“The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.”

I was listening to Chef Rob Ferris talk to our new students at Platt College about the history of cooking and some of the great chefs in history such as Careme and Escoffier. This morning early I read a great article written by the James Beard Society on the State of American Cuisine. It is a very well written article that makes one think about the food we call American.

James Beard Society - The State of American Cuisine

The question of whether or not America can lay claim to a bona fide cuisine has

been asked since the founding of our nation. Even though the first cookbook published on our shores after the American Revolution—American Cookery written by

Amelia Simmons in 1796—is full of recipes that seem French or British, historians

generally consider it a publisher’s attempt to use food as a means to fuse a national

identity. Almost two centuries later, when James Beard wrote his own American

Cookery in 1972, the jury was still out on whether American cookery equated to

American cuisine. Today, food scholars, such as anthropologist Sidney Mintz and

sociologist Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, continue to debate the question of whether

America has a coherent national identity as it relates to food.