Lunch | Lauren Klein | An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States

Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture

There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved among the printed records of the early United States. Synthesizing a range of textual artifacts with accounts (both real and imagined) of foods harvested, dishes prepared, and meals consumed, this talk—based on An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)—will reveal how a focus on eating allows us to rethink the nature and significance of aesthetics in early America, as well as of its archive. Klein will tell the story of how eating emerged as an aesthetic activity over the course of the eighteenth century and how it subsequently transformed into a means of expressing both allegiance and resistance to the dominant Enlightenment worldview. Accounts of the enslaved men and women who cooked the meals of the nation’s founders—from Thomas Jefferson’s emancipation agreement with his enslaved chef to Malinda Russell’s Domestic Cookbook, the first African American-authored culinary text of its kind--help show how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States.