Modern Fare draws from the archives and methods of cultural, intellectual, labor, and food history. With a primary focus on the 1890s, each of the five chapters charts major shifts from Reconstruction into the twentieth century. The structure takes cues from gastronomic science and critical food studies, tracing various stages of production and consumption in the food system: agriculture, industry, retail and advertisement, food service, and dietary science. The dissertation accelerates the study of food history through a call to acknowledge that how, what, and why individuals purchased and utilized industrial foodstuffs as well as operated food businesses were (1) inextricable from the increasingly precarious positions of the those who grew, processed, sold, and prepared their foods and (2) mediated by political practices and cultural and social belief systems around citizenship and belonging.

The first two chapters focus on the growing distance between middle-class urban consumers and the production of foodstuffs on farms and in factories. Chapter one looks at Nancy Green’s performance of Aunt Jemima in the Agricultural Building at the World’s Fair hand in hand with the budding Populist movement. The proliferation of pastoral and Lost Cause plantation ideals around agrarian life at a time when Black and white farmers faced unprecedented challenges and responded with outstated political activism. The second chapter looks at industrial tourism, arguing that people who came to observe slaughtering operations at Chicago’s Union Stock Yards partook in a practice of “alienated leisure” and adopted a “managerial eye” towards industrial workers. Shocked at the size and speed of modern meatpacking, tourists who wrote about the visits often depicted animals with human-like qualities and the immigrant-majority workforce as machine-like or otherwise subhuman.

From there, the dissertation moves into the consumer spaces of stores and public dining establishments with a particular focus on print materials and popular discourses. The third chapter examines the role of advertisements in crafting a consumer isolated from the interests and day-to-day realities of workers in the food system. Studying advertisements and especially trade cards—popular souvenirs at the World’s Fair, where some were sent as postcards for the first time—alongside changing retail practices, I map the shift in authority over quality and value of goods from small grocers to big corporations. Chapter four argues that middle class diners came to define their social status less in relation to fellow consumers—elite or working class—but to service workers. Meanwhile, waiters, bussers, bartenders, and hotel employees organized into craft unions to fight tipped wages (a legacy of slavery’s afterlives), inhumane hours and expectations, and corrupt managerial practices. The fifth chapter addresses how home economics promoted ideas of difference through diet through the life and work of Ellen Richards. The work of dietary scientists overlapped with exaggeration of racial and ethnic alterity showcased on the Midway Plaisance and had direct ties to the rise of eugenics and race science.

Methodologically, my research brings together a robust array of material from eighteen archival collections across the United States in addition to digitized primary sources. Winterthur Library and the Departments of History and Anthropology at Johns Hopkins have supported this research, which I have presented to the Midwestern History Association, Nineteenth Century Studies Association, and the Organization of American Historians.

My multidisciplinary research in food studies began as an undergraduate student at the University of Richmond. There, I wrote honors theses in History—”Free French ‘gentlemen of couleur’ : reconsidering race, ethnicity, and migration in Philadelphia’s catering industry, 1870-1930“—and in French—”‘Il est bon, aujourd’hui, le boudin’ : la nourriture esthétique et le goût dans le roman naturaliste Zolien.”

Arriving at Johns Hopkins, I dove into Southern foodways through research on the nineteenth-century culinary history of New Orleans. This culminated in a first year paper, “‘Their idea is to establish a genuine creole kitchen’: White Creoles and Black Culinarians in Louisiana’s Lost Cause Cuisine.” Moving from Reconstruction through the end of the nineneenth century—with an eye to Louisiana’s colonial and antebellum history and twentieth-century celebration of Creole culture—the paper concentrated on the life and work of Nellie Murray, a formerly enslaved chef who built a booming catering business in New Orleans in the 1880s. Alongside, I examined the expanding print culture and national discourse around Creole food that went and in hand with the proliferation of Lost Cause mythology. This piece concludes where the dissertation picks up: at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.