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Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America's Food. By Camille Bégin. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016. 240 pp., $25.00, paperback, ISBN 978-0-252-08170-5.
Although scholars have long analyzed New Deal initiatives, the cultural programs undertaken by the Roosevelt Administration have only gained considerable attention in the last two decades. Efforts to promote tourism and preserve the country's cultural heritage were essential to repairing Americans' confidence. In Taste of the Nation, Camille Bégin unpacks the America Eats initiative of the Federal Writers Project to reveal both the process by which agents recorded culinary customs, and how they interpreted their findings to reinforce the New Deal's aims. The "agency's unabashed goal was to reconcile cultural pluralism and a potentially xenophobic romantic nationalism" to promote a greater American future (2).
America Eats, started in the late 1930s but abandoned after Pearl Harbor, aimed to provide literary comfort food. Rejecting practices that...