by Matt Siegel
Many of the fruits and vegetables the colonists found, like corn, were native; others, such as figs, lemons, limes, and oranges, had been planted earlier by the Spanish;38 and others still—like the apple—they brought themselves. The first apple seeds arrived39 in the colonies on the Mayflower in 1620, where they would prosper more in a generation than they had in the entirety of apple history. And not because of Johnny Appleseed. Sure, there was a guy named John Chapman, born 1774, who traveled west from Massachusetts planting apple seeds, and his personal impact was significant. But everyone in the colonies was Johnny Appleseed—and they had more than a century’s head start on the actual Johnny. If you were a landowner in the New World, you planted apple trees, and if you were a landowner in Virginia40 or some parts of Ohio,41 this was actually a legal requirement. (In chapter 10, we’ll read how potatoes were similarly subsidized in Europe by threatening citizens with forty lashes or having their ears cut off for refusing to plant them.)
So by the late 1700s, the colonies were growing more apples, and apples of higher quality, than anywhere else in the world and shipping them overseas on a massive scale, providing much of the supply throughout Europe.42 And they weren’t just better but more diverse. Like the colonists themselves, they’d been shaped and transformed by the New World: its soil, its climate, its untamed wilds, and its geographic diversity.
Before 1620, there were no apples in the New World, barring inedible crabapples, and only somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy varieties cataloged in England.43 And thirty-six of those varieties44 had likely been around since the first century, having been cataloged by Pliny the Elder in ancient Rome. So between the years 55 and 1620, there were roughly thirty-four new types of apples documented in Europe. But the colonies gave birth to some seventeen thousand new varieties,45 not including the countless experiments that weren’t particularly appealing or worth cataloging.
Initially, this was due largely to the demand for hard apple cider, which served as not just the national beverage of the colonies but also as a currency for barter,46 the average colonial family generally consuming a few hundred gallons47 of it per year. However, apple pies quickly became a colonial staple, particularly in New England, where the growing season was so short and the winters so long that many fruits were sugared and preserved48 for winter rather than eaten fresh. The fibrous apple held up much better to this than other fruits; whereas softer fruits like raspberries and strawberries lent themselves more to soft jams and pastes, apples could easily be dried and reconstituted months later for pie filling.
So pies, long before Americans invented the McDonald’s drive-through*49 and TV dinners, were the paramount of convenience—well suited to the get-up-and-go lifestyle in the colonies, where you didn’t have servants to cook for you and do your dishes.
“The great beauty of an apple pie breakfast,50 aside from its power to generate indigestion,” writes R. K. Munkittrick in 1891, “lies in the fact that it doesn’t leave behind it a number of dishes thickly incrusted with ham grease to be cracked with a hammer or melted off over a candle.”
Pies were everything that tea wasn’t: hearty, available on demand, suited to travel, untamed, utilitarian, and unpretentious. They kept well, being sealed off from air and preserved with sugar; traveled well, being protected by a crust; and could easily be baked ahead and grabbed in the morning, so they met the demand for convenient, on-the-go meals Americans would become known for. During a time when the British were becoming increasingly proper, placing emphasis on decorum, etiquette, and social hierarchy (one of the reasons tea became popular51 in Great Britain was that coffeehouses were restricted to men), America’s humble pie showed the world a new form of liberty and freedom, unencumbered by pomp and circumstance: a world without limits, wherein women could drink not only coffee for breakfast but hard cider or melted bear fat.
“The pie is an English tradition,”52 writes Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1869, “which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old traditional mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses.”
Among those adaptations was the transformation of pie’s crust; you see, despite there being an abundance of birds and berries, wheat was initially scarce in the colonies,53 particularly in New England, and this forced colonists to literally stretch their crust until it became flaky and thin—making American crusts not just more edible but also more appetizing.
In other words, colonists elevated and transformed pie to the point that it became not just “a great American institution”54 but “the great American institution.”*55
Writes Charles Dudley Warner in 187256, pie was so ubiquitous in the colonies that its absence would have been more noticeable than a scarcity of Bibles.
“This country was founded57 by men who had pie for breakfast, pie for dinner, pie for supper; in addition they usually had a slice or so before going to bed at night,” reads a 1922 editorial in The Nation. “The only time they did not eat pie was when they were asleep, at work, or in church.”
The author then goes on to blame the corruption of American youth on the invention of marshmallow nut sundaes and banana splits and to suggest Lincoln could never have freed the slaves if it weren’t for his habitual indulgence in pie—this from a paper founded to “wage war upon the vices58 of violence, exaggeration and misrepresentation” in the media.
Meanwhile, the English continued to eat beans on toast for breakfast, stuff their pies with pigeon’s blood, and in general treat pie like a second-class citizen; and while American doctors and journalists hailed pie as a cure-all and the elixir of life, the English condemned it as a social disease, declaring, “The present civil strife59 in America is to be looked upon as a hideous nightmare, produced by half a century’s indulgence of an unhallowed appetite for pie.” Again, this is from a medical journal.
In 1865, British journalist George Augustus Sala wrote60 in his diary of America that “the real social curse of the Atlantic States is Pie,” “that an unholy appetite for Pie works untold woes,” and that “the Pie fiend reigns supreme.”
“The sallow faces, the shrunken forms, the sunken eyes, the morose looks, the tetchy temperament of the Northerners,” he writes, “are attributable not half so much to iced water, candies, tough beefsteaks, tight lacing, and tobacco-chewing, as to unbridled indulgence in Pie.”
He went on like this for four pages, later accusing American girls of taking pies to bed with them. The bastard.
Meanwhile, Rudyard Kipling, the British author of The Jungle Book who moved to Vermont in the late 1800s, called New England “the Great Pie Belt”61 and questioned the “moral and physical condition of a people which eats pie for breakfast, pie for dinner, pie for supper.”
Americans, of course, fired back.
In 1884, the New York Times published a biting parody in response to British criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s habit of eating pie for breakfast:
An indiscreet and perhaps malevolent62 person who once breakfasted with the late Ralph Waldo Emerson has revealed the fact that Mr. Emerson was accustomed to eat pie at breakfast. This revelation has naturally caused a very painful sensation, and not a few persons who had hitherto admired what they conceived to be the philosophical ideas expressed in Mr. Emerson’s writings have suddenly discovered that Mr. Emerson was not a philosopher and that his writings are filled with the vagueness that characterizes a mind warped and weakened by pie.
After warning readers that eating pie might cause them to compose poetry, attend prestigious schools, and gaze silently at the moon, the authors went on to suggest that “no pie shall be eaten until it has been thoroughly disinfected by prolonged immersion in a bath composed of carbolic acid, Worcestershire sauce, and permanganate of Sulphur” to avoid any “danger of increasing the flood of poetry, philosophy, and generally misery which has hithert
o devastated so large a part of our country.”
And this back-and-forth continued for quite some time; eighteen years later, the Times was still declaring pie “the food of the heroic,”63 boasting that “No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished,” and calling it “a significant historical fact that England’s glory was greatest in the days when her gallant sons ate pie” and that such glory and greatness had long since crumbled.
During an 1889 debate on the national flower64, a Milwaukee journalist even suggested that the United States abandon its search for a symbolic flower and look instead to apple pie—it being more substantial and indicative of American life than a flimsy plant:
What’s the matter with the apple pie as a national emblem? The apple pie grows in every section of our beloved country, varying in thickness and toughness of crust, it is true, but always characteristically American. In the homes of New England, in the smack-houses of the South, on the lunch counters of the North, at the wayside stations of the towering Rockies—everywhere in this vast country the flaky or leathery crusts inclose the spiced fruit of the apple tree. Every true American eats apple pie. It is substantial, it is satisfying, it is hard to digest. And therefore it is no light and trifling symbol of the solid, satisfying and tenacious life of America.
That foreigners mocked America’s apple pie was another key selling point:
Another thing in favor of the apple pie as a national emblem is that it is hated, reviled and feared by foreigners, just as our great Republic has been. Like our free institutions, the apple pie has held its own against all the world. The French pate, the German coffee-cake, the English tart, the Scotch oat-cake, have all been offered as substitutes, but on every loyal table the apple pie holds its place of honor.
The author then closes by suggesting:
We should go further than to make the apple pie the national flower; we should embody in the Constitution of the United States a requirement that no foreign immigrant should receive his final papers of naturalization until he should eat an apple pie in the presence of the Court.
And maybe they were right. The search for a national flower would last another ninety-seven years until the Reagan administration finally settled65 on the rose in 1986 and include many front-runners most Americans had never heard of, like goldenrod and arbutus66. And what, really, has the rose done for America? The American colonies didn’t survive on rose water. American soldiers weren’t substantially taller than the British67 during the Revolution because they ate roses for breakfast.* American pioneers didn’t ride west with roses in their bags. The majority of roses aren’t even grown in America68 but in countries like Colombia or Ecuador, where they’re often the product of child labor and banned pesticides.*
In fact, apple pie might have made a decent national bird, too. Benjamin Franklin would have been on board with this, having imported American apples by the barrel69 while living in London; introduced the English to the Newtown Pippin70, a variety that would singlehandedly convince the queen to lift the tariff on American apples; and, in a 1784 letter, criticized the bald eagle for being lazy and immoral:
For my own part71 I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing-hawk; and, when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. . . . Besides, he is a rank coward; the little kingbird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district.
Franklin suggested the turkey as an alternative to the eagle but surely would have understood the repercussions of its being named after another country*72 and nearly wiped out by American colonists. (Try to recall the last time you saw a flock of five hundred turkeys running wild.)
Apples, meanwhile, are inherently diverse. They can be white or brown, pink or yellow, red or green; mixed or speckled, streaked or russeted; they can be fat, round, or pear-shaped; coarse or chalky; sweet, sour, or bitter; they can be English or Swiss, German or French; poisonous or forbidden. Add them to pie, and they become both sponge and catalyst.
“Do not suppose that we limit the apple-pie 73to the kinds and methods enumerated,” writes Henry Ward Beecher in 1862. “Its capacity in variation is endless, and every diversity discovers some new charm or flavour. It will accept almost every flavour of every spice.”
Perhaps most poignantly, the apple itself, like the colonists who planted it, refuses to be wrangled. “Sown by chance,74 or even sown intentionally,” writes Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, “apple trees almost always revert to the wild form instead of breeding true to the mother tree.”
One could certainly say the same about early colonists—and the country they colonized.
Sure, pie is immoderate, overindulgent, unrefined, and potentially inflammatory, but so is America; so were Searle and Emerson and that guy who drank a quart of rendered bear fat without vomiting; so are free speech, New England winters, and Fourth of July cookouts; so was declaring independence, dumping shiploads of tea into Boston Harbor, and fishing uncharted waters with frying pans in pursuit of the sweet, if sometimes excessive, taste of liberty.
Chapter 3
Breakfast of Champions
It tastes like all the naughty things,1 but has the advantage of being digestible and wholesome.
—New York lady on Nuttose
In this fast age, the less exciting the food,2 the better.
—Ellen G. White
Cold cereal is the “Breakfast of Champions,” a morning staple enjoyed by 93 percent of Americans,3 and so prevalent on grocery lists that it not only gets its own aisle in the supermarket but plays a key role in the psychology of shelf allocation storewide. (One of the reasons supermarkets place their dairy cases in the back,4 far from a store’s entrance, is that they know most shoppers are going to buy milk, for cereal, and want to funnel them past as many impulse buys as possible along the way.)*5
Cereal transcends race, social class, age, gender—and even dietary guidelines; egg consumption has dropped by more than 40 percent in the United States6 since the demonization of cholesterol in the 1940s, yet decades of health warnings concerning milk and sugar (and millennia of heritable lactose intolerance) have failed to unseat cereal as the official champion of the breakfast table. For many people, it’s the one food they still eat sitting down, at a table, or with family: their first and only taste of sweetness before venturing out into a bitter world of industrial coffee and eating in cars.
Cereal often serves as an excellent source of not just vitamins and minerals, as the labels claim, but nostalgia, free prizes, back-of-the-box activities, and aerated confectionary foams (better known as dried marshmallows or, in industry jargon, “marbits”). So it satisfies our hunger in ways that go beyond the merely caloric.
In fact, though it might lack pie’s heartiness or indigestibility, cereal has several key traits that can trick us into feeling more satisfied by it than perhaps we should, given that it’s made up mostly of sugars and simple carbohydrates. Research suggests, for example, that people tend to consume less food7 when consuming it from a spoon (as opposed to, say, their hands or a straw) without feeling any less full, owing to the additional time it takes to operate a spoon, which essentially tricks our bodies into thinking we ate more because it took longer. The fact that cereal is composed of many small pieces adds to this effect, triggering what psychologists call a “unit bias,”8 wherein we assume that we ate more food because we ate more pieces.*9 (Similarly, if you lift your bowl while eating cereal to drink the cereal milk, the weight of the bowl could lead you to believe you’re ingesting more breakfast than you really are.) Finally, there’s the Pavlovian response10 that conditions us to feel satisfied due to decades of television commercials painting cereal as a delicious part
of a complete breakfast that’s supposedly the most important meal of the day—so we feel satisfied, in part, because advertisers tell us to.
And here you thought you liked Frosted Flakes just because they’re gr-r-reat.
Yet despite cereal’s mass appeal and generally massive sugar content (in 2014, the average children’s cereal was 34 percent sugar by weight11 and adult cereal, 18 percent),*12,13,14 it was never meant to be sweet; in fact, it was never even meant to be enjoyable.
Rather, cold breakfast cereal was created to be deliberately bland: the brainchild of religious health reformers who thought America needed a breakfast free from not just sugar and excess, à la the all-day-pie diet in the previous chapter, but from sin and gluttony—a way to “break fast” without breaking religious sanctity and becoming a godless pagan hedonist. No sooner had Americans emerged from the “starving times” and begun to enjoy their freedom and comfort, in fact, than a health craze swept the country, bringing with it a long list of dietary cautions. Unlike today’s fad diets, however, which tend to target things like carbs or cellulite in the interest of living longer or looking good naked, this new wave of diets targeted “depraved desire and perverted appetite”15 in the interest of avoiding eternal fire and brimstone—and looking good in the eyes of God.