Three Squares: Mealtime in America [rebroadcast]

BackStory

Education, History

4.5 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2015

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Three square meals a day. Three to five servings of fruits and vegetables, two to three servings of milk, yogurt, or cheese. Avoid fats and sugar. Red meat in moderation. We’re used to hearing these kinds of instructions. But eating isn’t just about finding the perfect nutritional balance—it has profound social implications, too. On this episode of BackStory, the Guys recover from their Thanksgiving feasts by looking back over the history of mealtime in America. From Victorian table manners to the school lunch program, how have our ideas about what, when, and how we eat our meals evolved?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Backstory. I'm Ed Ayers.
0:02.3	And I'm Brian Bello. The holiday season revolves around the dining room table.
0:06.7	And as history has shown us, when people sit down to eat, things can get complicated.
0:11.9	Take school lunch, a federal program to feed hungry kids.
0:15.2	It wasn't an easy sell in the south.
0:17.6	They didn't want the federal government to come anywhere near the schools because they really feared
0:22.6	and I think rightly so that the federal government would begin to dismantle their system of segregation.
0:28.7	It would begin to demand some kind of equality.
0:32.0	As for the quality of school lunch, well, let's just say history has seen worse.
0:37.2	Take train food, for example, in the 1860s.
0:40.2	Basically, the food was considered so terrible that the New York Times suggested at one point
0:44.8	there was more danger eating the food than there was from train wrecks and fires in the west.
0:49.7	The history of Mealtime in America. Today on Backstory.
0:59.3	Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities,
1:05.2	the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
1:10.0	This episode was originally broadcast in 2012.
1:14.7	From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is Backstory with the American History Guide.
1:22.5	Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballot, 20th Century Guy and I'm here with Ed Ayers.
1:30.0	The 19th Century Guy. Peter Odoff, our 18th Century Guy, is out this week, which is actually
1:35.9	kind of great just between you and me because this show in particular is one that I want a little
1:40.6	extra share of for myself. Yeah, Ed, today it's all about the history of Meals in America.
1:46.5	And we're going to go ahead and start with, well, an outsider's perspective.
	...

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