Introduction Every day, multiple times, almost all Americans think about food. What to eat, when to eat, and where to get food is so deeply embedded in Ameri- can people’s existence that they scarcely realize that they are thinking about it. A lot of ordinary conversation is about food in all of its aspects, from eating out to discussions about recipes. Meal planning—including reading cookbooks and watching television cooking shows—shopping, food prep- aration, and actual eating take up hours of almost everyone’s day. Of all biological functions, eating and what follows from it, are the ones with the most “culture” around them. From personal and group identification to taboos and taste and distaste, jokes, stories, movies, tele vi sion programs, and much more, food is central to people’s lives. And yet Americans usu- ally take all these for granted as normal behaviors in everyday life. Different peoples around the world have not eaten in the same ways as everyone else, though today, international contacts have made those dif- ferences smaller. Nonetheless, Amer i ca is unique in many ways. Those who foodways (meaning the economic, social, and cultural habits of a study people) ask why do Americans eat what they eat? Where does the food come from and why do they like it, or not like it? Why do they dine at cer- tain times of the day and what rituals do Americans use for eating, such as using forks or eating out of hand? American food, what is eaten and what is not, comes mostly from immi- grant origins. Cattle (beef and dairy products made from cows’ milk), pork from pigs, chickens, sheep (lamb), and goats (mostly dairy), wheat, barley, rye, oats, rice, apples, peaches, watermelons, pears, broccoli, spinach, chard, kale, and many others, are imports from the Old World (Europe, Africa, and Asia). Of the relatively few plants native to North America that we eat, corn is the most important. Animal feeds, corn oil, corn meal, corn starch, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and sweetened and plain popcorn,
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