America Eats!

America Eats! is one of the great works to have emerged from the files of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a part of the Great Depression’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). The FWP’s editor and chief motivator behind the project, Katharine Amend Kellock, was adamant that America Eats! be “an account of group eating as an important American social institution: its part in development of American cookery as an authentic art and in the preservation of that art in the face of mass production of foodstuff and partly cooked food and introduction of numerous technological devices that lessen labor of preparation but lower the quality of the product.”