Fruits red and purple, sombre and bloomed and black;

Then, the rich fields and beaches of frozen river

We trample bright persimmons, while you kill

Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and Canvasback.

Elinor Wylie1

I ate another apple pie and ice cream, which almost everything eaten all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and delicious it was, of course.

Jack Kerouac2

In October 1998, Jiao-Tong University, editor of China Times Taipei, Taiwan, invited me to write an essay on American food in American literature for presentation at the First International Conference on Food and Literature was held in Taipei in May 1999. I thought I would find many books of secondary sources on this topic. After extensive research and communications network with several professors of American literature at universities in the United States and Canada, I was very surprised to find a printed book on the subject. Not only was there no book on it, also found no single article that directly addresses my argument. The absence of secondary sources, explains why most of the references in this essay are the primary sources. The limitations of time and space to write this further explain why I limited my study of American literature of novels, short stories and poems. I tried to make a representative selection of novelists, short story writers, including writers and poets of almost two hundred years of American literature, of both sexes and a variety of ethnic groups. Why are there so many versions of the main works cited, which limits appointments to the author's name, job title and the inside as the verse, chapter or section and page numbers omitted details of the versions I used. Less best known works, collections and anthologies receive standard citation format.

To bring order to this large amount of material, I created around three themes that I weave what I find American food in American literature: continuity and discontinuity, purity and impurity, and the abundance and scarcity. These three themes are several important truths about the American experience over time to appear as the concerns of their writers too. For example, the great changes wrought in the land and the natives were accompanied by profound and lasting attachments of European eating habits. Moreover, the enormous abundance of natural resources and wealth in America has a longer lasting artificial devastated land and absolute poverty. The greatest American writers like Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck, have repeatedly recognized and sanctioned the two extremes in their plots and characters as they are embodied in everyday life and personality of Americans.

The fact that the creation and production of energy is also consumed resources, time and money has not been a central concern for the environmental movement in the early '50s and early '60s. The fact that the creation and production often led to emotional and physical deprivation less independent beings, including children, animals, women, the poor, and members of ethnic minorities was not even a central concern American writers and critics until the late 60s and early the 50th. Earlier writers felt compelled to produce and reproduce the sensations, impulses, images and characters of the male-oriented, individualistic creation and production in his writings. As a result, many of the facts of life such as eating, drinking, digesting, and excreting nutrients were systematically absent, implicit, polished or ignored.

Fortunately, there are many cases of food in American literature and shown some interesting patterns and features. I created three areas of focus such models and characteristics: continuity and discontinuity, purity and impurity, and the abundance and scarcity. First, I briefly describe the content and justification for each item and then proceed with the literary material that explains in detail and is illuminated by each subject.

A. Continuity and discontinuity. The first European settlers on the east coast of the United States experienced several break and started to create another. Teeming cities of European agricultural land have come to the vast and sparsely populated areas, forests, mountains and valleys. Companies rigidly intolerant 16th century many and 17 in Europe came to a country whose business, indigenous peoples, were completely unknown and closed. From life of poverty and the shortage came to a land that gradually aware of resources and wealth beyond your wildest dreams. As an old established areas in Europe, which had long since been tamed by the sword, the plow, the cross and the crown came to the wilderness that seemed oblivious to the greatness and traditions of European civilization.

Within these discontinuities have also created instability in the lives of indigenous peoples, war, trade and intermarriage. In the natural cycles of life of the new land, have also begun to generate activities discontinuity invasive registration, agriculture, mining, urbanization, hunting and fishing. The cultivation of the extremes

devices become of American life began at this time. There were Americans who loved the desert and how the Indians and paid, like many of its European way possible. There were Americans who hate the desert and the native mode and have tried to change or them or destroy them. The newest among the first settlers insisted on the continuation of religions and European languages, official protocols, forms and social customs and all that food that can give the new world, such as bread, or sent from Europe without the deterioration, such as tea.

The natives fell the first waves of most Europeans increasingly large, of which he firmly believed that the only good Indian is a dead Indian. For example, it is estimated that in 1600 there were approximately 10,000,000 people living in the different groups or tribes throughout the Americas. In 1900, as part of an official policy of the Government of the United States of extermination, which together had fallen to about 500,000. The impact of the new inhabitants of the earth has been no less powerful. In 1600, most of the lands east of the Mississippi River and west of the Rocky Mountains was covered with wood and mixed hardwood forests. In 1990, less than 3% of the original trees remain standing.

Beyond the clash of Europeans and indigenous peoples, the growing population of Americans to cultivate the land for crops, especially cotton and snuff, which is sold to a growing consumer population in Europe, has provided a labor market human-slaves. The slave trade was initiated by the Dutch experienced sailor and persecuted by almost all Western European countries, has created great instability in many aspects of African life that are beyond the scope of this essay. But the import of African slaves who created a whole new wave of Americans, for two hundred years, subject to the conditions of hunger around the plantation, who invented and innovative gourmet material for them. His creativity has helped in many different types of foods Americans typically like Chitlins, Verdi, and a range of foods targeting the marshy area of Louisiana known as Cajun food. Along with original contributions of indigenous peoples to the diets of early settlers and corn as pioneers, some of these foods that last longer than the institution of slavery was also found its way into American literature.

B. The purity and impurity. The first settlers to the East Coast of America brought a deep fear of hell and a deep desire to cleanse your life of all factors that have hindered the practice of true Christianity. True Christianity means to them a literal reading of the Bible and a literal interpretation of human social life around the principles and teachings of the Bible. Red, for them, was the devil's color, the color of evil and the color of indigenous peoples. Black, were pure white and pure colors of your choice.

The Americans who loved nature, however, quickly approved the use of different colors animal skins for clothing and natural dyes to color cloth or leather. Historical accident that is not simply that the American cultural revolution of the 60s has taken violently colored clothing, vehicles, hair, and a significant language as clear and dramatic against the dark suit, white shirt, tie and dark shoes with dark figures institutions. There is a historical accident that the beatniks and hippies, has come out for food that differed greatly in flavor, color, smell, taste and texture of white bread, roast beef, potatoes, oats, milk and tea. It E 'also a landmark case that some of the most influential writers of this period, as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, has found a deep and lasting inspiration of literature and food of the lands and peoples far beyond the U.S. coastline.

C. Abundance and scarcity. From 1895 to 1915, some transfer of 23,000,000 immigrants to the United States. These people came from all over Europe. They left the living conditions characterized by poverty, political instability and oppression and the lack of any improvement opportunities. America was a land that promised to fulfill their dreams of prosperity, wealth, abundance and freedom come true. Many of these immigrants made their fortunes in America, then returned with them to their families in Europe. However, many stayed in the U.S., their families, who had begun to contribute and flavors, colors and flavors of an increasingly diverse scene. This period of intensive migration has seen the beginning of neighborhoods in big cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. These were ethnic enclaves for the Italians, Poles, Germans, Jews, Blacks, and trying to find an alternative to the defeated militarily, but racism is still strong for their former masters in the south, or other persons whose identity always brought the group special foods that have been amplified by the increasing scale of American life.

At the same time, the rapid growth of large-scale production in factories that employ tens of thousands of immigrants who were poorly paid and allowed only a minimal education beyond the context of its European origins, processed some of these neighborhoods in first quarters and American ghettos. Very low wages, no social services, the waves of unemployment and the growing burden of large families and newcomers often as many of these new Americans to the brink of malnutrition, hunger and even starvation. Abundance and scarcity began to appear as poles of an oscillation driven not by socio-economic institutions such as slavery obvious, but the beliefs, prejudices and attitudes about the superiority and inferiority of different types of people, along with well-established models access and lack of access to resources. The negative impact of the First World War was followed by the euphoria of the positive mad 20. The decade of unprecedented prosperity and national expansion, was followed by the Great Depression of the 30s. America is clearly moving to the forefront of a world order whose extremes ranging from the genocide of the population explosion, hunger and rotting of surplus feet consumed in the filthy mud nail satin shoes polished marble Poland .

A first look at the issue of continuity and discontinuity can be seen by comparing the two quotations at the beginning of this essay. Elinor Wylie lived 1885-1928. Jack Kerouac lived between 1922-1969. The ripe fruit looks like an edible food from a tree in Wylie's poetry and as an ingredient of the cake in Kerouac's novel. Wylie cherries and peaches are closer to nature, the natural state of Kerouac apple pie in the oven. Wylie poetry rooted means the first European settlers on land that has provided plenty of food. Kerouac's novel means concern of Americans, whose urban food had become an interesting need.

Poetry Wylie mean abundance and therefore the value of magnitude, without the addition of speed played a role in the life of Kerouac's character Dean Moriarty.

In fact, Dean Moriarty was based on the true man, Neal Cassady. In 1964, I lived in Palo Alto, California, after leaving Stanford University to try my hand at writing fiction and poetry. I met a beautiful young woman who was a student at Stanford and has been invited to a party. The party was in a house in East Palo Alto, which has always been known as a place for nonconformists and beatnik. Part of many people that neither my friend and I did not know much wine. It also shows some very unusual. At one point during the game we were drinking wine in the small kitchen light. In a tumult of laughter, people talking, a young man with a radiant smile and laughing call, whose feet seemed barely able to stay on the floor, clouds, and flew around the room while the man who had Guests at the party introduced him as Neal Cassady. He recognized me and left another door. I've never seen more of him, but still has a vivid impression of light and velocity also appears to have given Kerouac.

The continuity between poetry and fiction Kerouac Wylie indicated by the American saying: " 'American as apple pie!" Another kind of continuity is also where the verse after the one quoted by Wylie's poetry is considers:

Even the Puritan marrow of my bones

There is something in this richness that I hate.

I love the look, austere, immaculate,

Monotones landscapes drawn in pearly.

There's something in my blood, which has

Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,

A trickle of water, a wave hit Milky

Transmission through sloping pastures fenced with stones. 4

Overall, this verse and mentioned at the beginning of this essay spectacular display all three themes. There is continuity and discontinuity between the doctrines of a religious puritanism European heritage, which highlighted the great worldly success, but as a small screen possible world. One of the most important contributions of Max Weber to understand the modern Protestant view is its clear definition of the conflict between Protestantism on the principles of getting rich in the sense of being in favor of God and the display of humility only for the rest of the world without the display of material that pietistic, the Puritans, the Luddites and many other Protestant groups found so repugnant in Catholicism.

Weber argues convincingly, I think, that the Puritan, like every rational type of asceticism, tried to turn a man [sic] to maintain and act on their motives constants, especially those that teach themselves itself against emotions. "5 The purpose of this activity was to a certain kind of life, free from all worldly temptations and all the details dictated by the will of God, and therefore, to be sure of his own rebirth [in heaven after the last sentence] by external signs manifested in their daily behavior. "6 In the Bible and all religious literature, success in difficult tasks, is a clear sign of divine favor. For Protestants, these signs do not guarantee salvation, but are closest to a guarantee that a Protestant can get. In fact, that "God has blessed his chosen through the success of his work was … undeniable … for the Puritans. "7 This doctrine that asceticism combined with success in places the Protestant world strives to be the driving force behind the religious and the great creations of capitalism and the accumulation of material wealth that occurred in modernity. But the fact remains that this combination can be a rhythm, an oscillation, a confusion or conflict. This combination clearly has much more substance to our historical themes of abundance and scarcity and purity and impurity.

An example of condensate oscillation between wealth and the austerity of American Puritanism can be seen in a brief passage from the novella, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Feather by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). This passage also highlights the way that food and food-related activities have been treated by many of the greatest writers in American men, as an inevitable necessity, but of little interest, even in an imaginary environment " ; The table was well located abroad. E 'was loaded with plate, and more laden with delicacies. The profusion was absolutely barbaric. There was enough meat to Anakim been held. Never in my life, I had witnessed so rich, so useless expenditure of the good things of life. '8

The tension between the narrator and his guests in Poe's story echoes the tension between the narrator and protagonist of On the Road. The mention of Jack Kerouac is part of the first-person narrative of the novel, Sal Paradise, the support, the secondary character based on Kerouac himself. For the duration of his trip hitchhiking across the country, living in the apple pie and ice cream. This diet is reflected not just poverty, Sal, but is also clearly in the novel an American tradition that continues to de-emphasize the world body, physical or material. The discontinuity, however, occurs between the naturalness of the fruit in the poetry of Wylie and the impersonal, processed foods eaten that Sal Paradise. Another discontinuity is manifested in the fact that Sal is the consumption of food on the street, running at high speed, while Wylie has painted a picture of humans in the trees by their very nature can not move from where you are.

Wylie poetic image is drawn from her life in New England. Many settlers remained at or near the coast, it allowed them to continue in the seafaring life and occupations practiced in Europe and, since it offers an abundance of food. However, its puritanical ideology often led to the lives that have been experienced to the extent that the abundance of Wylie as "cold silver on a sky of slate. "Another poet, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), born in Massachusetts and raised by his grandparents in Nova Scotia, the eastern regions, the sea Province of Canada. His life in part overlapping Wylie and portraying the spirit of this particular area in terms of food but with the emphasis on the austerity of their diet:

From narrow provinces

fish and bread and tea,

House sea along

when the bay leaves the sea

twice daily and

herring long walks, 9

Moreover, the abundance that hates Wylie also rejected by Kerouac in a low hand, at random, as if time is less than a man dedicated to something as trivial as the food of better quality than a person who was. However, the oscillation between abundance and scarcity appears in Kerouac's novel, the contrast between Sal Paradise and the hero of On the Road, Dean Moriarty.

"… But Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love, did not care one way or another, "so long, I get the OLE lil lil gal there with your legs Tween chub, boy, and 'both time, we eat, the son y'ear me? I'm hungry, I'm hungry, let's eat now! "and we'd rush to eat, which, says Ecclesiastes," and "participation in the sun. ' "(Chapter 1 (italics in original))

It is also certainly worth noting in passing that in both writers, differentiated by gender, background, and time, there is a strong connection between religion and the food. This community and this continuity will occur in the traditional celebrations of American Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. All the features of the three meals unusually large and long and strong ties with Christians, Protestant background of the first settlers in America, settlers and pioneers. As with body functions, first, to bring the issue of food and literature in the foreground also illuminates the strong presence of Judeo-Christianity in American life and literature. Again, this argument is to be an innovative target for powerful visualization of a wide range of meanings that occur repeatedly and omnipresent in American literature.

In fact, the theological basis of hatred Wylie of "wealth" is the soul Puritan struggle for liberation of all its annexes, the participation and concerns about tangling with the material world. Metaphysics battles are fought on the battlefields of the thumb. In this case, the battle between the powers of ontological metaphysics of good and evil is fought on the battlefield of the empirical relationship between the poet and vegetables, natural fruit. The block shows the fall of man by the hand of a woman. The hatred of "wealth" is therefore a self-hatred that drives women away from the impure nature and more to the purity of intangibles austere, unadorned Protestant soul. The continuity of the human body with nature has gone from the discontinuity of the immaterial soul and body. The abundance of human bodies and souls are moved by the scarcity of the elect, those chosen by God in Protestant teaching the foundations of the world to survive the final decision and live eternally in heaven.

Serious reflection on the relationship between food and literature leads to a variety of meanings behind all the literature, namely, religion. Why? Why write initially served the purpose to transmit the most valuable is the point of view and experience of the group. The most valuable of all is undoubtedly conducive to group survival. All human groups long ago discovered that humans depend on more powers for survival. All human beings need air, water, food, warmth and sleep. Fear, respect, sacrifice and devotion to the powers that govern life, both visible and invisible, is the essence of all ancient religions. The ancient truths and the message of all religions is the dependence of humans on their powers, including the power of reproduction, which is represented in ancestor worship. Religion plays ritualized and pursue this fundamental truth of human dependency. The denial of this dependency can lead to highly innovative creativity and spirituality deeply transformative and for self-destruction and madness. The man can imagine the absolute freedom, but to try to live, as Nietzsche has shown, only leads to self-destruction and madness.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) struggled with insanity throughout his life and ended his life by suicide. The poem opens with the kind of hymn to the natural wealth that we saw in the poetry of Wylie and ends with a similar feeling of empty space cold and silver. The contrast between the words "nothing" and "more" in the first row indicates the tension between the abundance and emptiness. This signifier, which in turn connects to the tension between purity and impurity in the signifier of all, as a desirable and developed as the spiritual and material devoted to the spiritual land. In this poem, these issues are brought back by the concrete, local wild foods and abstract images created that moves the player away from a rich time with a purity absent but implied above or beyond the physical earth:

Moras

Nobody in the street, and nothing, nothing, but more

More information on both sides, but mainly on the right,

A blackberry alley, going down in the books, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, panting. More

Great as the tip of the thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges, fat

Blue with red juice. Those who squander on my fingers.

I had requested a blood brotherhood, but they love me.

To suit my milkbottle, flatten the sides.

Go to overload choughs in black, cacophonous flocks —

Wheeling pieces of paper burned in a burning sky.

His is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

I do not think that the sea appear at all.

The high green meadows shone as if illuminated from within.

I come to a bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

Bluegreen hang their bellies and right panels in a display of China.

The feast of honey from the berries has stunned them and they believe in heaven.

One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,

Ghost hits his clothes in my face.

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me

To meet the northern hills, 'and the face is orange rock

With a view to nothing, but a large space

White and pewter lights, and a roar as silversmiths

Touching and playing an intractable metal. 10

It is no coincidence, in this perspective that Neal Cassady, the person living behind the character Dean Moriarty in Kerouac died of an overdose of heat, polished steel rails of a railway in central Mexico. Drug use among all groups has traditionally been associated with the alignment of personal and group for the great powers to increase the Group's ability to survive. Cut the bonds of traditional religion, drugs have become a way of experimenting with the physical, mental and spiritual life of absolute freedom. The fact that many drugs such as LSD, cocaine, methamphetamine and opium, which the user feels no need of food or other natural support for their existence, shows just how they fit into the attempt to deny dependency and achieve freedom absolute. The discontinuity of the American experience in the field of ancient traditions, the abundance of material wealth and not generally recognized ideal setting for a pure soul, immaterial have worked together to produce the figures in literature as Dean Moriarty who earn their living and death along the border between innovation and self-destruction.

Or to condense our issues in a concise language and distinctively American poetry of William Carlos Williams: "The pure products of America go crazy" (from "On The Road To The Mental Hospital")

Apple pie and ice cream also offer even Kerouac, with the possibility of making a value statement, which clearly shows the greatness of wealth: "I ate apple pie and ice cream was better, I have the deepest in Iowa , the cake bigger, richer ice cream. "(Chapter 3)" better "," deeper "," large "and" rich "to work together to define a value system that was both bigger is better-American romantic depth and wealth. 11

The theme of abundance can be found at all periods of American literature. The by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, for example, a character who is the father "of the Customs, the patriarch, not only of his small team of staff, but I dare say, a respectable body of tide-waiters in the United States was a permanent inspector. "12-The Customs office was the federal government inspects all goods entering the country with the ship and the determination that any rights were to be paid. In the novel, this particular custom-House is located on a quay of the port of Salem, Massachusetts. In this particular character, Hawthorne, one of the most important aspects of the American diet, which also appears several times in their literature, the consumption of large quantities of meat. The inspector had the rare ability to remember details

"The dinner, so had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat …. hear talk of roast meat was acceptable as a pickle or an oyster …. I am always pleased to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, meat and butchers, and the proper methods to prepare the table. Her memories of good humor, but the long royal banquet, seemed to bring the taste of pork and turkey under the nose of the same …. A beef tenderloin, a cut of beef, a pork chop, pork, chicken in particular, or praiseworthy turkey, perhaps adorned his table … should be remembered …. '13

The meat in the American diet can be seen in several ways. One of them is the following table of individual gourmet fast food franchises top thirty companies in the U.S.

Food Type Number of Excess

Chicken 8683

Hamburger / Hot Dog / Roast Beef 29,600

Pizza [usually served with a

beating meat] 11,593

Tacos [usually served with a

stuffed with meat] 3620

Seafood 2630

Pancakes / Waffles [usually eat

bacon,

sausage or ham] 1.63014

Another view of this custom comes from U.S. food given the amount of meat consumption and production in the United States. For example,

"Americans spend about 25 percent of its budget on food of red meat. Per capita consumption of beef in the United States has increased steadily, while that of pork has declined …. Only in Australia, New Zealand and Argentina's per capita consumption in the United States. The United States normally produces about 27 percent of the world's meat. "(Ibid., (13) 190)

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the source of these statistics Compton's Encyclopedia and the 19th-century work of Hawthorne, we can pass the late 20th century. In the 1980s, was published in Fried Green Tomatoes Whistle Stop Cafe, a California writer, Fannie Flagg,. In the first part of the novel, a reproduction of an article in its weekly fictitious town in the southern United States Weems, Flagg describes the basic menu of recently opened Whistle Stop Cafe:

… Breakfast is 5:30-7:30, and you can get eggs, grits, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham and red eye gravy, and coffee ….

For lunch and dinner you can have: fried chicken, pork chops and gravy, catfish, chicken and dumplings, a plate or barbecue, and your choice of three vegetables, biscuits or cornbread and drink and dessert ….

… The vegetables are: creamed corn, fried green tomatoes, fried okra, cabbage or turnip greens, black-Eyed Peas, candied potatoes, beans and beans. 15

Later in the novel, the elements of a special dinner is served to a client that are described as "fried chicken, black-Eyed Peas, turnip greens, fried green tomatoes, cornbread and iced tea. "16

The richness, abundance and purity of the meat in the diet of Americans have also been used by some as a template for other kinds of scarcity and impurity. Sylvia Plath uses the tradition of a big meal of meat on Sunday, as once a week special meeting for American families and often have a large turkey roasting oven, which contrasts with other types of oven:

Canticle of Mary

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.

Fat

Sacrifices its opacity …

A window, holy gold.

The fire makes it precious,

Fire in the same

Melting of tallow heretics,

Expulsion of the Jews.

Float ball thickness

Poland's scar, burn-out

Germany

Do not die.

Gray birds obsess my heart,

Ash mouth, the eyes of ash.

Settle. At the top

Precipice

Emptying a man in space

The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

This is a heart,

This holocaust road

O golden child the world will kill and eat. 17

One of America's most talented and enigmatic contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize, John Ashbery (1927 -), transformed the U.S. wealth in a series of impurities, but not from scarcity, lack of certainty:

Hardly anything grows here,

However, the barns are full of flour,

The sacks of flour stacked to the ceiling.

The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;

Birds darken the sky. Simply

Of that the pot of milk is at night,

We think of him sometimes

At times, always with mixed feelings? 18

Besides the importance and priority of the flesh, Plath's poem and lists of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe continuity in the foreground and the major discontinuity in the American food. Continuity is important is that the early settlers and pioneers, trying to live in a strange land, was developed for agriculture, the first bread made from locally available cereals, especially maize. Wheat and other grains were related to hard to grind by hand and requires a heavy mill complex that the first settlers could not carry with them. Corn became a staple is so important to the early European settlers, as it was for indigenous peoples:

Young, ripe grain was consumed as corn. In winter the skin of the beans were soaked off with lye to make corn. For breakfast and dinner is cooked polenta. Sometimes the dough is fried and served with butter or lard. The most common dish, however, was the hot cornbread. Cooked on a piece of hoe in front of the fire, is called hoe cake. Mixed with water in a stiff batter and covered with hot ash, ash was the cake. From the Dutch oven has been shown to corn or corn bread. Corn cakes were called corn places Dodgers. 19

In the passage from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, both fish and Turkey are mentioned along with pork and chicken. Fish and Turkey were most likely captured and shot in their natural habitat. Pork and chicken were more likely raised and slaughtered in a pet to keep. This combination of beef and wild and domestic animals began with the first settlers and continues to this day. In fact, the pioneers who traveled on foot, horseback and wagon from east to west in the Americas, found an abundance of wild game for meat. Even tried to make familiar, nutritious food for her final journey to their new farm and proceed through periods when the game was not available. A typical charge for an adult traveling by ox cart to the west was:

"… 200 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of pilot bread, 75 pounds of bacon, 10 kilos of rice, 5 pounds of coffee, tea, 2 pounds, 25 pounds of sugar, half a bag of beans, a bushel of nuts , 2 pounds of sodium bicarbonate, 10 kilos of salt, half a bushel of corn flour. And it's good to have half bushel of wheat, and dry land. From a small barrel of vinegar also be taken. '20

In many rural or sparsely populated areas of America, the meat mixture of wild and domestic animals continues today. In Alaska, for example, where I lived many years in one third the space of forty-eight contiguous states in the United States, many people still rely on hunting for a large part of its tender meat. John Haines, past Poet Laureate of the State of Alaska Alaska and poet best known, began homesteading near Fairbanks, Alaska in 1950. I have known personally for many years and read poetry with him on the stage of Loussac Library in Anchorage in 1986. His poetry reflects clearly the dependence on bushmeat could crystallize the issues of wealth and purity of an identification with the predator:

If the new Owl calls

dusk

island in the river,

And not too cold,

I'll wait for the moon

increasing

then take flight and glide

meeting

Do not talk

but hooded against the frost

floating above

alder flats, searching.

Brown eyes

And then we will sit

in the shade and spruce

Pick the bones

mice negligent

while drifting over the moon

Asia

and the murmur of the river

in its bed of ice.

And when you get up in the morning

extremities

that party, without a sound,

satisfied fleet

house, as

awake in the cold world. 21

Long before any European or other Haines settled in Alaska, however, Indians have long lived in the flesh of animals that can kill and prepare. In fact, when French explorers first met and spent time with the natives of the north of what is now Canada, who were so impressed by the dominance of raw meat in their diet, which they called "Esquimeaux" which French is "raw meat eaters. "In addition, the coasts of Canada and Alaska, however, millions of salmon in large rivers, are captured and used by local people. These Americans already eat salmon after being smoked or cooked, as mentioned in the following poem, "Keep # 2" by Andrew Hope, III (1949 -), Sitka, Alaska:

Dog salmon

Shiny

Evening Sun

Marea

Wash the beach

Shine Dog Salmon

Flash Silver Purple

Reach

Lifting of a large

For the tail

Marea

Wash the beach

Time to eat

Fried Salmon Dog

For dinner22

There are five types of salmon migrating to the fresh waters of Alaska and are not used for food. Each genre has its own name and some types have different names in different parts of Alaska. Thus, the discontinuities in the time of preparation, from raw to cooked-occurred with discontinuities in the time between the practices of the name of the food itself. Salmon dogs are so called because they were once used by thousands of channels that many dogs in Alaska Natives, invoked by the transport during the long winters. This type of salmon, however, is perfectly fit for human consumption and now that many indigenous peoples in Alaska travel with only one motor vehicle in all seasons, salmon dogs have become a staple of the human nutrition.

These discontinuities in touch with the difference in meaning the ingredients of your first meal and the second date of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which is the regional variation in food. Bran, for example, is a kind of grain or corn polenta or coarsely ground grains that. Crane is considered by most Americans to be a food characteristic of South America. His public presence in northern cities is usually the result of north and south of opening restaurants that feature cuisine from South America. Traditional regional foods of America are associated with north-east sea cod, Key Lime pie related to the cuisine of the Florida Keys, tortillas and red beans cooking related to Hispanic heritage derived Southwest States United and Northwest salmon associated with Alaska and kitchens.

One of the Alaska Native American poets, Charlie Blatchford, a Yupik Eskimo who I knew personally and who is now dead, said the case of meat just one of his few poems published:

Forgotten words

Our language, from what I know,

was prepared

with wisdom and grace.

The skin was so rich

and is on one side.

The viscera were carefully

exposed.

Its sweet flesh

ready to party.

A meat, a staple of life,

consumed with satisfaction …

Sedatives our need

new words. 23

In the hands of contemporary poets who are not Native Americans, as Charlie Blatchford, the meat continues to any food substance and is often joined by some kind of substance which can serve as a separate argument next food intoxicants like alcohol and drugs. In Whitman, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and other writers, wine, beer and other mind-altering substances that often accompany food, especially meat. This range has a significant history of consumption in any literature that is as old as interesting and important as the meat and other foods. In fact, putting in the best interest of food has refocused a current in the life of all peoples, which would be a major topic of research, discussion and writing. In many poets, the connection between meat and the wine is made briefly, as in the fourth stanza of "asylum" Herman Fong (1963 -):

During meals are just eating,

take small pieces of meat,

most of the fat, and a few drops of red wine. 24

A concentration on the details of daily life that characterizes the style of many American writers, both older and younger. John Steinbeck, Nobel laureate and one of the voices of America for literary excellence of the 20th century, often for his characters and settings of everyday life of people in California. Some of his best written and most popular novels like Cannery Row, Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, and collection of short stories, long valley, the characters and settings based on the California coast, south and central. Tortilla Flats characteristics of the life of "civilians" who lived near the central coastal city of Monterey. According to Steinbeck, a civilian, was a mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican and Caucasian variety Bloods "(Chapter 1). The main character, Danny, and their friends, listen to a ship that sank off the nearby coast. Go to sea and salvage scrap of wreckage and then sell it. The sale puts five dollars in possession of Danny, an unusually large amount of money:

The five dollars that were saved from fire in the pocket of Danny, but now know what to do with it. He and Pilon went to market and bought seven pounds of hamburgers and a bag of bread and onions and a large piece of candy. Paul of Mary and Jesus went to Torrelli to two liters of wine, and not a drop is drunk on the way home, either. (Chapter 5)

Part of the genius of Steinbeck as a writer and one aspect of his stories, which distinguish them from other writings of America is the deliberate use of food and activities for the characterization and plot development. Tortilla Flats is an example of his style, and continue to demonstrate the importance of meat in the American diet in all geographic regions and ethnic groups:

Danny was very simple activities. I went to the back door of a restaurant. "Do you have stale bread that I give my dog" asked the cook. And while the man was innocent of food packaging, Danny stole two slices of ham, four eggs, a lamb and a flyswatter.

"I'll pay a bit of time," he said.

"There is no need to pay for the waste. I throw it away if nothing is done. "

Danny felt better by the time theft. If this was his way of feeling, on the surface was innocent. Torelli returned to [the wine merchant], exchange of four eggs, lamb flyswatter and a glass of brandy and water retreated into the forests to cook dinner. (Chapter 1)

The special meal with onion is the first step to Tortilla Flats, a small detail that indicates a wide range of local produce in the southwestern United States by early settlers colonized by Spain not England. Among the burgers and onions are the continuity of the ease of preparation and consumption of meat and the discontinuity of the regional cuisines of America. Another major voice in American literature, that of William Carlos Williams, who also picked up this series of signifiers south-west on its way, and one only for that part of America. Besides a keen ear for the particularities that distinguish American English from all other types of English, Williams also had an eye for small details of the place that brought the reader closer to the subject of Williams's writing. The following passage is from "The Desert Music" which is based on Williams' travel to the southwestern United States and stay in the city, at that time, Hispanics are more of the Caucasus:

- Paper flowers (for the saints)

brick red clay utensils, dirty

silver blue,

The dried peppers, onions, ownership of the press, children

clothing. desert place, but all

Indians squatted in a few

unnoticing booths (not believe)

as if he had not slept. 25

The use of activity around the food plot and character development is also part of the style of another American writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Faulkner (1897-1962). Spread of deserts and valleys of the south-west of the lush forests, swamps and prairies of the Deep South, American literature, like literature perennial all languages, has always insisted that the physical location and its features are part of history. In the following passage of light in August, Faulkner uses the attempt of Mrs. Joe McEachern to feed a reflector for both characters:

I was so relaxed, back, hands crossed on his chest like an effigy of the grave when he heard again the feet up the narrow stairs ….

Without turning his head the boy heard Mrs. McEachern fatigue slowly down the stairs. He heard her approach on the ground. His eyes, but after a while its shadow and fell off the wall where you could see, and was carrying something. "It was a food tray. She put the tray on the bed. He had once seen. He had not moved. "Joe" he said. He did not move. "Joe" he said. He saw that his eyes were open. She did not touch it.

"I'm not hungry," he said.

She did not move. He stood, hands folded in her apron. She did not seem to see, either. It was like talking to the wall beyond the bed. "I know what you think. Not that. He did not say to you. That was me that thought of doing so. He did not know. Is not it a food that has been sent. "He did not move. His face was calm as an engraving, looking at the slanted roof of the table. "You have not eaten today. Sit down and eat. It was he who told me that for you. He does not know. I waited until he was gone and then me. "

He joined then. As she saw him out of bed and took the tray and into a corner and flipped it over, dumping the dishes and food, and all on the floor. He then returned to bed, taking the empty tray as a custody and reduce bearer surplice vest which had been bought by a man to wear. She was watching him now, even though he had not moved. His hands were still wrapped in her apron. I went back to bed and lay on his back, eyes wide open and even on the ceiling. He saw his shadow, motionless, formless, slightly bent. Then he left. It looked, but could feel his knees in a corner, pick up the pieces in the drawer. Then she left the room. It's been a lot more then. 26

Faulkner lived and wrote in the Bible Belt. The importance of the Bible of the Christian fundamentalists of most people in the South were Protestants who put his own spirit of austerity and nostalgia for a paradise beyond the simplicity and peace so strongly articulated by the writers of Wylie and New England as Bishop. Even if the food is often the work of Faulkner, rarely fully processed or lost. Usually serves to highlight the paucity of physical and moral condition of people living slightly outside a society in which wealth rarely appears in his work:

Judith. She lived alone. Perhaps he had lived alone since Christmas Day last year and then last year, so that within three years and then four years ago when Sutpen left now … lived in solitude, but nothing, what with Ellen in bed in the room with the shutter, which require the constant attention of a child, looked surprised that ignorance and passive death, and she (Judith) and not Clytie and maintain such a garden to keep alive, and Wash Jones, who live abandoned and decaying in the area of the river bottom fishing, that Sutpen had built after the first wife, Ellen-entered his house and the last bear and the Deer Hunter hit the streets, where it now allows you to wash and her daughter and granddaughter to live, doing heavy garden work and the provision of Ellen and Judith and Judith then with fishing and hunting occasionally, even enter the house today, which went to Sutpen never had come closer to the scuppernong arbor behind the kitchen, where on Sunday afternoon, he and Sutpen drink a demi-John and the bucket of water Washington took power almost a mile away …. "27

Another indication of Faulkner's genius is his ability to see an event as routine as ordering a couple of pastries and coffee from a waitress who secretly want some kind of relationship, the potential fine, the game deep. Faulkner preferably by food shortages and food shortages still shows low purity and were inevitable in their social and historical. In the following passage, Faulkner describes Joe, just bring the kids in the passage, which came to a restaurant to be attended by the employee, in clear terms that bring into play the signifiers of purity and intangible dimension and food onerous as a binder necessary:

He believed that men in the background … laughed at him. So he stood on the sidewalk, looking at the coin clutched in the palm of your hand. Do not see the waitress until her hands became too great in the counter in front of him and – Can you see the model on the bib of her dress and apron and a two-handed bigknuckled situated on the edge of the counter as a full stop, as if it were something he had taken from the kitchen. "Coffee and cake," he said.

His voice was depressed, was empty. "Coco Chocolate lemon. "

In proportion to the height from which his voice came with his hands could not be handsfree. "Yes," said Joe.

The hands did not move. The article did not move. "Coco Chocolate lemon. What kind. "For others, must have seemed very strange. Facing each other across the dark spot, greasecrusted and frictionsmooth must have seemed a bit "as if in prayer: the countryfaced young, clean clothes spartan, with a clumsiness that invested him with a quality out of this world and innocent, and the woman opposite him, dejected, still pending, due to its smallness involved in the same way that the quality of his, something beyond the flesh. His face was highboned weak. The meat was very tense in all its