via Jason Kottke

“Did people living in the 1860s really see themselves as eating a simple diet? Not so much. This was an era of frequent food adulteration, with consumer goods being leavened by sawdust, engine grease, plaster of Paris, pipe clay and God knows what else.”

McWilliams argues prominent figures in each period of history have urged Americans to make simple recipes from locally grown ingredients. What complicates matters, however, is discovering when that simple period in history took place exactly.

“And those rugged early Americans?  Yet again we find evidence suggesting that the idealized group—in this case early Americans—saw matters quite differently. The American Revolution drove Americans to define who they were as a culture. After years of approximating the increasingly luxuriant habits of Empire, early Americans reacted to independence by playing up their status as rough-hewn frontiersmen and self-sufficient survivalists. In terms of food, this self-identification meant rejecting luxury for—you got it—the primitive simplicity of the first European settlers.”

It appears primitive food has never existed on American shores, at least not in the eyes of those actually consuming the food. The “modern” ideal of eating simpler food appears to come from a deep-rooted American dream rather than a historical event or time period.

Read the Freakonomics post here.