America Eats

rdf:langString America Eats

rdf:langString America Eats was a project under the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) during the 1930s in the United States. The FWP was one of the many projects contained within the Works Progress Administration, which was a New Deal program created during the Great Depression. America Eats was created in the late 1930s with the intention of producing a book regarding regional foodways. The project was divided into five regions: the Northeast, the South, the Middle West, the Far West and the Southwest. Each region had a team of writers producing short essays discussing the foods and collecting interviews particular to a state. The America Eats project was the brainchild of the FWP's main editor, . Her goal was to highlight the "ethnic traditions, as well as the regional and local customs" of foodways in the United States. As a result of Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II, funding for the project was pulled and funneled into the war effort. Subsequently, the materials for the America Eats project have remained in relative obscurity, scattered around the country in archives and libraries. The majority of the remaining America Eats materials can be found in the Library of Congress and the Montana State University Archives and Special Collections.