![]() ![]() America was less a homogenous conglomeration than a thousand different cultural pockets, where food was mostly local and seasonal, and many people still grew, gathered, or caught a good portion of what they ate. In 1941, the system of highways didn’t exist, McDonald’s was a single fledgling restaurant in San Bernadino, and refrigerators were still a luxury item. And while the project itself, which was nearing completion in late 1941, was shelved after the Pearl Harbor attacks, the resulting book that Kurlansky has assembled from its files is fascinating. ![]() What this meant was that major American cultural projects that required hundreds of different writers-such as an examination of what people around the country ate-were, for a brief time, viable. ![]() At its peak, the FWP employed, according to Kurlansky, around 4,500 writers. The FWP was a part of the Works Progress Administration, itself a part of FDR’s New Deal attempts to keep Americans working. Kurlansky, a voluminous writer whose output includes two exhaustive food treatises, Salt and Cod, was putting together an anthology of food writing when he made a fortuitous discovery: the Federal Writer’s Project had been working on the exact same thing when it was shut down in 1941. Mark Kurlansky’s new book, The Food of a Younger Land might have a better back story than any book that has come out in the last several years. ![]()
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