The Pursuit of Hungriness: 250 Years of American Food Innovation
America’s food history is short, compared with the ancient cuisines of the world. Some of its greatest hits were imported, and not everyone loves its outsize influence on the rest of the globe. But one thing is clear: 250 years of eating, cooking and innovating have produced a distinct and abundant culinary culture.
With help from several food historians and writers, we’ve developed a decade-by-decade tour of the most important dishes, books, movements and inventions that have shaped the national diet.
Like anyone who declares they’ve found the best burger or the perfect restaurant, we are prepared for a fight over our selections. See you in the comments section. At the end of this article, you can cast your vote on the next big innovation.
1770s The Johnnycake
Hunger is an unexpected enemy during the Revolutionary War, when more than twice as many soldiers die of malnourishment than fall in combat. But the troops persevere with the help of a simple Native American recipe of corn and water cooked over a fire. It’s one of several Indigenous practices adopted by early settlers, like smoking food, using fish as fertilizer and growing the “three sisters” — corn, beans and squash — together.
1780s Mac and Cheese
When Thomas Jefferson travels to Paris in 1874, he brings along James Hemings, an enslaved man who has worked at Monticello since childhood. Hemings studies French cooking, and when they return, he cooks at formal events hosted by Jefferson. One dish he serves is macaroni pie, an early version of macaroni and cheese made with noodles boiled in milk, layered with cheese and baked in a Dutch oven. Like Hercules Posey, another enslaved chef who cooked at the highest levels of society, Hemings, who becomes a free man in 1796, helps a young nation assert its culinary identity.
1790s A Revolutionary Cookbook
Americans are still cooking a lot like Brits when Amelia Simmons publishes “American Cookery,” the first cookbook written by an American, for Americans. It marks a break from the Old World expressed through food. Although she includes plenty of British dishes, the book introduces recipes for what will become Thanksgiving staples: pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce, which Simmons pairs with turkey.
1800s The Ice Trade
Food options are limited if you don’t live on or near a farm. Meat must be heavily salted, dried or smoked to keep from rotting. Milk spoils within hours. Fresh produce wilts in transit. Frederic Tudor, who will become known as “the Ice King,” starts harvesting ice from New England rivers and lakes, packs it tightly in sawdust and ships it around the globe, revolutionizing food preservation. At first, ice is a luxury item or a necessity in hospitals, but by the late 19th century, homes have ice boxes. The wooden crates, lined with zinc or tin, are filled by regular ice deliveries.
1810s Canned Food
Another leap for feeding a growing nation: The first American food-canning factory opens in New York City, using a technique developed in France. It allows food to be harvested in rural areas and transported by boat or rail hundreds of miles away without spoiling, and lays the foundation for the industrial food-supply chain. (Until the can opener was invented, in the 1850s, people used hammers and chisels, axes or just threw the can in the fire to melt the lead soldering.)
1820s The Dawn of Fine Dining
In what is now New York City’s financial district, the Swiss-Italian brothers Giovanni and Pietro Delmonico open Delmonico’s, a tiny pastry shop that will become the first à la carte restaurant in America. Its printed menus and private tables covered in white linen are a novelty at a time when eating in public is usually done at communal tables in taverns or boarding houses. The restaurant creates a safe space for women to dine without a male escort, and raises American cooking to an art form with dishes like baked alaska and Delmonico’s namesake steak, cut thick, cooked to order and basted in butter.
1830s The Graham Cracker
The Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, who preaches that mass-produced food, meat and alcohol overstimulate the body and lead to corrupting sexual behavior, inspires a recipe for a bland, unsweetened cracker made with his coarsely ground whole wheat flour. He encourages people to bake the crackers at home, and his “Grahamite” diet becomes such a national fad that commercial bakers start making them. The cracker lays the groundwork for countless, lucrative American health-food kicks and wellness movements.
1840s The Arrival of Chinese Food
At the peak of the California Gold Rush, Canton opens in San Francisco. It’s the first Chinese restaurant in America, featuring the diaspora cooking that will evolve into the Chinese American cuisine we know today, when Chinese restaurants can be found in nearly three-quarters of the nation’s counties.
1850s The Automated Harvest
Harvesting wheat by hand requires large crews working for days. But with widespread use of Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper, the task can suddenly be done in hours by fewer hands. Farmers, who can plant and harvest more acreage, have surplus grain to ship to Europe, creating a global market for wheat. Much of the rest goes to feed workers who migrated from rural areas to work in urban factories. The American food system starts its march toward what will become Big Ag.
1860s Mass Immigration
German, Irish and Chinese immigration peaks, to be followed decades later by a second population shift that will eventually bring another 20 million immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe — along with their cooking and food traditions. A century later, another immigration shift will introduce food from countries like Mexico, Vietnam and Korea into the American culinary vernacular.
Coming to America, a Global Spread
It’s hard to imagine the national menu without the foods brought and inspired by immigrants, and now served in every corner of the country: pizza, hot dogs, chop suey, tacos, gyros, fried chicken, injera, pierogi, sushi, samosas, bagels, kimchi and lager, to name just a few.
1870s The Refrigerated Rail Car
Although grain, live cattle and other food can be shipped across the country by rail or waterways, anything perishable has limited distribution until the first refrigerated rail car comes along. Packed with ice harvested from frozen lakes, it allows meatpackers like Swift and Armour to ship beef nationwide, and spawns the modern meatpacking industry.
1880s Coca-Cola
The chemist John Stith Pemberton is happily selling his wine tonic infused with kola nuts and coca leaves when his city, Atlanta, votes to ban alcohol. He pivots, removing the wine but leaving in the caffeine and the cocaine (almost all of which is removed by 1903 and completely gone by 1929). Marketed as the ultimate “temperance drink,” Coca-Cola rides a wave of local anti-alcohol movements and the late-19th-century soda fountain craze. The company becomes the model for what M.B.A.s call “omnipresent marketing,” slapping its distinctive red logo on mirrors, calendars and other everyday objects.
1890s Home Economics
The notion that domestic work should be viewed as a profession requiring scientific efficiency, proper nutrition and structured kitchen design is given a formal name at a conference in Lake Placid, N.Y. The event is organized by women in academics, science and the culinary arts who regard the kitchen as the first line of defense against disease and social decay.
1900s The Pure Food and Drug Act
Inspired by “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s stomach-churning exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry, President Theodore Roosevelt orders his own investigation, and pushes through the first major federal laws, including the Federal Meat Inspection Act, that regulate the safety of the nation’s food supply.
1910s Piggly Wiggly
The Memphis grocery store is the first in the country to allow customers to stroll the aisles and select their own food, rather than hand clerks a written list and wait while they gather the goods and tally the bill. It is also the first to use open shelves, list the price of each item and create checkout lanes staffed by cashiers.
1920s Sliced Bread
A machine that can slice and wrap loaves in seconds, invented by the engineer Otto Rohwedder, debuts in 1928 at the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. Within two weeks, sales jump by more than 2,000 percent, and a phrase is coined that will endure as the American linguistic yardstick for innovation.
1930s ‘The Joy of Cooking’
This seminal cookbook by a Missouri homemaker forever changes how recipes are written. Its warm, conversational, step-by-step style of instruction creates a template on which food blogs, cooking shows and videos will be built.
1940s Cheetos
To feed its millions of troops in World War II, the military turns to food science. Orange juice is reduced to concentrate, potatoes are dried into easily reconstituted flakes and Cheddar is dehydrated and pulverized. But the war’s end leaves mountains of surplus cheese powder. Charles Elmer Doolin, riding high on the success of the Fritos he created 16 years earlier, fries extruded puffs of cornmeal and coats them in the powder. Dozens of other food companies take advantage of food technology developed for the war effort, ringing in the heyday of ultraprocessed foods.
1950s McDonald’s
Ray Kroc’s first franchise opens in 1955 in a Chicago suburb. Kroc decrees that every burger patty will be exactly 1.6 ounces, condiments will be applied with a calibrated gun and garbage cans will be emptied the moment they look full. Consistency and automation will help American fast food grow to an $800 billion global business.
Chain, Chain, Chain
The country’s car culture and midcentury baby boom drive an explosion of roadside restaurants that cater to families seeking a quick, inexpensive meal.
1960s Soul Food
Since the 1910s, Black families have been migrating north from the South, bringing recipes for dishes like collard greens, fried chicken and black-eyed peas. The term “soul food” emerges with the civil-rights movement, as that style of cooking takes on added significance as an expression of Black American culture.
1970s Farm-to-Table
Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’s French-influenced restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., pioneers a culinary movement based on local, organic ingredients and the people who grow them, propelling the spread of farmers’ markets and eventually improving school lunches. The restaurant is essential to the rise of California Cuisine and, later, regional food in America.
1980s Lean Cuisine
Stouffer’s low-calorie frozen dinners embody a new era that turbocharges America’s diet culture, arriving as obesity rates are climbing, home cooking is declining as more women enter the work force, and Americans are looking for more sophisticated culinary choices in the freezer case. The marketing success of elevated diet food paves the way for Snackwell’s cookies and other portion-controlled, low-fat or low-carb products.
1990s Food Network
Although public television has already produced stars like Julia Child and Martin Yan, a fledgling network dedicated solely to food and cooking turns chefs like Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay into superstars and starts the media careers of Rachael Ray and Ina Garten. A flood of cooking shows, competitions and food documentaries follow.
2000s Organics
The U.S. Department of Agriculture establishes national organic standards, a set of regulations dictating how food must be grown, raised and processed to be sold with the USDA Organic label. The rules follow decades of pressure from environmentalists, small farmers and parents with eco-anxiety. What begins as an anti-establishment movement to promote health will generate $70 billion in food sales by 2025.
2010s The Delivery App
Four Stanford University students invent DoorDash in 2013. Given a huge boost by Covid shutdowns, DoorDash and competing apps will be used at least once a week by almost 30 percent of Americans and occasionally by another 44 percent.
2020s
Just halfway through this decade, Americans are being bombarded by scientific and technological advancements that promise to radically change the way they eat. More than 12 percent of the population suppresses hunger with the jab of a needle, and others are experimenting with food and supplements to maximize health. Algorithms spark viral cooking trends and run the restaurant industry. Robots cook. Scientists can make real dairy and meat from cells. And who knows what impact artificial intelligence will have?
Special thanks to the journalist and culinary historian Laura Shapiro; Ashley Rose Young, a food historian, author and curator of American history at the Library of Congress; Paula Johnson, the curator of food history at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History; Helen Zoe Veit, an author and professor of history at Michigan State University; and Leni Sorensen, a scholar, historian and food provisioner.
