Monday, May 10, 2021, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

Lauren Klein, Associate Professor, Departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods

“An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States”

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 Lauren Klein’s recent book, An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)—will reveal 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 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.