Project Highlight: What America Ate

What America Ate
Led by History professor Helen Zoe Veit

This is a interactive website and online archive about food in the Great Depression, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. What were Americans eating in the Depression? Economic upheaval, mass migration and technology were all changing Americans’ diets, and people living through the Depression wondered if there was such a thing as American cuisine and who was eating what. To answer those questions, the U.S. government did something extraordinary: it created the America Eats Project, sending writers around the country to document American eating. Today, for the first time, America Eats sources that had been scattered across the country are digitized and fully searchable, along with almost two hundred local community cookbooks and thousands of food advertising materials from the 1930s. Start exploring now!

Screenshot of the website "What America Ate:
Preserving America's Culinary History from the Great Depression"

Dr. Helen Zoe Veit joins Michael Cullinane to answer all his questions about decadent recipes, food security, poverty, picky children, and the connections between Gilded Age foodstuff and our diet today. Dr. Veit is a professor at Michigan State University and the director of the “What America Ate” project.

The following Project Highlight was originally created for the DH@MSU Undergraduate Newsletter and was featured in the January 26, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.