What did Americans eat during the Great Depression?

That question is the basis of a new series of essays written by Elizabeth Zanoni, associate professor of history, and graduate students Alexander Bright, Cathryn Janka, Kevin Lopez-Gibbs, Brad Moore, and Jim Wilkerson. The forum, published in September in the international journal Global Food History, started in fall 2019 in Zanoni's class "Edible History: Food and Drink in the United States and Global History".

The essays were inspired by whatamericaate.org, a publicly accessible online searchable archive of Great Depression-era documents related to food history, including the Works Progress Administration's American Eats records, as well as by historian Camille Begin's book Taste of the Nation. Students used the archive to study and debate what constitutes regional and national cuisines, the construction of the historical archive itself, and the culinary skills of average Americans during the Interwar period. The forum was then composed of essays written by the students and additional authors, on the subjects.

The forum allowed students to write on and discuss how food can "become a platform for policing boundaries of race, regionalism, nationalism, gender, and sexuality during the interwar period," Zanoni wrote in the forum.

Additionally, writing for the forum allowed students to research their particular interests.

"Learning about the past has always been fun for me, but I was delighted when Dr. Zanoni introduced me and my fellow students to the study of Food History! She even allowed me an opportunity to 'get weird with it'," said Brad Moore, BA '17 and MA '20. "I came across my topic ('Possum Parties) purely by accident, but with the assistance of Dr. Zanoni and her colleagues in the field, I somehow managed to turn a discussion of two primary sources from the digital archive regarding a peculiar delicacy into an introspective on race and sexuality."