“I was born in Massachusetts but was once a press agent for a Rhode Island shore resort (where 6,000 clambake eaters each pleasant Sunday was the season’s average). I take no sides.” James Francis Davis debating clam chowders in his essay.
Although it’s little comfort to the Class of 2009 journalism majors, writing jobs have been scarce before. At the height of the Great Depression, newspapers and magazines were closing down as fast as advertisers were attracted to radio, and books were seen as leisure time luxuries.
But as familiar as this scenario sounds, what happened next seems radical today. To create jobs for unemployed writers, Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Federal Writers’ Project under the Works Progress Administration, putting poets, novelists, journalists and amateurs to work.
“It was never really voted on by Congress, and there was a lot of criticism of it,” says Mark Kurlansky, who examines the FWP’s “America Eats” project in his latest book, “The Food of a Younger Land” (Riverhead, $28). “It’s very hard, the notion of the government subsidizing the arts. Money is very serious in America.”
At the time — a time before Easy Mac and chain restaurants, when food was regional and seasonal — “America Eats” was a fairly straightforward project: Writers sent in essays and recipes reflecting local food traditions, which would be compiled into a book.
Although the final product was never published, Kurlansky provides a sample of the contributions, which feel alternately quaintly American and completely foreign. “It’s scary when you read through this and see all of these common things that are really scarce now,” says Kurlansky.
“Abalone, salmon, flying squirrels — not that I want to eat one, but they should be hopping around.”
Whether you read it as a historical text, a cookbook, or a stark warning on food policy, “Food of a Younger Land” serves up unsettling questions alongside the molasses pie. “My only agenda was showing readers 1940 America,” says Kurlansky. “Of course, if you look at the past, it makes you think about the present and the future.”
Mark Kurlansky
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