer. His only amusement in
the United States was visiting a Danish tavern, but even there he
found the differences from home appalling, the prices for beer and
schnapps being so high that “one can soon sell everything one
owns.”19
最终, Hansen settled in Highwood, 伊利诺伊州, 他在哪里
continued to struggle with homesickness and regret. Three years
之后, a new letter from him complained about performing hard
work in the summer heat with only water and no beer to drink. 作为
late as March 1899, the Hansens were still “owls among crows,”
with little knowledge of the English language. Niels grumbled that
“even a salted herring costs 20 øre.” But later that year, Hansen in-
formed his brother that he had become used to drinking water in-
Interview with Peter Maretich, Ethnic History of Wisconsin Project, 4, 5, Wisconsin Histor-
18
ical Society Archives, 麦迪逊.
19 Niels Hansen, letter to Hans Hansen, 十一月 8, 1894, Niels Hansen papers [hereinaf-
ter nhp], Danish Immigrant Archives [hereinafter dia], Grand View College, Des Moines,
爱荷华州.
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334 | KNUT OYANGEN
stead of beer and liquor, expressing satisfaction that “here no one
is offered øllebrød and salted herring, but roast and ªne cakes as
much as they want for every meal.” Working as a lumberjack the
next year, he still noted the absence of beer and liquor during the
workday, but he also reported that the food was better than in
Denmark—white bread, roast, and butter.20
经过 1904, Hansen showed outright enthusiasm for American
foodways. Despite only three meals a day and no beer, the food
很好, and he was thankful to have forgotten the “evil habit”
of drinking liquor. “America is a good land,” he wrote, “especially
for workers. They need not stand and watch when the rich man
lives with roast and cake, because the worker gets that everyday if
he wants it.” What Hansen ªrst had seen as an odd, foreign cus-
tom eventually became a sign of the country’s wealth. “Roast and
cake” came to symbolize the goodness of the country itself,
deªned by the possibility of social equality rooted in common
prosperity.21
Scholars have described how processes of urbanization, indus-
trialization, and population growth disrupted traditional foodways
and complicated the relationship between foods and their socio-
cultural meanings. Some have even claimed that modernity can
create situations of “gastro-anomie,” a bewildering normlessness
in the realm of food caused by the “disaggregation” of old mean-
英格斯. The risk of food losing its accustomed meaning is especially
great in the context of migration. When he ªrst arrived in the
美国, Hansen used the phrase “roast and cake” to deªne
the American other. The fact that this “other” included his own
children deepened his feelings of isolation and hopelessness. As he
became acclimated to living, 在职的, and eating in America,
然而, “roast and cake” began to assume a positive meaning,
representing abundance and a different standard of living. But only
after more than a decade in the United States was Hansen ªnally
able to tie American food, the American economy, and his own
immigrant identity together into a coherent whole. The abun-
dance of food symbolized how immigrants could come to Amer-
ica and claim equal social status with the rich. Thus “roast and
20 Letters from Niels to Hans Hansen, 六月 23, 1897; 行进 5, 1899; 九月 2, 1899;
一月 2, 1900, nhp. Øllebrød, beer bread, is rye bread boiled in wheat beer; like salted her-
ring, it was typical poor man’s fare in nineteenth-century Denmark.
21
同上。, 十二月 10, 1904.
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 335
cake” went from being an outward manifestation of one charac-
teristic of American society to symbolizing the totality of it. 这
concept of “roast and cake, everyday” had become a fully articu-
lated medium for understanding America.22
Europeans traveling to America sometimes encountered a
new world of food as soon as they embarked on their transatlantic
voyage. Simon Kjems, traveling third class in 1891, found the food
decent but the coffee “undrinkable.” Nils Olsen Haatvedt, WHO
left Norway in 1879, could not bring himself to drink the coffee.
It was “sweet and disgusting,” ªlled with syrup and “other addi-
tives.” The tea, 显然, was not much better. Nor was the
食物: “[时间]he soup . . . wasn’t really too poorly made. It consisted
of coarse and fatty beef, whoever is not used to eating meat that
fresh will not be likely to enjoy it. I don’t know what we would
have done if we hadn’t brought along a little food ourselves. Salted
veal, salty sausage, gamalost, sureprim, and ºatbread, these men-
tioned things one should deªnitely bring aboard, or at least that is
what I would prefer.”23
Although clearly of limited education, Haatvedt (like many
其他的) was accustomed to having coffee, meat, and dairy products
available to him; being without them for a few weeks was highly
undesirable. This sense of deprivation contrasts sharply with the
22 The term gastro-anomie was coined by Fischler. See Beardsworth and Keil, Sociology on the
Menu, 66–67; William A. McIntosh, Sociologies of Food and Nutrition (纽约, 1966), 29;
Teuterberg, “General Relationship between Diet and Industrialization”; and Mennell, “Di-
vergences and Convergences in the Development of Culinary Cultures,” in Teuterberg (编辑。),
European Food History, 285.
The wealthy in the United States had begun to abandon the “roast and cake” paradigm
by this time. 后 1880, they increasingly embraced fancy French cuisine, requiring skilled
chefs whom the middle and lower classes could not afford to hire, thus creating some distance
between the rich and others in food habits. Niels Hansen was presumably not aware of this
趋势. His concept of the “rich” probably derived mostly from his experiences in Denmark.
See Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 10–22.
The distinction between food as medium and food in itself (as a message) 很重要,
although this binary form conceals its complexity. If each mention of food in the sources is in-
terpreted as a message about food, the importance of food as food will be overstated. 不幸-
内特利, 一些作品, including Diner’s otherwise magniªcent Hungering for America, may have
gone too far in that direction. As the case of “roast and cake” shows, deciphering what people
talk about when they mention food requires a great deal of attention to context.
23 Hjalmar Kjems, “Mit Liv,” unpub. ms.( 日期不详。), dia; Nils Olsen Haatvedt, letter to his fa-
ther and siblngs, 六月 13, 1879, in Amerikabrev fra Norsk Utvandrermuseum, collection of Amer-
ica letters published online, http://www.nb.no/emigrasjon/brev_oversikt_forfatter.php.
Gamalost, old cheese, is a pungent blue-mold cheese made from sour skim milk. Sureprim is a
whey product also made from sour milk.
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336 | KNUT OYANGEN
well-known case of Italian immigrants, who had limited access to
such foods in the old country. But of even greater interest are
Haatvedt’s extraordinarily speciªc suggestions for foods to pack on
a journey to America and his admission that they constituted a
preference on his part. From a structural perspective, the notewor-
thy connection between his ªve food items are that they all—
besides being traditional, 当地的 (non-commodity) products of the
mountain peasants—require extensive transformations (cultural or
natural) from their natural forms (meat, milk, and grain) 并有
distinctive ºavors identiªed with the process rather than the
raw material. They are also “dry,” nonperishable foods. 其他
字, they individually and combined form a perfect structural
opposition to a soup made from fresh meat. 因此, whether he in-
tended to do so or not, Haatvedt revealed his gustatory identity,
specifying what was his food and what was foreign or “other.”
在这种情况下, food became a component of an immigrant’s
social cognition. Social cognition about food behavior was not
limited to food items alone. Just as most people have relatively
rigid ideas about what constitutes “food,” most people also have
清除 (even if usually unconscious) views about what constitutes
a “meal.” Meals are deªned by a variety of factors, 包括
proper organization, 定时, and frequency as well as the types of
food served and the social rules for eating with others. Due to the
variability of these rules across cultures, immigrants were destined
to encounter different conceptions of meals, leading to social-
cognition processes situating those others relative to themselves.24
Niels Sorensen Rungborg emigrated from Denmark in 1903.
Although he and his wife left to acquire their “own home” rather
than to escape hunger, his description of the transatlantic voyage
in his unpublished autobiography revolves largely around food.
After a dinner of peas and bacon followed by intense seasickness,
Rungborg’s wife was tempted to “turn around and go back home
到 . . . familiar meat kettles.” In time, 然而, they became ac-
customed to the sea and seem to have appreciated the shipboard
饮食: cereal, 面包, sausage, and coffee for breakfast; soup or peas,
24 Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” in Counihan and Van Esterik (编辑。), Food and Culture,
36–54; Simmel, “Sociology of the Meal”; Khare, “The Indian Meal: Aspects of Cultural
Economy and Food Use,” in idem and Rao (编辑。), Food, 社会, 与文化, 159–183;
Douglas, In the Active Voice, 90–91; Ray, Migrant’s Table, 78–81; Beardsworth and Keil, Sociol-
ogy on the Menu, 83–84.
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 337
meat or herring, rice pudding, apple cider, and sweet bread for the
noon meal; meat, herring, preserves, cheese, and tea for the eve-
ning meal, followed later by a serving of oatmeal soup. But due ei-
ther to poverty or to dietary laws imposed by religion, some pas-
sengers did not take part in these meals: “The Jews and Polacks ate
and drank all day long with a greed that deªed comparison. 他们
scraped up the food and stuffed it in their mouths with both hands.
They mostly ate bread and white onions, and would rub the crust
of the bread with an onion. When it had been thoroughly rubbed
they stuffed it down their throats with one large chunk after the
other and this continued throughout the day. They have no regu-
lar mealtimes. . . . 然而, they did need a little time to digest
their food and they used this time to ªght and quarrel.”25
Although the author may have aimed for humor in this pas-
智者, its inclusion in his autobiography long after the actual event
suggests that the strange food behavior of Jews and Poles was a
signiªcant and distasteful aspect of the voyage. The offensiveness
of their foodways stemmed from their lack of manners and their
apparent lack of interest in structured meal times. Both of these
foibles pointed to the same inevitable conclusion: By failing to
frame eating within any recognizable, disciplined cultural frame-
工作, the offending parties behaved more like animals or barbari-
ans than civilized human beings. What Rungborg perceived as
constant “ªghting and quarreling” only re-enforced the impres-
sion of deviation from civilized human behavior. Rather than at-
tributing this behavior to time, 地方, and circumstance, Rung-
borg interpreted the perceived shortcomings of the Jews and Poles
as inherent, as evident in the present tense that he employed when
writing about them—“they have no regular mealtimes”—even
though the events in question took place in a distant past, 和所有
of the surrounding verbs are in the past tense.
It was relatively easy to dismiss and condemn the habits of
strangers encountered brieºy aboard ship. Regular shared meals
with others was a different matter altogether. Among the Hua
of Papua New Guinea, food not produced and cooked by co-
residents or kin is considered dirty, not ªt to be eaten. In the In-
dian caste system, who can eat whose foods in what form depends
on highly complex rules. Eating someone’s food implies an accep-
25 Niels Sorensen Rungborg, “Autobiography,” unpub. 多发性硬化症. (日期不详。), dia, 154, 158, 159.
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338 | KNUT OYANGEN
tance not only of the food but also of the person who made it. 它
also implies a form of community with those with whom one
eats.26
Many immigrants to the rural Midwest, especially young
adults (including what we now would call teenagers), started their
new lives in the employ of a farm family, as farmhands (男人) 或者
domestics (女性). These newcomers would usually try to ªnd
employment with fellow nationals, though it was not always possi-
布莱. Living and eating with “strangers” often became a necessity,
and the cohabitation and commensality that followed resulted in
adaptation and, 偶尔, conºict.
Christian Hansen, who had emigrated from Denmark in
1885, described a difªcult search for employment in rural Minne-
sota during the winter of 1887/88. Failing to ªnd a Danish farmer
who needed his help, he managed to ªnd work with a Yankee
couple. Although they were decent, respectable people, 汉森
noted “a snake in paradise.” To wit, the couple only ate two meals
a day, one after milking in the morning and one before milking in
the afternoon. Hansen was told that he could get more food each
night before going to bed, but the couple did not eat at that time.
Used to following the “table custom of the house,” the farmhand
could not bring himself to eat an extra meal alone. 反而, 他
went to bed hungry every night.27
Hansen accepted a 20 percent lower wage with another
farmer (a Yankee widow) in return for assurance that he would get
three proper meals a day (and be allowed to smoke). When he
tendered his resignation to the couple who had originally hired
他, the housewife again suggested that he simply take a third
meal by himself in the evening. 汉森, 然而, steadfastly re-
fused to consider this option. The woman insisted that he accept a
large piece of pie before leaving—evidently feeling guilty of “food
26 Meigs, “Food as a Cultural Construction”; Khare, “Indian Meal,” 176; Enrique Rodri-
guez-Alegria, “Eating like an Indian: Social Relations in the Spanish Colonies,” Current An-
thropology, XLVI (2005), 551–573; Rozin, “Sociocultural Inºuences,” 235; 威廉姆斯, “Why
Migrant Women Feed Their Husbands Tamales: Foodways as a Basis for a Revisionist View
of Tejano Family Life,” in Brown and Mussell (编辑。), Ethnic and Regional Foodways, 113–126.;
Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class, 12–13; Fischler, “Food, 自己, and Identity”; Counihan
and Van Esterik, “介绍,” in idem (编辑。), Food and Culture, 1–7; Douglas, “Deciphering
a Meal,” 42.
27 Christian Hansen, “Da jeg kom til Minnesota,” unpub. 多发性硬化症. (Tyler, 明尼苏达州, 1927), 10.
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 339
failure”—as an attempt at either rebuttal or restitution. 国际米兰-
esting part of the story is that Hansen walked dozens of miles in
the Minnesota winter, quit his job, and accepted a substantial de-
crease in wages, all because he could not imagine eating a meal
apart from the rest of the household. To eat alone would have re-
moved him from the proper social and cultural structuring of food
events and placed him outside civilization, driven by base biologi-
cal needs alone. The Yankee housewife’s imposition of a new cu-
linary order would have been profoundly degrading to him.
尽管如此, the woman’s consternation about his defection also
makes sense. If eating food implies acceptance of those who cook
and serve it, rejecting someone’s food and foodways implies the
opposite.
Although most immigrants to the rural Midwest came with
hopes of upward social mobility and were willing to start at the
bottom of the ladder, some of them arrived with a strong sense of
地位, expecting others to serve and defer to them. 不像
more modest sort, who tended to embrace social equality and
democratic ideals, those accustomed to privilege often abhorred
American egalitarianism and feared the social embarrassment of
constant interaction with presumptuous inferiors. While others
celebrated American plenty, Pastor Johan Storm Munch wrote in
a letter from his “so-called parsonage” in Wiota, 威斯康星州,
“Food is difªcult here, and help even more so. 总体上, 生活
here is one of renunciation and rich in wants.”28
These wants were not akin to the persistent hunger from
which many Europeans had ºed. 的确,
in the same letter,
Munch wrote that his wife was “getting fat and chubby.” More to
the point was his description of a German hotel that he had visited
in Milwaukee, where he had eaten “completely in European fash-
ion” with “proper food” and “Rhine wine.” This hotel contrasted
with regular American hotels where “you only get water and mis-
erable food and service.” Brief reminders of the lifestyle of Eu-
rope’s privileged classes were the high points in the Munches’
four-year sojourn in the United States.29
To recreate that lifestyle in rural Wisconsin was a different
28
Johan Storm Munch, letter to Else Munch, 七月 16, 1857, in Helene Munch and Peter A.
Munch (trans.), The Strange American Way: Letters of Caja Munch from Wiota, 威斯康星州, 1855–
1859 (Carbondale, 1970), 104.
29
同上.
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340 | KNUT OYANGEN
事情. Caja Munch, the pastor’s wife, wrote long, detailed letters
about her arduous attempts to build a household reminiscent of
她母亲的. In her mid-twenties when they ªrst arrived, she was
a skilled and resourceful housekeeper with a high opinion of her
own position in society, but in desperate need of recognition and
approval. Regarding preparations for Christmas, she wrote to her
母亲, “I made almost all the things you prepare,” and she as-
sured her sisters-in-law that her cooking made the pastor happy
(“I always have to make something extra for him to really make it
as pleasant as possible”). While he complained about renunciation
and want, she was making his favorite foods—meatballs, mutton
and cabbage, or blood pudding.30
As was often the case in the rural Midwest, the pastor and his
wife largely depended on the congregation for foodstuffs, 埃斯佩-
cially when they ªrst arrived in Wiota. After several months in the
国家, they had bought no food except a small amount of meat
(along with the two ubiquitous store items, coffee and sugar).
同时, parishioners had provided them with a hindquarter of
a cow, some piglets, chickens, wild rabbits, quails, dried ªsh, ºour,
面包, lard, butter, cream, eggs, potatoes, carrots, onions, cucum-
bers, apples, 坚果, and beer. The couple was eating three hot meals
a day just to keep up, “living very luxuriously” on ragout of hare,
creamed chicken, quail, and roasted piglets.31
Caja Munch’s letters were ªlled with reports of culinary de-
lights; the abundance and variety at the Munches’ table would
have impressed most Europeans arriving in the United States in
the nineteenth century. Yet they frequently complained, 两个都
about their own food and about the food that others served to
他们. Whereas Niels Hansen made “roast and cake, everyday” the
symbol of everything that was great about America, Caja Munch
noted with contempt the Yankee habit of having “pork, coffee,
and pie morning, noon, and evening.” Even worse, because Nor-
wegian immigrants had adopted this habit, the Munches were
forced to consume these items every time they visited parishio-
书呆子: “We are really tired of it, especially since these dishes are not
at all our favorite ones.” Hansen might have thought that universal
30 Caja Munch, letter to Thalie Falch, January 18–20, 1858; letter to Henriette and Caro-
line Munch, February 23–24, 1857, Munch and Munch (trans.), Strange American Way, 131,
78.
31
同上。, letter to Mr. and Mrs. Falch, 十一月, 25, 1855–February 15, 1856, 15–31.
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 341
access to rich foods helped to dissolve class distinctions, but to the
Munches, those distinctions derived from birth and breeding.
因此, rich foods available to everyone were no longer appropriate
markers of status. 反而, the Munches judged others by their ta-
ble manners and methods of food preparation, most of which fell
short of their lofty standards.32
Meals with others not of their class—whether Norwegian,
德语, 爱尔兰语, or Yankee—involved uneasy interactions with
dirty, rude, and impertinent people, in some cases so offensive and
disgusting that they refused to eat or simply got up and left.They
observed that Americans of various backgrounds did not “bother
too much” about how they prepared their food. In her second let-
ter home, Caja complained, “Americans never have soup, 他们
don’t even know what it is, meatballs arouse great curiosity; 在
the whole, they never use any kind of gravy or prepared food.
Fruit porridge with cream they don’t even know how to eat.”33
Caja also lamented how difªcult it was to procure rye and
missed it “beyond measure.” Even if obtainable, American rye was
inferior and not ground in the same manner as in Norway. 他们
reluctantly ate “dry wheat loaves” instead. Caja went to great
lengths to brew her own beer, but admitted that the end product
was a “poor substitute for the Bavarian,” which was what the pas-
tor really wanted.34
What makes the Munches’ case signiªcant, given that it was
hardly “typical” or “representative” of immigrants to the rural
Midwest? From the vantage point of cultural history, the Munches
are interesting precisely because their experience deviated from
the norm. Most immigrants both resisted and participated in their
own displacement from old food habits, trying to ªnd an accept-
able combination of
传统, acculturation, and innovation.
J. Jorgensen, who settled in Dakota Territory in 1874, cherished
the rare occasions when he was able to procure a little coffee and
sugar, because these commodities made what he considered
32
同上。, 22. As Paul Fussell, 班级: A Guide through the American Status System (纽约,
1983), 16, pointed out, the lower classes tend to deªne class in terms of wealth, the middle
classes in terms of education and occupation, and the upper classes in terms of “taste, 价值观,
ideas, style, and behavior.”
33 Caja Munch, letter to Mr. and Mrs. Falch, 十月 28, 1857; 十一月 25, 1855–
二月 15, 1856, Munch and Munch (trans.), Strange American Way, 128, 27.
34
this context means commercially produced lager beer.
同上。, letter to Henriette and Caroline Munch, February 23–24, 1857, 34, 78. Bavarian in
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342 | KNUT OYANGEN
“proper” hospitality possible. 尽管如此, when coffee was not
可用的, he made do with “prairie tea” brewed from shoestring
grass, which he described as “very tasty.” To the Munches, 这样的
divergences from preferred practice would have been unthink-
able.35
Previous studies of immigrant food behavior often found that
adult males have the most traditionalist preferences in food, 和
that females engage in “menu negotiation” between the ideal diet
(largely deªned by adult males) and external constraints. 因此, 在
food habits, as in other aspects of life, immigrants to the rural Mid-
west tended to accommodate to a new identity that was neither
that of the old country nor that of “Americans” culturally deªned
(那是, Yankees). But the Munches, in any event, did not want a
new identity. Caja, who had a garden, knew something about the
limitations of the natural environment, the local cooking vessels,
and the available raw materials. Yet she desperately tried to emu-
late the “ideal diet” deªned by her husband’s preferences and her
mother’s cooking. Her husband, with little involvement in either
the production or preparation of food, never managed to see de-
partures from his accustomed habits as anything other than “re-
nunciation and want.” Although most immigrants accepted the
need for ºexibility, 调整, and innovation, Johan Storm
Munch was truly “transplanted,” still fully Norwegian in America.
一段时间后, he just wanted to go home. Hoping to transplant a
complete set of cultural practices to a new social context could
only lead to disappointment and failure. Unlike Pastor Munch,
most immigrants had enough common sense and peasant pragma-
tism to adapt.36
Unsatisfying as his life was, it would have been unbearable
without his wife catering to his culinary whims. Male immigrants
who arrived without a female companion often had little knowl-
edge about the preparation of even familiar, traditional foods. 在-
契据, single male immigrants, like Theodor van Dreveldt—a lib-
eral intellectual from West Prussia who came to America primarily
J. Jorgensen, “Danskerne i Turner County, South Dakota,” unpub. 多发性硬化症. (日期不详。), dia, 4.
35
36 The previous studies of food behavior include Goode et al., “A Framework for the Anal-
ysis of Continuity and Change in Shared Sociocultural Rules for Food Use: The Italian-
American Pattern,” in Brown and Mussell (编辑。), Ethnic and Regional Foodways, 67. 也可以看看
Poe, “Labor and Leisure of Food Production,” 142; Cordona, “Re-Encountering Cuban
Tastes.”
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 343
for political reasons—often survived on miserable diets. 货车
Dreveldt spent the winter of 1847/48 in a poorly built log cabin
on the Wisconsin frontier, living on a suspect mixture of ºour,
水, and fat. After becoming ill, a physician told him to eat meat
three times a day and to drink a glass of Rhine wine regularly. 作为
he sat down to drink wine in his cabin for the ªrst time, he real-
ized that he “had purchased many privations for a great deal of
钱. Freedom is a good thing and worthy of a man, 然而
over here it comes at a damned high price.” That day, van
Dreveldt decided to return to Europe.37
Theodore Bost, an educated Swiss man of bourgeois origins,
was in a similar predicament on the Minnesota frontier: “I have
two tin plates and some knives and forks. I boil six or seven pota-
toes and peel them; next I fry up a good big piece of bacon and
brown my potatoes in the bacon grease; then I eat my whole meal
using my knees as a table. Sometimes I fry the potatoes in butter,
but since it costs thirty cents a pound, I use it sparingly. 一些-
次, too—as I did today—I make a boiled dinner of bacon, 后-
tatoes, and rutabagas; this is for special occasions when I want a
good soup.”38
As Ray recognized in the case of contemporary Bengali im-
migrants, the food situation of the single male immigrant can re-
turn to relative normality with the arrival of a wife from the old
国家. Bost soon began a long-distance courtship, and two and a
half years later, he welcomed Sophie Bonjour to Minnesota. 他们
married the next day.39
Both the Munches and the Bosts wrote unusually articulate
and expressive letters home, but their descriptions of life in rural
America show more contrasts than similarities. Whereas Johan
Storm Munch condemned the “dishwater” presented as coffee on
the train from New York, the Bosts had no complaints about their
ersatz coffee made from wheat or rye. Sophie made “excellent
37 Ray, Migrant’s Table, 73. See also N. Manaan and B. J. Boucher, “The Bangladeshi Dias-
pora and Its Dietary Proªle in East London, 1990–2000,” in Anne J. Kershen (编辑。), Food in the
Migrant Experience (伯灵顿, Vt., 2002), 233; Theodor van Dreveldt, letter to Franz von
Weise, 行进 1848, in Kenneth Kronenberg (编辑. and trans.), Lives and Letters of an Immigrant
Family: The van Dreveldt’s Experiences along the Missouri, 1844–1866 (Lincoln, 1998), 79.
38 Theodore Bost, letter to Ami and Jenny Bost, 十二月 2, 1855, in Ralph H. Bowen
(编辑. and trans.), A Frontier Family in Minnesota: Letters of Theodore and Sophie Bost, 1851–1920
(明尼阿波利斯, 1981), 72–73.
39 Ray, Migrant’s Table, 74; Bowen, Frontier Family, 130.
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344 | KNUT OYANGEN
wine” from fruit, syrup, and water, and was especially fond of the
sweet ºavors to which the farm gave her access. Her letters men-
tion the “wonderful” and “beautiful” ºavors of honey from wild
bees and sugar from maple trees. Theodore found their produce as
agreeable as that of their European counterparts: “Little by little,
we expect to become as well off as your best farmers, with our
own wine, sugar, coffee (made from wheat!), beer, fruit of all
kinds.”40
The Bosts perceived home-made replacement foods as new
and exciting, not pale, inferior imitations. Although class preten-
sions may have hampered the Munches’ appreciation of American
foods, the relationship between class background and the interpre-
tation of a new food situation is not always predictable. 上
相反, an immigrant’s relationship to food can be understood
only within the context of that person’s own experiences and cir-
情况.
The Koepºi and Suppiger families who established the New
Switzerland colony in Illinois during the early 1830s furnish an-
other example of people who had been relatively well-to-do in
Europe settling in a rural area on the American frontier. 他们的
travel account contains an especially detailed list of the foods that
they took on their transatlantic voyage. 这 250 liters of wine and
多于 20 liters of liqueur, cognac, and brandy that they
packed give the distinct impression that abundance and variety
were familiar to them. In addition to all of the immigrants who
were literally “hungering” for America were some who were ac-
customed to eating and drinking well.41
The decision to emigrate was controversial in the Koepºi
家庭. Bernard Koepºi doubted his father’s decision, and pitied
his mother’s “cooking for a hungry mob before an open ªre.” In a
house “worse than a pigpen in Switzerland,” she had no oven and
had to bake bread in iron pots. These objections came to naught,
40
Johan Storm Munch, “Vita Mea,” in Munch and Munch (trans.), Strange American Way,
167; Sophie Bost, letter to Ami and Jenny Bost, 四月 10, 1862, in Bowen, Frontier Family,
204; Theodore Bost, letter to Ami and Jenny Bost, 八月 1862, in ibid., 213; Sophie Bost,
letters to Ami and Jenny Bost, 十二月 3, 1858; 四月 10, 1862; 四月 26, 1862; to Elisee
Bost, 四月 7, 1860, in ibid., 157, 158–160, 204–205, 208; Theodore Bost, letter to Ami and
Jenny Bost, 八月 1862, in ibid., 213.
41
John C. Abbott (编辑。) (反式. Raymond Spahn), Journey to New Switzerland: Travel Account
of the Koepºi and Suppiger Family to St. Louis on the Mississippi and the Founding of New Switzer-
land in the State of Illinois (Carbondale, 1987), 77–84.
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 345
然而, at least in part because of the availability of good food.
Salomon Koepºi, describing their acquisition of cattle, sheep,
hogs, goats, and chickens, as well as the profusion of deer in the
vicinity, 总结, “Our dogs consume more meat in a week
than most families in Switzerland eat in an entire year.” Joseph
Suppiger averred that the food was simply “better, more nourish-
英, and more suitable than in Europe.” Dr. Kaspar Koepºi, 这
group’s leader, acknowledged some shortcomings with regard to
beer, wine, and cheese but described an otherwise advantageous
food situation:
“Americans eat well. The average farmer expects to be served two
kinds of meat at every meal of the day, but soup is rarely served.
Fresh bread for every meal is baked in iron pans. Corn bread, 非常
popular with Americans, has come to be a favorite of the Swiss,
who could not bear it at ªrst. Butter and usually also honey are
found at every meal, at least during the summer.”42
Not all immigrants were so accepting of American foodways.
Some of them felt an intense longing for the ºavors that they asso-
ciated with home, like the German immigrant in Iowa who wrote
home about missing the “good sausage . . . made in Germany” and
hoped someday to visit there in early autumn to “enjoy everything
that is missing here,” like “the good plum cake.” This longing
tended to manifest at special times of the year. Berta Kingestad
missed her mother’s “delicious Christmas porridge” and her
“good pickled pork.” Anna Swanson’s American Christmas was
far removed from what she had known as a child in Sweden: “It
was just like any other day; no luteªsk, no limpa bread, nothing. 我
曾是 . . . so hungry for a little coffee bread, or a slice of good Swed-
ish rye bread with Swedish butter.”43
Yet even those immigrants to the rural Midwest who were
less than thrilled about American foodways had to adapt or adjust
42 Bernard Koepºi quoted by Salomon Koepºi in a letter to Kaspar Mauris Koepºi, 的-
十二月 11, 1831, in Abbott, Journey to New Switzerland, 151, 142; Joseph Suppiger, letter to
Suppiger family, 九月 1832, 同上。, 168; Kaspar Koepºi, “Advantages and Disadvantages
of the Area We Chose to Settle,” ibid., 196 (italics in original).
John Becker, letter to Johannes Seibold, 一月 14, 1881, 3, Becker papers, 威斯康星州
43
Historical Society Archive, 麦迪逊; Berta Kingestad, letter to Anna Bjøravåg, 十二月 3,
1893, in Solveig Zempel (编辑。), In Their Own Words: Letters from Norwegian Immigrants (Minne-
apolis, 1991), 53; Anna Svensson Swanson (编辑. Marjorie Carol and Lillian Evenson), Orphan,
Immigrant, Prairie Pioneer: Memories of My Life (publisher unknown, 1989), 17.
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346 | KNUT OYANGEN
in some way—farmhands to the norms of the farm family and do-
mestics to the cooking standards of an (often Yankee) housewife.
Women who once had dependable servants in Europe often had
to manage by themselves or deal with less deferential maids who
had tasted American freedom and social equality. 根据
Gertrude Braat Vandergon, all of the Dutch women with whom
she arrived in Minnesota had relied on their own maids in the
Netherlands to cook, if not to plan, their meals. In America, 他们
had to learn simple tasks like baking bread or making pancakes. 作为
Gro Svendsen put it, “Life here is very different from life in our
mountain valley. One must readjust oneself and learn everything
all over again, even to the preparation of food.” Mathilde Küner,
who in her early days in Sheboygan, 威斯康星州, had no kitchen,
was forced to set up her oven outside. “I would often rather not
eat than stand outside cooking with an umbrella in my hand,“ 她
complained. Immigrant women who settled on the Great Plains
often had to endure the even greater indignity of burning cow
chips to heat their stoves.44
Children also had to adjust and learn. Thirteen-year-old Hjal-
mar Kjems, newly arrived in Ashland, Michigan, was disgusted
with the taste of the “very large, red berries,” that he picked from
some bushes. Only later would he come to appreciate the ºavor of
tomatoes. Other immigrant children were more disgusted by tra-
ditional fare. Alfred Frost was appalled by his parents’ Danish
food—dry, 难的, tasteless pumpernickel bread; awful øllebrød; 和
beef stew that made him gag. Frederikke Johansen, 然而, 关于-
membered it with delight, especially at Christmas when her
mother “radiated Christmas joy” as she prepared æbleskiver, Christ-
mas porridge, sausage, and other holiday dishes.45
Broad, general conclusions about the experiences that immigrants
had with food in America are difªcult to draw. Although the indi-
44 Gertrude Braat Vandergon, Our Pioneer Days in Minnesota (Holland, 密歇根州。, 1949), 24;
Gro Svendsen, letter to her parents, 十一月 20, 1862, in Theodore C. Blegen (编辑。), Land
of Their Choice: The Immigrants Write Home (明尼阿波利斯, 1955), 393; Mathilde Küner, letter
to Veronika and Regina Kerler, 行进 23, 1850, in Louis F. Frank (编辑。), Pionierjahre der
Deutsch-Amerikanischer Familien Frank-Kerler in Wisconsin und Michigan, 1849–1864 (Milwaukee,
1911), 64; Roger Welsch and Linda Welsch, Cather’s Kitchen: Foodways in Literature and Life
(Lincoln, 1987), 3.
45 Kjems, “Mit liv,” 5; Alfred Frost, “Autobiography,” unpub. 多发性硬化症. (Withee, Wisc., 1981),
2; Frederikke Johansen, Fredelund: Skildringer fra Nybyggertiden (Askov, 明尼苏达州, 日期不详。), 40–41.
Æbleskiver, apple slices, are round pastries made in a special pan.
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THE GASTRODYNAM ICS OF D ISPLACEM ENT | 347
vidual stories must stand alone as unique events in certain respects,
the typically modern, individualist assumption that taste is simply
arbitrary and idiosyncratic does not thereby hold. Learned prac-
tices and ideas derived from a sociocultural context are reºected in
systematic variations in gastronomic preferences according to class,
性别, 种族, religion, and other variables. But these effects
are not completely determined; they are subject to change within
the individual life cycle. Psychologists may be puzzled by the fact
that members of the same family often have dissimilar food prefer-
恩塞斯, but historians who study foodways would not ªnd it sur-
prising.46
The immigrants’ stories expose three strands of meaning,
which can be labeled displacement, place-making, and gustatory
身份. Displacement signiªes the physical, 社会的, and mental as-
pects of moving from one continent to another. To a certain ex-
帐篷, the question of whether these emigrants left Europe by force
of circumstance or by choice boils down to a preference for either
causal or intentional explanations. Notwithstanding the concept
of “agency,” underlying social circumstances clearly inºuenced
emigrants’ decisions to leave Europe. Many of those circumstances
创新, demographic
(economic upheaval,
改变, military conscription, religious intolerance, political op-
压力, ETC。) were large-scale social processes impossible for an
individual to control. More importantly for the discussion at hand,
displacement or migration was a similar type of disruptive process
on a smaller scale. Whenever or wherever immigrants went, 他们
found environmental and social conditions that made reproducing
the cultural practices of a different place inconvenient, imprudent,
or impossible. Although their grandchildren or later historians
could be made to believe that such control was feasible, 有
little evidence that the immigrants themselves did.
技术性的
Ray has written about his three “lands”: 印度, 联合
状态, and the “everyday lands” of the kitchen, the desk, 和
classroom. European immigrants, 也, had their everyday lands:
woods and prairies, pastures, ªelds, gardens, orchards, 和
kitchens where nature was given the imprimatur of culture. 什么
did it mean to sit, as the Vandergon family did, on a log-house
ºoor eating from ªne Dresden china? The food and food practices
46 Mennell, All Manners of Food, 1. 看, 例如, Kittler and Suchler, Food and Culture in
美国, 6–9. Mennella and Beauchamp, “Early Development of Human Flavor Preferences,”
103–104; Rozin, “Sociocultural Inºuences,” 253–254.
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348 | KNUT OYANGEN
of immigrants belonged to the everyday lands, fully identiªed with
neither “the fatherland” nor “the promised land.” To rely on the
concepts of agency and cultural transplantation in explaining such
situations would ºy in the face of reality.47
This caveat is especially cogent with regard to immigrants in
rural America. Much of what they ate came from the local envi-
ronment—their own farm or someone else’s. On the farm, cook-
ing and eating also became place-making. What had once been a
small square on a surveyor’s map became infused with cultural
meaning when, 说, the Bosts tapped a maple tree and stayed up all
night to keep the kettles boiling. Within the limits of the natural
环境, and with due regard for the family economy, 男人
and women turned farmsteads into homes partly by integrating
some of their old foodways into a new lifestyle. To achieve a sym-
bolic connection between the old home and the new one was
more important than slavishly to follow tradition. To act always
and everywhere in the same way is contrary to human nature.
As the immigrants sought to engender a sense of place
through cultivating, cooking, and eating, they also sought to
deªne their identities by contrasting their food habits with the
food habits of others. Their foils were often Yankees who ate roast
and cake every day, drank water instead of beer, never ate soup,
knew nothing of meatballs or fruit porridge, ate only twice or
three times a day, and belched loudly even in ªne hotel restau-
rants. Although immigrants largely accepted Yankee ways as a
matter of convenience, this process was rarely forced by any great
desire to imitate or be like “Americans.” They usually saw them-
selves as adapting to the environment, 经济, and local cir-
cumstances rather than conforming to a cultural norm. But as this
article reveals, deªning oneself and others in terms of food is a
continuous process dependent on innumerable variables and con-
文本. What remains certain is that food was a common vehicle for
efforts to understand the relationship between self and other.
Through place-making and the creative negotiation of gustatory
身份, immigrants took charge of their own gastronomical dis-
placement. The culinary world that they left behind remained
with them through symbolic reminders rather than a wholesale
transplantation of traditional practices.
47 Ray, Migrant’s Table, 2.
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