Making Modern Fare draws from the archives and methods of cultural, intellectual, labor, and food history and engages with interdisciplinary scholarship in American Studies, literature, Black studies, environmental studies, history of science, and women and gender studies. 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 Swallow. 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 and Nineteenth Century Studies Association and look forward to bringing to the Organization of American Historians in 2025.

My multidisciplinary research in food studies began as an undergraduate student at the University of Richmond. In addition to exploring food culture and food systems in coursework across the History, Political Science, and Languages, Literatures, and Cultures departments, I was fortunate to have two summers of fully-funded independent research. After sophomore year, I conducted bilingual, interdisciplinary comparative research on bread cultures between the United States and France. This experience clarified my interest in the methods and archives of History, and the next summer I worked on research towards my History honors thesis, “Free French ‘gentlemen of couleur’ : reconsidering race, ethnicity, and migration in Philadelphia’s catering industry, 1870-1930.” Here, I argued that three prominent Black catering families—the Augustins, Baptistes, and Deutreuilles—navigated their liminal position in segregated Philadelphia as mixed-race French Creoles to the effect that they were able to transcend social divisions and eclipse racial biases while preserving a multi-racial, transnational identity predicated on their trade. The archival research focused on hundreds of draft pages of an unpublished manuscript on the family history by direct descendant and accomplished journalist Bernice Deutreuille Shelton. Simultaneously, I earned honors in French with my thesis “‘Il est bon, aujourd’hui, le boudin’ : la nourriture esthétique et le goût dans le roman naturaliste Zolien.” Here, a close reading of Le Ventre de Paris, L’Assommoir, and Germinal for language around food led me to the argument that in Zola’s naturalist novels, aesthetics of food and taste challenge conventions of aesthetic theory, ultimately in order to reenforce a hierarchical system of social class.

Arriving at Johns Hopkins, I carried my interests in Franco-American food cultures and Black culinary entrepreneurs into 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.