The Empire Builder Diet- Nutritional Foundations for the American Empire, Part 1

It’s no secret that the typical Western diet (generally referred to as the Western Pattern Diet or WPD, or the Standard American Diet, or SAD) is one of the least cool gifts anyone’s given since white settlers gave the Native Americans smallpox blankets or the Mongols fired bubonic-plague-ridden corpses over the wall into Rostov, Russia. Seriously, the typical American diet is a gift only in the way that giving HIV to an unsuspecting sexual partner is a gift, or like a new Justin Bieber single is when released as aural herpes to the world at large- yeah, it’s free, but you’re really rather be stricken blind and deaf than receive either. Though certainly delicious and calorically dense, the SAD diet is aptly named, because it’s a nutritional shitshow built on the backbone of literal poison- high fructose corn syrup.

The diet on which Americans subsisted prior to the advent of McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, however, was a damn fine diet. There is a reason why the kids who grow up on farms end up 6’5″ 330lbs and able to run a 4.8 second 40 yard dash- they grew up eating the meat-and-potatoes type diet on which this country was built. Their parents intuitively knew what suburban parents don’t- a Whole Foods label doesn’t mean it’s going to turn your kid into Superman, and processed foods are literal trash. Nah, the diet that built the American Empire was vastly different than the trash we eat today, and was responsible in large part for the feats we were able to accomplish, which is why examining it as we physically and mentally devolve in the present makes a hell of a lot of sense.

The Colonial Diet

When it came to eating in colonial America, calories were king. At that point, life was fucking hard- there was wood to be chopped, water to be fetched, you walked or rode a horse everywhere, and America was an agricultural nation- taking care of a farm is seriously hard work. As such, Americans typically ate three to four thousand calories a day, and it was nothing like the effete bullshit “health nuts” nosh on now, because those health nuts think stretching on a soft mat is fucking exercise. Most estimates of pre-industrial life put caloric expenditures for women at around 2525 calories and 3830 for men, so they required the kind of hearty-assed meals promised by Banquet frozen dinners, which while delicious are totally unnecessary for the fat assed truckers and assembly line workers to whom they’re marketed.

Nor were American by any stretch of the imagination out of shape by 19th Century standards. Actually, it was quite the opposite- Americans were fucking supermen by comparison with their diminutive, sickly European counterparts. The average American male was about two and a half inches taller than the Brits they fought in the revolutionary war, if they were adults- the younger recruits, however, fucking towered over their Limey opponents, standing almost 5″ taller than poor Londoners at the age of 16 (Komlos). That certainly explains how a bunch of untrained farmhands managed to best the most powerful army on the planet at the time, because 16 year old Londoners must have had a hell of a time loading a five foot long Brown Bess rifle at about four and a half feet tall… which even by my powermidget standards is crazy fucking short.

Not everyone ate the same thing in Colonial America, but we do have a pretty good idea of what the Continental army ate in the field by looking at the soldiers’ rations.

• half pint of beans or peas
• pint of milk
• pound of beef, pork, or salted fish
• pound of bread
• six ounces of butter

Clearly, these guys were about getting in the calories, not counting their macros, because the concept of macros didn’t even exist at the time and they would have had better shit to waste time on than inputting every bit of food they ate into their phone, anyway. For some reason, people in this era believed pork was far more nutritive than beef (and the acorn-fed pork of the era was apparently the shit), and only ate fish in times of dire necessity, because being the intelligent people they were, knew intuitively that all things found beneath the surface of the water are evil. When they did choose to nosh on a bit of cod, perhaps, they would sprinkle it with scraps of salt pork while cooking it so that it actually stuck to their bellies, and likely because it tasted less awful.

My culinary peccadilloes aside, most of what people ate at the time was cooked in a single pot, stewroids style, and was consumed at two large meals- breakfast (around 8AM) and dinner (around 2PM), with an optional third meal called supper in the evening, though that was a very light meal. The reasoning behind the stew was pretty simple- in most homes, they only had one cooking pot. As such, everything they were going to eat, save for the bread, went into the pot. Another likely reason for this is that without refrigeration, most of their meat was salted to preserve it. That means that they would slaughter large livestock like cows and pigs in the fall, then salt cure the meat and eat it over the course of the next twelve months.

For those of you who can’t cook, eating salt-cured meat necessarily involves boiling. To prepare it, you simply boil the hell out of the meat to soften it up and draw out the salt, then pour off the salty water, refill with fresh, and add veggies. As to the veggies, they were crazy plentiful at this time. Even small homesteads grew an array of produce that included different kinds of beans and squash; root vegetables like potatoes and turnips; and roughage like cabbage, collards, broccoli, and cauliflower.

And then there was the bread. Though bread at the time was a staple food, most of the bread in the colonies was baked with corn, in the form of johnnycakes. The rich had plenty of wheat for brown bread, but the common man ate corn at practically every meal.

“According to Baum of Claude Moore Colonial Farm, the breakfast of a typical farm family was a porridge made from ground corn, salt, and water boiled over the fire. And the universal bread was corn bread—”but not like today’s,” Baum makes clear. It was a hoecake or Johnny cake: a combination of corn meal, salt, and water that was mixed into a stiff dough and then baked in front of the fire or right in the ashes. Dinner would usually include corn in some form, too. As one Colonial farmer purportedly described it, “I can say truthfully that [corn] was not used more than 30 days a month” (Casto).

Antebellum and the 19th Century

Whether it’s because people just slept through history in high school, or teachers these days just suck, I have no idea, but post-Revolutionary War America was an interesting place. For the first eight years of our nation’s existence, we were a loose confederation of agrarian states that bickered incessantly but mostly managed to avoid committing atrocities. After the ratification of the Constitution we held on for another ten years, eventually getting embroiled in a stupid war with France after defaulting on our war loans to them, which then led to evil shithead extraordinaire Alexander Hamilton taking power in America and the death of the American dream (I encourage you guys to read up on that period of US history if you’ve a mind to).

In spite of the shitty little wars (Canada kicked our ass for the second time in the War of 1812, when we failed in a another invasion attempt to “liberate” them) and other assorted nonsense we kept getting up to, the standard of living in America was extremely high, if totally unrefined. We were a relative backwater, and our population was filled with some of the most pugnacious, drunken, brawling motherfuckers on Earth. With low population density, very little disease (due in large part to the low population density and also to the introduction of smallpox inoculations), Americans were the tallest and healthiest people in the world by the 1830s. An array of factors well beyond the scope of this article contributed to the decline of the average American height, but most notably it was the railroad, as increased travel spread scarlet fever, whooping cough, and cholera- shit that while once cured through vaccinations (with the exception of cholera, obviously) are now back to spread fun and joy throughout our great land. By the end of the 19th Century, height started to increase again with the advent of government-led water purification and waste treatment, which I’m sure has a growing upsurge of resistance online as nutsacks claim water without fecal matter in it causes autism.

As to what caused the first height surge, academics believe it isn’t just better nutrition but more food that led to the increase. According to one theorist, ”Our hypothesis is that nutritional standards were much, much better in the New World than in the Old…. What you’re talking about is simply more food. The more food they ate, the more chance they had to get what they needed” (Komlos). And the food in the 19th Century didn’t differ vastly beyond regional differences in the available foodstuffs.

For instance, hunter’s stew was a staple in 18th and 19th Century Kentucky. As I mentioned in this stewroids article, it was made without a recipe and consisted of whatever pieces of meat were available from the game they’d shot that day. The ultimate, endless one pot meal consisted of a mixture of that days’ meat and veggies and whatever leftovers were still in the pot, then slow cooked over an open fire in an iron kettle. Thus, you had a heavy mixture of deer, elk, bear, and wild turkey combined with potatoes, carrots, leeks, sage, and pepper for a meal morning and evening.

One interesting thing to note is that by the end of long hunts in this period, they would generally have run out of cornmeal and flour, and would have no bread with their meals. At this point, they would take wild turkey breast, which was pretty dry and flavorless, and slap some roasted kidney or stewed liver between two slices of turkey breast for keto-as-a-motherfucker sandwiches. When home, they’d combine game meat with vegetables they’d planted, such as potatoes, carrots, lima beans, green beans, and okra. A favorite dish of the time was green beans simmered all day with bacon until the beans were essentially green mush, but the smoky flavor of the bacon made it delicious green mush. That mush was often used as the base for a vegetable stew that would include the aforementioned other veggies, but their favorite way to get the veggies down the hatch was to gather all of the wild greens and cook them with “smoked ham hocks, hog jowl, bacon, or “pot likker” (juice that had been saved from greens previously cooked with cured or smoked meats). ‘A mess of greens’ was a welcome treat after having only root and dried vegetables over winter” (Traditional).

For the rest of the country, food was a bit more varied than in the backwaters, but was still seasonal and limited by the lack of refrigeration and rapid transit. Even foods kept in ice houses were crap, due to the fact that the slow refrigeration process therein meant that large ice crystals that would puncture the cell walls of the foods were created, which led to mushy and tasteless food when it was defrosted. Frozen foods at this point were so fucking inedible that they were only served to prisoners, and even then was considered more inhumane than hitting a man with a fire hose on full blast or whipping him bloody.

Typical meals in an American home during the winter in the 1850’s weren’t too far removed from the home cooked meals of today, save for the fact that people then ate real food they prepared themselves, rather than prepackaged dogshit filled with chemicals and poison. The meals were very heavy on turkey, which was so plentiful as a wild animal it was unthinkable to go hungry outside the city, and pork, due to the ease of raising pigs in the New World. According to a popular cookbook of that era, here is a typical meal plan:

Monday

Breakfast. Corn bread, cold bread, stew, boiled eggs.
Dinner. Soup, cold joint, calves’ head, vegetables.
Dessert. Puddings, &c.
Tea. Cold bread, milk toast, stewed fruit.

Tuesday

Breakfast. Hot cakes, cold bread, sausages, fried potatoes.
Dinner. Soup, roast turkey, cranberry sauce, boiled ham, vegetables.
Dessert. Pie &c.
Tea. Corn bread, cold bread, stewed oysters.

Wednesday

Breakfast. Hot bread, cold bread, chops, omelet.
Dinner. Boiled mutton, stewed liver, vegetables.
Dessert. Pudding, &c.
Tea. Hot light bread, cold bread, fish, stewed fruit.

Thursday

Breakfast. Hot cakes, cold bread, sausages, fried potatoes.
Dinner. Soup, poultry, cutlets, vegetables.
Dessert. Custards and stewed fruit.
Tea. Corn bread, cold bread, frizzled beef, stewed fruits, or soused calves’ feet.

Friday

Breakfast. Hot bread, cold bread, chops, omelet.
Dinner. Soup, fish, roast mutton and currant jelly, vegetables.
Dessert. Pudding, &c.
Tea. Hot light bread, cold bread, stewed fruit.

Beyond the abundance of fresh food and variety that Americans enjoyed over the European counterparts, another difference in eating habits was the manner in which Americans ate.

“Writer James Fenimore Cooper noted that ‘Americans are the grossest feeders of any civilized nation… Their food is heavy, coarse, ill prepared, and indigestible… There is not, perhaps on the face of the globe, the same number of people among whom the good things of the earth are so much abused, or ignorantly wasted, as among the people of the United States.” One French tourist wrote in 1804 that Americans ‘swallow almost without chewing.’ Another, Constantin Volney, argued that Americans’ habits ‘ruined the Yankee stomach, destroyed the teeth, and extinguished health.’ An Englishman complained that even members of Congress ‘plunged into their mouths enormous wedges of meat and pounds of vegetables, perched on the ends of their knives'” (Wikipedia).

That was actually an outgrowth of the American obsession with work, and their hatred of the effete Europeans and their slavering love of aristocracy over a democratic ideal. In fact, Americans were so filled with liberte that they ate everything either family style or buffet style, believe the a la carte style of French eating was nothing was anti-democratic snobbery fit only for powdered wig wearing haters of American life. Eating different food than the people with whom you dined was akin to kneeling during the national anthem today, or hating Walmart and Jesus, or not thanking a person who volunteered to shoot foreign brown people in their homes for unleashing their suburban bloodlust in the name of American freedom.

And there we have the beginnings of American dominance in strength sports. At this point, Americans were so obsessed with working that they had almost no concept of free time. Any down time was, as you will see, spent drunk and usually beating the breaks off one another, rather than lifting weights. Though George Barker Winship started to spread the idea of heavy lifting and meat eating for health around the time of the Civil War, lifting to get swole didn’t really catch on until after the American Civil War… which is where I’ll pick up in the next installment.

And if you have’t jumped on the 365 Days of Brutality train yet, my badass new book is available in print and ebook!

Sources:

19th century American foodways.  Food Timelines.  Web.  23 Aug 2019.  http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpioneer.html

DeSilver, Drew.  What’s on your table? How America’s diet has changed over the decades.  Pew Research.  13 Dec 2016.  Web.  23 Aug 2019.  https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/12/13/whats-on-your-table-how-americas-diet-has-changed-over-the-decades/

A history of American eating habits.  Winchester Hospital Health Library.  Web.  23 Aug 2019. https://www.winchesterhospital.org/health-library/article?id=14001

Komlos, John.  On the biological standard of living of Eighteenth Century Americans: taller, richer, healthier.  University of Munich.  July 2003.  Web.  23 Aug 2019.  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.197.6596&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Practical Housekeeper.  Cookery as it Should be: A New Manual of the Dining Room and Kitchen, for Persons in Moderate Circumstances.  Philadelphia: Willis P. Hazard, 1856.

Traditional state foods & recipes.  Food Timelines.  Web.  23 Aug 2019.  http://www.foodtimeline.org/statefoods.html#kentucky

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