UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles American Food Culture
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles American Food Culture, the Language of Taste, and the Edible Image in Twentieth-Century Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Stacie Cassarino 2014 © Copyright by Stacie Cassarino 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION American Food Culture, the Language of Taste, and the Edible Image in Twentieth-Century Literature by Stacie Cassarino Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Michael North, Chair In a study ranging from Futurist cookbooks to fast-food lyrics, this dissertation opens up new perspectives on modernist writing in relation to key developments in American food culture. It resituates popular culinary texts within a discourse of literary aesthetics and rereads literary texts as they reflect the conditions of alimentary production and consumption. Pairing chefs and poets — Julia Child & Gertrude Stein, Poppy Cannon & Frank O’Hara, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor & Harryette Mullen — I show how a modernist fixation on the materiality of edible things, expressed through the language of food, became a way for American writers to respond to the culinary, political, and aesthetic tastes of a nation undergoing tremendous shifts: from an austere wartime sensibility of patriotic eating, to the postwar excess of culinary cosmopolitanism, and finally, to racially inflected supermarket pastorals in the second half of the century. My research engages an i interdisciplinary cross-section of literary and visual forms, drawing on culinary history, art theory, cultural anthropology, race and gender studies, eco-criticism, and food studies, while remaining invested in literary analysis, to illuminate the correlating aesthetic economies of foodstuff and language, and to rethink the collision of popular culture and high art. I consider how modernism positions food as an innovative site for the ingestion and reflux of ideas, reconceptualizations of art, reflections on embodied humanity, and broader queries of taste. I argue that just as cooking makes an aesthetics of everyday food by lifting it from routine to art, literature reflexively uses food to address its own necessariness; sustenance for the physical and imaginary palates of Americans during moments of significant change. ii The dissertation of Stacie Cassarino is approved. ____________________________________ Monica L. Smith ____________________________________ Richard Yarborough ____________________________________ Michael A. North, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2014 iii For my parents, who fed me well iv Contents Acknowledgments Curriculum Vitae Preface x Introduction 1 • F.T. Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook One Modernist Food and Art of the Ordinary 32 • M.F.K. Fisher, How To Cook a Wolf 38 • Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons 50 • Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking 68 Two Postwar Culinary Pop 99 • Andy Warhol, Yum Yum Yum 104 • Poppy Cannon, The Fast Gourmet Cookbook 111 • Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems 131 Three The “Recyclable Soul” of Food 156 • Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking 162 • Harryette Mullen, S*PeRM**K*T 192 Conclusion 233 Food Futures: Feeding Machines and Prosthetic Consumption 236 • Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times + Andrew Stanton, Wall-E That Happy Garden-State1: Slow Food, Seed Politics, Supermarket Pastorals 242 Meta-Cuisines: Molecular Gastronomy and Culinary Spectacle 258 Food “Happenings”: Eating Design, Edible Architecture, Feast Art 265 Bibliography 287 1 Andrew Marvell, “The Garden” (my capitalization) v Acknowledgements I am grateful for the generous, unyielding support of my dissertation committee, without whom this project would still be a dense, cartographic scribble of ideas. For demanding rigor, asking the tough questions, and keeping me on track: thank you. This project would not have been possible without the significant guidance of my advisor, Professor Michael North. He knew what it could become long before I did, and remarkably challenged me in all the right ways at all the right times as an incisive critic and skeptic, and as a genuine advocate. What I learned from him far exceeds these pages. Thanks to Professor Richard Yarborough: for understanding my “velcro mind,” for patience throughout the early sketches of multiple projects before this one materialized; for believing in me. Thanks to the generosity of Monica L. Smith, whose voice from outside my discipline pushed against my project invaluably from the inside, in ways that I will continue to draw from. For the steadfast support, friendship, poem-sharing, and tennis through the years, and for bringing me West, thank you Rob Watson. Thanks to the UCLA English Department for supporting and encouraging my research. Especially: graduate advisor Mike Lambert who was an indispensible, patient, generous resource as I navigated these years; Chris Mott, whose teaching sharpened and deepened my own; Jeanette Gilkison, a warm presence in the office, helpful and comforting in every situation; and Rick Fagin, who shares in the creative work. And to my weekly medievalist tennis crew, a family away from home, for competitive matches and disputable etymologies over wine: Donka Minkova and Andy Kelly. Thanks also to fellow graduate student colleagues who offered encouragement over the years. And to Graduate Division for much- needed funding. My debts extend beyond LA: for the time and energies of professors, mentors, and colleagues at University of Washington-Seattle, Middlebury College, and Pratt Institute. I am deeply appreciate of the readers of my work, friends of my mind, mentors across time: Ann Cronin, Alexandra Milsom, Angus Fletcher, Sarah Lagrotteria, Kathy Harding, Katherine Isokawa, Brett Millier, Barbara Ganley, and especially my first and dearest friend (in food and words) in LA, Taly Ravid – I couldn’t have done this without you. Thanks also to friends and family near and far, particularly my sister Elizabeth Krauser who has always offered a sharp set of eyes on my writing, even between diapers. For the homes along the way where parts of this dissertation were dreamed-up and written: Barbara and Bill in Vermont, Lara and Tom in Seattle, Jen and Kate in Brooklyn. For my parents Salvatore and Linda, who have supported me in education, poetry, and adventure, and whose love is my anchor. And in memory of Giustina Vignone and Matthew Power, for their vibrancy, and without whom food and words, respectively. vi Stacie Cassarino Education 2010 MA in English, UCLA 2000 MA in English, University of Washington, Seattle 1997 Semester (Graduate), University of Oxford, Lincoln College, UK 1997 BA in English with High Honors, Middlebury College Minors: Italian / Women’s and Gender Studies 1996 Semester (Undergraduate), Middlebury College School in Florence, Italy Academic Appointments 2009-2010 Teaching Associate, Department of English, UCLA 2004-2008, 2011 Visiting Lecturer, English & American Literatures Department, Middlebury College 2005-2008 Visiting Instructor, Humanities & Media Studies Department, Pratt Institute Dissertation “American Food Culture, the Language of Taste, and the Edible Image in 20th-Century Literature” Chair: Michael North Committee: Richard Yarborough, Monica L. Smith (Department of Anthropology) Publications Books: Zero at the Bone (poems). New Issues Press (Western Michigan University), 2009 Articles: “The Postwar Culinary Pop Of Frank O’Hara and Poppy Cannon,” under review. “With An Ear To The Line: Reading the “Undermusic” of Old English in the Poetics of Seamus Heaney,” under review. “Imagining a Genetic Seed Bank,” Art Review, Center for the Studies of Women Journal, December 2012, pp. 6-10. Poems: Summer Solstice, The Writers’ Almanac with Garrison Keillor, NPR, 2011 Song for the Unborn Mother, Willow Springs, 2011 Spoon to the Sky, Poetry Daily, 2010 Postcard to Vancouver, The Owls, 2009 Cures For Love, Agni, 2007 Northwest / Zero at the Bone, Crazyhorse, 2007 Alaska Memoir, Green Mountains Review, 2007 Northwest / Early Snow, Verse Daily, 2007/2005 Notes on Vermont, Mantis, 2007 January / Watermark / Mappings / Steeplechase, Small Spiral Notebook, 2006 Apple Orchard / Firework, Radical Society, 2006 Midwest Eclogue, The Nation, 2005 Early Snow, The New Republic, 2005 Early December, Vermont, Massachusetts Review, 2005 The Eye’s Understory / Watermap for Birds, 88, 2005 Brooklyn Morning, Gulf Coast, 2005 vii In that Bright Room, Georgia Review, 2004 Bird of Bone, American Letters & Commentary, 2004 Half June / Goldfish Are Ordinary, Comstock Review, 2003 Blue Territory, Columbia: a journal of literature & art, 2003 Spell of Motion, Iowa Review, 2003 Crawlspace of the Interior, Indiana Review, 2001 Writing Awards and Prizes Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Award, UCLA, 2011 LAMBDA Literary Award for Zero at the Bone, 2010 Audre Lorde Award for Zero at the Bone, 2010 Astraea Foundation, Writers’ Fund Grant of $10k, 2007 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, Nominee Finalist, 2007 “Discovery”/The Nation Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize, 2005 Pushcart Prize, Nominee, 2004 & 2006 Fellowship Residency, Julia & David White Artists’ Colony, Costa Rica, 2004 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award, 2003 Friends’ Fellowship Residency, Ragdale Foundation, Chicago, 2003 Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fellowship Residency, Millay Colony for the Arts, NY, 2003 Writers’ Grant Residency, Vermont Studio Center, 2000 Donald Everett Axinn Annual Prize, 1997 Scholarship, BreadLoaf Writers’ Conference,