The Food That Built America is a new series focused on a number of businessmen who had a transformative effect on food culture in the United States. As such, it is an excellent choice of entertainment for people who are curious about what they eat, how they eat it, and how it manages to reach their table, particularly if they have a preference for narrative history presented in a visual format. Here are some reasons that interested individuals should consider watching The Food That Built America:
Food Is Fundamental
For a lot of people out there, history can seem very grand in scale. They hear stories about long-dead rulers at the heads of long-dead civilizations, whose choices have huge consequences that extend for centuries and centuries afterwards. Unfortunately, this perception can make history rather unrelatable, particularly when people in the present have no sense of connection to either those people or those civilizations that feature in the history books. However, it is important to note that history is by no means limited to a regurgitation of grand events carried out by grand individuals. Instead, there are countless historians who are much more interested in more minute details of how our predecessors lived their lives, with popular examples ranging from how they related to one anothr to how they thought about the world around them. In particular, it is worth noting the study of how people in the past secured the basic necessities of life, which can reveal incredible insights into them as well as everything around them.
That claim can sound surprising, but interested individuals might want to think about what the way that they get their food says about them. Generally speaking, most people living in the United States and other developed countries buy their food from supermarkets as well as other retailers. There are plenty of individuals who grow various useful plants in their gardens, but for the most part, the people who live in urban locations have very little immediate connection with the processes of food production. Right away, this single fact tells us that our modern world is very different from our predecessors from just a couple of centuries ago. Certainly, past civilizations had people such as artisans and scribes who secured their food by paying for it using the resources that they secured through the use of their specialized skills.
However, the overwhelming majority of the people living in those past civilizations were food producers in one way or another because their food production methods were so much less efficient than ours. On top of this, it should be mentioned that the fact that our civilization can ship in sufficient food as well as other necessities for the millions and millions of people living in urbanized areas speaks of an incredible logistical network that functions on a constant basis with minimal disruption because the cutting off of said flow of products would have catastrophic consequences within a very short period of time. For us, this is normal because this is a routine part of our day-to-day lives. However, for people in the not so distant past, this system would have been the envy of even the greatest empires that existed.
Regardless, the important part is thus. How people secure their basic necessities on a day-to-day basis says a great deal about them as well as everything around them. As a result, for people who are curious about how the world that we live in came to be, there aren’t a lot of series better than The Food That Built America. After all, the series is focused on a number of key figures that have had a profound impact on how not just Americans but also their counterparts in other countries get their food, so much so that the title of the series isn’t a gross exaggeration but rather much closer to being a simple statement of fact.
Fascinating Narratives
Having said that, it should be mentioned that the key figures in The Food That Built America have fascinating stories, particularly for people who enjoy hearing about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial endeavors. For instance, consider the case of Dr. John Kellogg, who is one of the figures of focus for the series.
In short, Dr. John Kellogg wasn’t just a practitioner of medicine but also a businessman as well as what one might call a health activist. In some respects, Kellogg’s beliefs were very much in line with modern opinions, with examples ranging from his support for a holistic approach to achieving health to his support for the germ theory of disease that was still very new at the time. In other respects, well, suffice to say that people have made a lot of jokes about how the corn flakes that continues to bear his name came to be.
For those who are curious, Kellogg was a believer in sexual abstinence. As a result, when combined with his vegetarianism, this resulted in the creation of vegetarian foods that were deliberately designed to be as bland as possible so that they wouldn’t excite their eaters into what Kellogg regarded as bad behavior. This was a huge contrast with popular practice at the time in the United States, which preferred heavy breakfasts packed with meat. As in, a middle-class breakfast wasn’t considered to be complete without a beef steak. Something that says a lot about how they ate in those times. In any case, whatever Kellogg’s beliefs were, his invention of corn flakes did a great deal to popularize breakfast cereal, though it is amusing to note that this has to do with convenience as much as health concerns.
Mix of Presentation Methods
The series isn’t presented using a single method but instead uses a mix of methods. For instance, it has reenactments of some of the most important events featuring its figures of focus, thus providing interested individuals with a more intuitive method of connecting with their stories. However, The Food That Built America makes frequent use of expert commentaries as well, which serve to provide those same individuals with a wide range of relevant opinions from a wide range of relevant perspectives such as entrepreneurs and food historians. On the whole, this mix of presentation methods serves a couple of useful purposes. One, it ensures that the viewers won’t be bored by a single presentation method, thus making the series more entertaining. Two, it communicates more information than what a single presentation method can manage on its own, thus making the series more educational.
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