From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that represent key moments in the history of the United States, this book takes readers from before European colonization to the present, narrating major turning points along the way, with food as a guide.

US History in 15 Foods takes everyday items like wheat bread, peanuts, and chicken nuggets, and shows the part they played in the making of America. What did the British colonists think about the corn they observed Indigenous people growing? How are oranges connected to Roosevelt's New Deal? And what can green bean casserole tell us about gender roles in the mid-20th century? Weaving food into colonialism, globalization, racism, economic depression, environmental change and more, Anna Zeide shows how America has evolved through the food it eats.

Anna Zeide is Associate Professor of History and the founding director of the Food Studies Program in the College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences at Virginia Tech, USA. She has previously written Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (2018), which won a 2019 James Beard Media Award, and co-edited Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (2021).

1. Pemmican: Food in the Not-So-New World
2. Corn: Colonization and Settlement, 1500-1750
3. Whiskey: Eating and Drinking in a New Nation, 1750-1800
4. Graham Bread: Early Nineteenth-Century Diet and Reform
5. Potlikker: Food and Slavery in the Antebellum South
6. Peanuts: The Civil War, Reconstruction, and After
7. Jell-O: Industrialization in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
8. Spaghetti: Immigration and Consumerism in the 1910s and 1920s
9. Oranges: Food and Agriculture in the Great Depression
10. Spam: Eating in the Second World War
11. Green Bean Casserole: Postwar Foodways
12. Tofu: Food in the Counterculture and Protest Era, 1950-75
13. Chicken Nuggets: Cheap Food and Politics in the 1970 and 1980s
14. Big Mac: McDonaldization and Its Discontents, 1990-2008
15. Korean Tacos: Immigration, Social Media, and America Today
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index