Feature: "Key Ingredients" in Food Reveal Who We Are

            If we are what we eat, find out who we are at the Smithsonian’s touring exhibit on food and the MSU Museum’s companion exhibit on “Michigan Foodways.”   

            What exactly are kolaces, spaetzle, and pierogie?  How do you make burgoo and gumbo?  Who brought yams and pigs to America?

            Most of us eat day in day out without giving a second thought to the wealth of history and culture that shapes our dining habits and taste preferences. 

            Nonetheless, as the old saying goes, we are what we eat. 

            For Americans, our recipes, menus, ceremonies, and etiquette are a product of our country’s rich immigrant experience, the history and innovations of food preparation technology, and the ever-changing availability of key ingredients, says Yvonne Lockwood, MSU Museum curator of folklife and a leading researcher and scholar of foodways.  

            Lookwood heads up a project exploring Michigan’s food culture, “Michigan Foodways,” a companion to a nationally touring Smithsonian exhibit, “Key Ingredients: America By Food.”  The Michigan Humanities Council is joining with the Smithsonian Institution and the Federation of State Humanities Councils to bring “Key Ingredients” to six different communities throughout the state beginning this spring. 

            “According to popular wisdom, we are what we eat,” explains Lockwood.  “What we eat says volumes about us—our backgrounds, our social, cultural, economic and religious status, our food preferences, in other words, who we are.

            “Foodways represents an entire complex of ideas, behaviors and beliefs centered on food production, preparation, presentation and consumption, and the role of culture in shaping and preserving it,” she explains.  “The biological necessity to eat is unquestionable; however, it is to culture, not biology, that we must look to explain why we eat what we eat.”

            “Michigan Foodways” will explore nature, agriculture, food production and distribution, ethnic food and culture, and emerging issues like organic farming and the “slow food” movement (that is, opposite of “fast food”).  Lockwood examines the creation of early Michigan cookbooks and a variety of food-centered celebrations—from fish fries to cherry and berry festivals aplenty.   The exhibit also draws on the MSU Museum’s extensive history and cultural collections to help tell the story of Michigan’s foodways, like cabbage slicers for sauerkraut, sap buckets for maple syrup, apple picking sacks, Native American wild rice winnowing baskets, and early Kellogg’s cereal packaging. 

            From the southeast corner to the tip of the U.P., Lockwood has studied foodways for decades. 

            “Besides a lot of good eating, friendship building and recipe collecting, I have witnessed how foodways express significant cultural, social and historical information,” she says.

            Observes Lockwood:

“In one study, foodways in Metropolitan Detroit of the various ethnic communities from different Arab counties were used to measure the process of becoming ‘Arab American.’  Foodways, in other words, became an index of the different degrees and influences of the acculturation process.” 

            “Pasty, in addition to being a tasty meat and potato turnover, reflects the immigrant and ethnic history of the Upper Peninsula,” explains Lockwood.  “As it passed from Cornish to other communities, it concurrently evolved from a mono-ethnic specialty to a multi-ethnic food, all the while adapting to the nuances of other food cultures—ultimately becoming a symbol of the region and claimed by all residents.”

            The MSU Museum, founded in 1857, celebrates 150 years in 2007 and is one of the oldest museums in the Midwest. In 2001, the MSU Museum became the first museum in the state to be named a Smithsonian Institution affiliate, the world's largest museum and research complex, giving the MSU Museum broader access to Smithsonian scientific and cultural resources. Recent collaborations have included research, publication and exhibition on birds of South Asia, and a program at the Smithsonian’s 2006 Folklife Festival on the national mall—Carriers of Culture: Living Native Basket Traditions—that will also be adapted at the MSU Museum’s Great Lakes Folk Festival in downtown East Lansing, Aug. 10-12. 

            The MSU Museum is Michigan's leading public natural history and culture museum and is accredited by the American Association of Museums.   The museum is a public steward for nearly a million objects and specimens of cultural and natural history from around the world and is open seven days a week on campus, next to Beaumont Tower.

            “Key Ingredients: America by Food” is made possible in Michigan by the Michigan Humanities Council. “Key Ingredients” is part of the Museum on Main Street, a collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and the Federation of State Humanities Councils. Support for Museum on Main Street has been provided by the United States Congress, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The Hearst Foundation. “Michigan Foodways,” created by the MSU Museum, is funded, in part, by the Michigan Humanities Council and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs.

            Lora Helou, M.A. ’90, is communications director for the MSU Museum and its Great Lakes Folk Festival—which also features a tremendous array of ethnic and regional food specialties in its Taste of Traditions Food Court, Aug. 10-12.

KEY INGREDIENTS & MICHIGAN FOODWAYS SITES AND DATES

            Spartans can see Key Ingredients/Michigan Foodways during its Michigan tour.  Local host sites are also planning special programs and activities to showcase their local flavor.

CHELSEA: May 25 - July 8, 2007 – Chelsea District Library

CALUMET: July 13 - Aug. 26, 2007 – Keweenaw Heritage Center

CHEBOYGAN: Aug. 31 - Oct. 14, 2007 – Cheboygan Area Public Library

WHITEHALL: Oct. 19 - Dec. 2, 2007 – White Lake Community Library

FRANKENMUTH: Dec. 7, 2007 - Jan. 27, 2008 – Frankenmuth Historical Museum

DUNDEE: Feb. 1 - Mar. 16, 2008 – Dundee Museum and Historical Center

            For more information, visit www.michiganfoodways.org, www.keyingredients.org, and museum.msu.edu.

KEY INGREDIENTS: AMERICA BY FOOD

            Here’s a savory sampling of the online companion to the Smithsonian Institution's “Key Ingredients: America by Food.” Visitors can learn about “America By Food,” across time, over regions, and through production, and by customs and traditions.

• THE THREE SISTERS:  Native Americans have traditionally grown three crops – corn, beans and squash – together for thousands of years.  “Companion planting” allows the plants to help one another grow.  The corn provides structure to support the growing beans, which add nitrogen to the soil, and the squash spreads along the ground locking in essential moisture and preventing weed growth.  The combination holds a spiritual meaning for Native Americans.  According to an Onondaga farmer, who lives near Syracuse, NY, “So long as the three sisters are with us we know that we will never starve.  The Creator sends them to us each year….We thank Him for the gift He gives us today and every day.”
• EAST OR WEST?  “Chop suey”is actually a Chinese-American dish invented in California, probably by one of the thousands of Chinese looking for work during the mid-19^th century.  Where cooks were constrained by the lack of Asian vegetables and trying to produce a dish that was palatable to Americans, they created Chop suey—“miscellaneous pieces,” in Cantonese.  The mixing of bean sprouts, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, mushrooms, meat or chicken, soy sauce, and rice emerged as one of the trendiest dishes of the Jazz Age.
• TOLL HOUSE ACCIDENT:  Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, MA, was making cookies for her guests when she ran out of regular baker’s chocolate.  She substituted a bar of semi-sweet chocolate and cut it into pieces, thinking it would melt into the dough as baker’s chocolate did.  Lucky for us, it didn’t.  Welcome, “chocolate chips.”
• DISCOVERING CRANBERRIES:  Mahon Stacy, an early New Jersey settler, wrote to his brother in England about a fruit long cultivated by American Natives—the cranberry.  “An excellent sauce is made of them for venison, turkeys, and other great fowl and they are better to make tarts than either gooseberries or cherries,” he wrote.  Today red and white cranberries are grown in Wisconsin, New Jersey, and New England.

            -- Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and Federation of State Humanities Councils

MICHIGAN FOOD FACTOIDS

• Michigan grows more beans, blueberries, tart cherries, cucumbers, flowering hanging baskets, geraniums, Niagara grapes, hosta, and impatiens then any other state.
• Michigan is the nation’s second leading producer of celery and the third leading producer of apples, asparagus, snap beans, carrots, Concord grapes and radishes.
• Detroit’s Eastern Market is 202 years old and has been at its current location since 1841, serving as many as 45,000 individuals per day
• Each day 1.4 million people pick up one of (Chelsea’s) Jiffy Mix little blue boxes on grocery store shelves around the country, affirming an embattled American business tradition.
• The first soda pop made in America was Vernor's Ginger Ale, created in Detroit in 1866
• John Lennon wrote the song "Good Morning Good Morning" after seeing a Kellogg's Corn Flakes commercial on TV.
• Zehnder's in Frankenmuth is America’s largest family restaurant and the second largest independent restaurant, serving some one million diners a year. 

            --Michigan Humanities Council