“Dine. . . with the Bissells”: Warm Meals, a Cold War, and the Julia Child Project
This talk is part of a larger project that uses historical biography of Julia Child to ask how, and with what consequences, gourmet food, and laborious home cooking became critical features of American cultural, social, and intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century. Here I focus on the years between 1948 and 1960, when Julia Child, living abroad as an “embassy wife,” developing the knowledge and the recipes that she would later share through her many cookbooks and television shows. These years also coincided with the heyday of US anticommunism and the creation of the US security state. This talk connects these timelines, arguing that Child has much to teach us about how middle-class Americans experienced dissension, division, and political possibility during the Cold War, with elaborate food politics emerging as critical to navigating it all. I call into question earlier narratives that have emphasized consensus, mass produced convenience foods, and the centrality of nuclear family life as the norm of middle-class life in the mid-20th century. In making this case, I also reflect on my work as a biographer and historian, navigating a time of political anxiety and disarray.
Tracey Deutsch is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She teaches, researches, and writes in critical food studies, gender and women’s history, the history of capitalism, and modern US history. Deutsch is the author of Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Government, and American Grocery Stores, 1919-1968. She has also published academic and public essays on food and unpaid labor, on the uses of women’s history in contemporary local foods discourses, and on the politics of consumption more generally. She has overseen two interdisciplinary workshops, one on capitalism and another on critical food studies, and co-edited the journal Gender & History. She is committed to doing public engagement with food and social justice, currently through the “Thinking Food” initiative and “Minnesota Transform: Just Universities for Just Futures.” She is writing a book on the life of Julia Child and the politics of gourmet food and domestic labor in the mid-century US.