Here is a taste of the presentation content.....

 

On New Year’s Day 1836, President Andrew Jackson received a momentous culinary gift, a great cheese, 2 feet thick, 11 feet in circumference, and weighing 1400 pounds. It was created by in the summer of 1835 by Col. Thomas S. Meacham, a prosperous dairy farmer with lands in Sandy Creek near Lake Ontario north of Syracuse New York. The mammoth cheese was sent by boat along the Erie Canal, to Albany, New York City and on to Washington. It was a public sensation. James Fenimore Cooper wrote of the same area of New York only two generations before as a wilderness that only gradually was being transformed. What happened? 

 

The small ears of corn grown on the land by Native Americans have become row upon row of cornflakes on supermarket shelves. The immense seas of grass and the animals that they supported are now big farms with regular rows of soybeans, corn and wheat that feed the world. But how did this happen and why? What happened is the history of food in America, where it comes from and how it has changed over time. 

 

From the first Native Americans to modern industrial farmers, people have shaped the North American continent and its climate based on the foods they wanted and the crops and animals they raised. This talk looks at the food people have served up from their kitchens or eaten in public dining places throughout American history, as well as considering the impact of technical innovation and industrialization on the creation of modern American food systems.