The History of American Food

Americans have this crazy fetish for telling each other about what the "Authentic" or "Real" version of a dish is - and Chili (the stew) may have been the first.  Snipey magazine articles about what "real chili is" have been written since at least the 1950's, and the "I'm right and you're stupid" of it all is about the same then as now. 

Becasue chili originated ...

I wanna be a cowboy?  Maybe?

Anyway - there were 50 years of the Good Cowboy Years... and the way the interacted with the opening up of the Louisina Purchase (remember that?) and the US Civil War and the arrival of the railroad did so much to shape the American relationship with meat - and particularly beef.

Find out how the American stove top steak came in...

Do your own research is quite the thing to say - but imagine if there were no laws... iand more importantly no regulations around what you could say about what was in in your food, or what your medicine does.  
All the research in the world would do you no good if anyone could say anything - and there were no repercutuions for simply making things up. This was the landscap...

Thi week I argue that you should pay attention to how the sausage gets made.  And not doing so resulted in the bland, mostly the same American sausages that ruled the 20th century... AKA the hot dog.   This is mostly sad, but not too bad.

What was worse - making a joke about how bad sausage making was resulted in conditions that were so bad that people were getting si...

Normally my episodes are not timely - but it is fun to be releasing an episode on the start of the Modern American Beer Style when two of the great beer cities in the US are both in the MLB playoffs.

After all the Brewers are 1 of 2 MLB teams that have never won a world series.  I know this becasue I live in Seattle.  The Brewers have one up on us. They have been TO ...