A Brief History of Foreign Food in the U.S.

One of the most diverse things about the U.S. is its food industry. Foodies obsessively seek out the “authentic” flavors of any given culture. But many of the foods brought to the U.S. via immigration were initially viewed with suspicion and disdain.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. I think it's
safe to say that one of the most diverse things
about the United States is actually its food industry. And

(00:22):
for foodie, seeking out the elusive and I'm putting this
in quotes authentic flavors of any given culture can become
an obsession. Uh. There are a lot of things that
are often seen as belonging to an ethnic cuisine that
are in fact not even recognized in the culture that
they're associated with. Fortune cookies, for example, are a North
American invention. This episode was inspired by our listener Justin,

(00:47):
who actually asked for a history of Thai food in
the US. And we're not actually going to talk about
Thai food this time around. Perhaps if we do a
follow up episode we will, but for now, we're talking
about the most popular ethnic foods in the US to
trace their adoption and adaptations to ultimately become part of
our culinary melting pot. Uh. This also ended up being

(01:07):
an episode that touches a lot of other episodes that
we have done because so much of it is linked
to the story of immigration. And one of the things
that all of these foods really have in common is
a basic trajectory. So they are first thought of with
a degree of suspicion or disdain by the resident population
when they are brought in via immigration, and then there's
this slow acceptance and revelation that hey, this is delicious. Uh,

(01:33):
And then it shifts and these cultural dishes become celebrated,
but in a way that doesn't usually resemble their country
of origins cuisine very much. The term ethnic food, which
we are putting in air quotes here, really started to
see usage in the United States and the nineteen fifties,

(01:53):
and before that, food from cultures that were outside of
the United States were just usually referred to as foreign foods.
And this was to some degree part of a larger
post war shift where white Americans were trying to figure
out exactly how to refer to anything that wasn't part
of their own culture. So like American and quotes white

(02:15):
people food, calling everything apart from that ethnic that's weird
and kind of gross, But yeah, I mean, it's one
of those things where I actually think there was probably
a desire to find an appropriate way to do it.

(02:38):
But just in in that that hunt and setting things apart,
you're kind of automatically in a danger zone, right like
not us other food, and then US is definitely like
mainstream white American palette. Yeah, but I I read an
interview recently with Christian Endu Ray, who is an author

(03:02):
who wrote The Ethnic Restaurant Tour, and he didn't he's
also the cheer of Nutrition and food studies at New
York University, and he brought up a really interesting point
that he's not the first to make it, but he
he articulated it really well in a Washington Post interview
that he did in sixteen, and he pointed out, uh,
something that has been discussed by other scholars, that there

(03:22):
is this inherent, subconscious association of inferiority with the term
ethnic food. So, for example, foods that are usually categorized
as ethnic and quotation marks a lot of times those
are Indian and Thai, Chinese, Mexican. I've even heard people
refer to American cuisines from specific groups, like I've heard

(03:43):
people call soul food ethnic food when that's an American cuisine,
or sometimes Cajun food gets it too. Yeah, yeah, and
and like these tends to be often less expensive a
lot of times with a less cultural prestige within the

(04:03):
mainstream then say French food or Japanese food, which a
lot of times don't wind up in the bucket of
quote ethnic. There are, of course, some exceptions to that.
There are high end Chinese restaurants, economically priced French cafes.
There's a whole idea of fusion, which a lot of
times is viewed as something that's a little higher class

(04:25):
but draws from different ethnic ethnicities. But you know, as
a general rule, that's pretty accurate observation. So as we said,
we want to just sort of set that up so
you're thinking about it as we go through this. But
we're going to cover the three most popular categories of
ethnic food again using the quotes in the US today,

(04:46):
and those are Chinese, Mexican, and Italian. Chinese food was
one of the most common cuisines in the United States.
Even very small towns typically have a Chinese restaurant. I
know I have been two, some like incredibly, not even
the stoplight, but there's a Chinese restaurant. Uh. In the

(05:09):
documentary The Search for General So Sully, Who's the executive
director for the Chinese Historical Society, stated that in Chinese
people made up only one percent of the US population,
but most Americans have eaten some form of Chinese food.
So for clarity, that one percent number represents only people

(05:29):
who identified exclusively as Chinese, not as people who identified
in combination with other ethnicities. And that's according to the
Census Bureau. And to trace the origins of Chinese foods
popularity to that point where almost all of us have
had it, even though Chinese people do not make up
a particularly large segment of the population, uh in North America,

(05:53):
we have to go all the way back to the
eighteen fifties and even a little bit before that, which
we'll talk about, but primarily when the California a gold
Rush brought a great deal of Chinese and specifically Cantonese
immigrants to the United States through San Francisco, and there
was already a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco before the
gold Rush. There was one Cantonese restaurant that had opened

(06:14):
there in eighteen forty nine, but initially Chinese food seemed
too new and even scary to most of the white population.
Also in the general, so documentary they talked about how
this is where a lot of crazy rumors began about
the things that might be included in your Chinese food. Yeah,

(06:35):
that continues to be like a way to insult people's
native cuisines. Um. But this this, all of this combines together,
the suspicion of the food and the rumors about what
the food contained, was in part because Chinese immigrants were
seen as a threat to the job market. That were

(06:57):
approximately twenty five thousand Chinese immigrants in California by eighteen
fifty one, and there was a concern that they would
be taking jobs away from white residents. There was also
a xenophobic fear of basically all of the culture that
they had brought with them to the United States, including
the food. Eventually, that xenophobia led to the Chinese Exclusion

(07:18):
Act of eighteen eighty two, and this act, signed by
President Chester A. Arthur, established a freeze on Chinese labor immigration.
Non laborers seeking to enter the US had to get
special certification from the Chinese government, but it was incredibly
difficult to prove that a person had no intent to
work as labor once they got to the States, So

(07:38):
that Avenue of immigration was really largely choked off. This
entire situation is also mentioned in more detail in our
two part episode that we did on Executive Order ninety
sixty six and the Japanese internment camps. Not only did
the Exclusion Act make it difficult for Chinese people to
enter the United States, it also simultaneously sparked islands by

(08:00):
white communities against Chinese communities. But if a Chinese immigrant
already in the United States left, they would have to
go through the certification process to re enter the country.
So a lot of people stayed in spite of their
being so much animosity towards their communities. Yeah, in many cases,
people that had immigrated here had you know, left everything.

(08:23):
They had built a life here, so they didn't want
to leave because they really had nowhere to go. Uh.
And as that door to jobs really closed for the
immigrants that were already living in the United States, the
need for self reliant forms of income brought about the
rise of two business ventures that are still commonly associated
with Chinese entrepreneurs. It's laundry service and food service. In

(08:44):
regarding food service, in a really savvy business move, a
lot of Chinese restaurant owners adapted recipes to American tastes
so that they could build their customer bases. The culinary
balance that was struck was sort of foreign but familiar
to the white majority. While China's vast size includes all

(09:05):
like a lot a lot of distinct styles of food,
Americanized Chinese food tends to be more homogeneous. There's Chop suey,
which was the first quote Chinese dish to gain acceptance
in the United States, largely because it was easily adapted
to include ingredients that would appeal to the palates of
white customers. It was meat, eggs, and vegetables that were

(09:27):
a little different from what folks typically had day to day,
but they weren't too foreign and taste. Uh. That's really
a dish that was made for Chinese restaurant use in
the United States, not a dish from China. So for
a lot of diners in the early part of the
twentie century, Chop suey was their introduction to this foreign food,

(09:50):
and the Chinese Exclusion Act, initially intended as a ten
year moratorium, was extended for a second decade in eighteen
ninety two with the passing of the Gearya Act, and
then it was made permanent in nineteen o two. In
the nineteen twenties, it was replaced with a quota system
as immigration once again swelled after after World War One,

(10:11):
and then UH, almost twenty years later, the Exclusion Act
was repealed in nineteen forty three. Throughout all of this,
as anti Chinese sentiments slowly ebbed, Chinese eateries in the
US continued to serve up dishes that offered a taste
of Asia, but was still in this sort of comforting,
not too aggressive or frightening way to appeal to the

(10:35):
white diners that they were hoping to get. As a
side note, UH, it seems like every December there will
be an article about how Chinese cuisine became uh. What
Jewish people eat at Christmas because for a long time,
the Chinese restaurants were the only ones that were open
on Christmas, and so now culturally there's also this connection

(10:58):
between Chinese community is in Jewish communities, um around the
food that is eaten at Christmas time. Uh. And next
up we will talk about the ebb and flow of
Chinese foods growing acceptance in the United States. But first
we will pause for a quick word from a sponsor

(11:21):
By the nineteen forties, Chinese food had really become a
two way cultural gate in the United States. It enabled
white Americans to feel like they had an end with
another culture, and it simultaneously offered Chinese immigrants a way
to fit into majority white communities and with China as
an ally. In World War Two and the repeal of
the Chinese Exclusion Act, the early nineteen forties actually saw

(11:44):
an explosion in popularity of Chinese restaurants. Unfortunately, though, that
wave of acceptance for Chinese culture was short lived. Chinese
Communist revolution changed things a lot, and once again Chinese
people living in the United States were viewed with suspicion.
There was a drop at that point in the popularity
of Chinese restaurants. Actually have a whole uh I think

(12:07):
four part podcasts covering this window of Chinese history. For
the next three decades, appreciation for Chinese food really waxed
and waned within American culture. In nineteen sixty there were
six thousand Chinese restaurants in the US. Ten percent of
those were in New York City. And that may sound
like a lot, but we have a lot more now.

(12:28):
After President Nixon visited China in nineteen seventy two, and
he was shown on live television eating Chinese food. During
that visit, Chinese cuisine once again experienced a massive boom
and popularity in the United States, and this time UH.
This really led to an interesting diversification. So instead of
just general Chinese restaurants or what we've come to call

(12:51):
American Chinese restaurants, that sort of homogenized version of Chinese food,
it became a lot more common to start to see
eaters that were specializing some of the regional cuisines of China,
think Kunan and Sechuan, for example. Since the nineteen seventies,
Chinese foods popularity has continued to grow throughout the United States,

(13:11):
and in teen, there were more than forty three thousand
Chinese restaurants spread across across the country. UH. And next up,
we will talk about another cuisine that makes up a
really big segment of the ethnic food market in the
United States. And again we're using ethnic food in quotes, UH,
and that is Mexican and it has become so popular that,

(13:31):
for example, salta will now vie with ketchup and sharracha
for most popular condiment in America. When you see those
sort of cutesi cultural food articles pop up, and sometimes
it wins those those um which is the most popular
condiment discussions depending on what source you're looking at. So,
in short, Mexican food huge part of the American cultural

(13:52):
food landscape. At this point. In the early part of
the twentieth century, Mexican immigrants made up a small portion
of the It States population. The first instance of tacos
arriving in the United States was during the Mexican Revolution,
which started in nineteen ten. Before that, most immigrants were
from northern Mexico, and tacos, which started being called by

(14:14):
that name in the eighteen eighties, were common a little
farther south. If you listen to our episode on the
Burscero program from August of sixteen, you may recall that
in the late nineteen twenties and early nineteen thirties there
was a lot of hostility aimed at Mexican immigrants, massive
deportation and also segregation, and this was all spawned by

(14:35):
the same problem that had caused a distrust of Chinese immigrants,
which was concern over the effect migration was going to
have on the labor pool, and that environment of distrust
fostered an opinion the Mexican food was for the poor
and lower classes, and it had that reputation for a
long time. For decades, Mexican cuisine was a staple in

(14:56):
more low income homes. But slowly the middle glass, starting
in the border States and then spreading throughout the country,
came to adopt Mexican food as their own, and in
the nineteen forties, San Antonio, Texas, actually started importing chili
powder from Mexico to meet the growing demand. In nineteen
sixty two, fast food giant Taco Bell was founded in Downey, California.

(15:19):
By the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, Mexican restaurants had
become popular neighborhood eateries throughout the country. But then, as now,
if you were to go into most Mexican restaurants, you'd
see a pretty similar list of items on the menu,
things like ca city as, tacos, and burritos. The concept
of Mexican food has become, as with Chinese food, largely homogenized. Mexico,

(15:43):
like China, has a number of regional cuisines that don't
always get as much focus in restaurants in the States,
so in very broad strokes to talk about some of them.
Northern Mexican food tends to include a lot of beef
and cheese and wheat. Wahaca cuisine includes a lot of corn, chili, peppers,
and beans. Yucatan dishes feature avocados and slow cooked salted

(16:06):
pork and chocolate. Western Mexican food is characterized by the
frequent inclusion of fresh fish and Vera Cruz cuisine favors
the use of tropical fruit. I want to eat all
of that. I know it sounds so good. It doesn't
help that we are recording this at eleven forty eight
a m uh. As you listen to that list, you

(16:28):
probably noticed a number of items that are common ingredients
in Mexican food here in the United States, because as
Mexican food gained mainstream acceptance, it became a hodgepodge of
all the various aspects of regional cuisines that appealed to
a broader audience. Yeah, it's not to say there wouldn't
have been crossover in those cuisines anyway, but like it's
almost like somebody went through and went, yes, fish, fish,

(16:51):
tacos would be good. Yes, Also, we want the cheese
for sure. Also to put avocado on a fish taco,
put avocado on everything, and additionally, approaches to preparation change.
So while a burrito in Mexico might include a simple
assortment of ingredients like beans and a meat protein, as
they became the handheld standards of the US, they really

(17:13):
changed and started to be packed with additional things and
just got larger and larger. So the burrito in its
American incarnation didn't even get it start in a border
town near Mexico either. It's actually credited to the Mission
District in San Francisco sometime in the nineteen sixties. I
have witnessed a couple of very heated arguments about what

(17:34):
items in a tortilla are acceptable to call a burrito.
As long as they're delicious, I don't care, But if
you're looking at it from a cultural and historical standpoint,
you might want to get more specific. One of the
other appeals of Mexican food in the United States was
the ability to make it at home. Kitchen cook wear

(17:56):
sets that included tortilla presses and a taco friar mill
started appearing for the home market in the latter half
of the twentieth century, and dishes that were both very
popular and very unique to American Mexican food also came
about in the second half of the twentieth century. So,
for example, taco salad made its debut in nineteen sixty eight,

(18:17):
and fahitas, which all confess that I deeply love, were
invented in nineteen seventy one. I love uh. I love
the fragrance of fajitas like I love it when someone
else orders fahitas. That is it the d I y
aspect that is not for you. The flavor of it

(18:38):
is never as amazing to me as the fragrance of it.
Gustavo Ariano, journalist and author of Taco Usa, How Mexican
Food Conquered America, take some more relaxed view of what
qualifies this Mexican food. In an interview with the Christian
Science Monitor in he said quote, I know a lot
of Mexicans and people who love Mexican food who believe

(18:59):
that there's real Mexican food and fake Mexican food. To me,
if you think it's Mexican food, it's Mexican food. But
the good news is Mexican restaurants haven't entirely homogenized or
they have once again diversified, and many offer lesser known
specialty dishes now that appeal to those on the hunt
for that quote, more authentic flavor. There's also this whole discussion.

(19:20):
I didn't include it in this right up, but I
found it in one place where people were saying that
for people that are not familiar with any given cuisine,
they tend to assume that the spicier it is, the
more authentic it is, which is really not the case
and kind of robs a lot of cultures of their
actual food identities because it's not all about heat. But
Ariano also gave great advice in that interview on how

(19:43):
you can find the hidden treasures and Mexican restaurants. He said, quote,
when you go to a Mexican restaurant and you see
Spanish on the menu that you have never heard in
your life, order it. That will be the regional cuisine,
and more likely than not, it's really good. I was
reading something about about Mexican cuisine before we came in
here to record, and there was one particular writer. It

(20:05):
was like, y'all stop bragging about how you tried corn
smutt is like a normal part of cuisine. You don't
get a medal for having tried it. YEP. As of
twenty four teen, there were more than seventy Mexican restaurants
just in the ten cities that were flagged in this

(20:27):
one particular article. Thousands more are threads are spread throughout
smaller cities and towns and rural areas. This is similar to, Uh, like,
the place where I grew up was not very large.
We we definitely had multiple Mexican restaurants. Yeah, and I
feel like I am in the area of town I

(20:50):
live in now, which is very diverse. I will often
see a lot of little, small taco shops pop up,
and often they'll stick around for years and years. Uh
and they're to sucked sometimes into just like a random
part of a neighborhood, which is kind of awesome because
those places often have gold, super deliciousness. Uh. So, next up,
we are about to talk about Italian food in its

(21:12):
place at the American table. But first we're gonna take
a quick sponsor break before we do that. The other
big hitter in the triumvirate of popular ethnic foods in America,
again we're using the ethic foods and quotes is Italian
and It's life in the US parallels that of Chinese

(21:33):
food in a lot of ways. Also Mexican food, but
this one has some pretty direct tie ins. In the
early twentieth century, Italian food, like both Chinese and Mexican,
was seen as a cuisine for the lower classes or
lower income homes. And the smells of garlic and the
red sauces that started to be used in the US
not necessarily a particularly Italian thing. We're seen as far

(21:57):
too pungent and overwhelming to the American palateate. That sort
of cracks me up, because garlic is like the magic
siren song that will draw me to any kitchen. Things
have changed. One of the things that's funniest to me
as as far as people's UH perception, sort of like
mainstream wide perception of what Italian food is, is that

(22:19):
it's sort of spaghetti in a tomato sauce, and uh,
tomatoes did not exist in Italy until after Europeans started
going back and forth to North America and brought tomatoes
back with them, and then pasta also likely introduced. All
though that before pasta was introduced into Italy, before tomatoes

(22:41):
were but both of those are UH things that came
about a little bit more recently. In the grand scope
of Italian history, immigration quotas from the nies had a
significant effect on the way the Italian immigrant population was
distributed throughout the United States. Because the Immigration Act of

(23:02):
four cut the Italian immigrant quota from forty two thousand
to just four thousand a year, Italian neighborhoods started to shrink.
Residents who lived in the Little Italy neighborhoods moved in
increasing numbers to the suburbs or other neighborhoods that were
less identified by one culture and were more diverse in

(23:22):
terms of which cultures lived there. The internal migration led
to a deeper integration of Italian immigrants into the so
called American melting pot, where they were both influenced and
influenced others. And during World War Two, Italian immigrants had
been classified as enemy aliens, and there were Italian Americans

(23:44):
interned in the same way Japanese Americans were, and there
was there was, of course, some uh hostility and anti
Italian sentiment that went on at the same time. However,
there was a less systematic implementation of the provision that
allowed for the removal of Italians to detention centers. Immigrants

(24:05):
who had been in the United States for a lengthy
period of time, and Italian immigrants who had become US
citizens and your naturalization were not generally subjected to the relocation.
Only Italian nationals were, and that was a pretty small
sliver of the Italian immigrant population. While that already indicates
that Italian immigrants were more accepted than some other immigrant populations,

(24:28):
another factor gave Italian culture a boost in the United States.
Approximately five hundred thousand Italian Americans served in the war,
sometimes going to Italy to fight. Uh This further eroded
the sense of Italians as outsiders the United States. It
bolsterred the image of their cuisine. I will add that
at this point, I mean, there had been immigration from

(24:51):
Italy to the United States for a long time, so
there were a lot of people of Italian descent who
were more than one or two generations removed from Italy,
which met that unlike with the Japanese American population, it
just was not feasible to try to round up all
of those folks and incarcerat them. But what's interesting is,

(25:13):
unlike Mexican and Chinese food, which were to some degree,
both really consciously shifted to appeal to American tastes. Italian
food in the United States changed, at least in part
just because of a ingredient availability. So, for example, canned
tomatoes were inexpensive and they were easy to find it
almost any market, and meat was far more plentiful and

(25:34):
affordable in the United States than in southern Italy, for example.
And so dishes like spaghetti and meatballs that Tracy referenced
earlier and baked zd slowly developed here in the United
States in Italian neighborhoods, although those were not common foods
in Italy. Even the ever popular fetatini Alfredo, which I know,
I know and love, was invented in Italy, but it

(25:56):
took on a very different pro profile in the United States.
According to the lore, in nineteen fourteen, Alfredo Delileo put
parmesan and butter on noodles as a meal for his
wife who was pregnant, and it was such a great
simple dish that he opened up a restaurant to serve
it to the masses. But once Delileo moved from Italy

(26:17):
to New York and opened a new restaurant, heavy cream
entered the picture, and that became a much different, much risher, richer,
very tasty dish. It's so delicious. But yeah, there are
still things that are served similar to his original dish
in Europe, but it's usually just called like pasta with butter.

(26:38):
It doesn't have the name Alfredo, and it certainly is
not coated in a heavy sauce the way we think
of it. A geni alfredo. Spaghetti carbonara, another Italian American
dish that is now often mentioned as one of the
most unhealthy things you can eat, was invented here in
nineteen fifty seven. And as for a pizza, we did

(26:59):
a whole epis old lawn that last year, which were
accorded in Chicago at C two e two. It basically
experienced the same lifespan as other Italian food. Neapolitan pizza
slowly morphed into this Americanized version, was heavier and doughier
and has way way more stuff on top. One of
the things I said in that live show was, if

(27:20):
you have this for the first time, and all you've
eaten your whole life is the kind of pizza that
served as the United States, your first reaction might be,
where are the toppings? It's a lot, a lot simpler
as a dish. Uh. And pizza, you know, once it
had a foothold, has become one of the most popular
foods in the United States. Yeah. I was reading in

(27:44):
the course of doing research for this a quote from
a gentleman who runs a Neapolitan pizza restaurant, and his
specific thing was about the crust being less doughy but
also less crispy, so he would have customers come to
him and say this didn't cook all the way, and
he was like, oh, no, no, no, no, I promise
this is how Neopolitan pizza works. Uh. In the nineteen nineties,

(28:06):
According to John Marianni, who is the author of How
Italian Food Conquered the World, Because foods all conquered things
I discovered while researching this Italian cuisine in the US
really got what he perceived as a much needed makeover
thanks to the rising popularity of the Mediterranean diet, which
took that focus away from the heavy cream based sauces
that were developed here and the massive portions that also

(28:28):
came to be kind of an American standard. They were
also more refined ingredients becoming more consistently available to both
chefs and home cooks. Thanks to globalization, things like truffles
and for studo became increasingly more available and more popular
in the United States. And this development of more options
and flavors beyond this heavily americanized Italian fair caused a

(28:51):
massive surgeon popularity for Italian restaurants. There are now about
seventeen thousand Italian restaurants just in ten US cities. Uh.
I think very very similarly to both Chinese and Maga
Suan cuisine. Things like pizza and spaghetti people think of
as really, you know, cheap food, yes, inexpensive and not

(29:16):
nutritionally very amazing for you, but there are also at
this point kind of intriguing uh I want to put
it in quotes artisanal pizza places well, and I feel
like there's this interesting parallel that's also gone on that
as the food industry has become more health conscious, we

(29:39):
are seeing restaurants move two recipes that more closely resemble
their place of origin. It's like America really is the
land of like put more butter on it, which don't
get me wrong, I love butter, but it is an
interesting parallel to watch that development. So foods adopted from

(29:59):
other cultures continu new to gain popularity in the US.
Restaurants serving everything from Vietnamese fa to South African bibodi,
which holy man, I'm in love with, are now available
in a lot of large cities and even in some
small cities. Hybrid foods like Korean Mexican tacos started cropping
up as early as the ninety nineties, and today, you know,

(30:19):
all kinds of international cuisines from all kinds of combinations
can be found in restaurants and food trucks, especially food trucks.
It seems like all over the United States. Yeah, I
feel like food trucks kind of offered this um opportunity
to experiment more. I could be wrong. I'm I'm literally
just um basing this on personal experiential chasing of food

(30:41):
trucks and eating a lot of food from them. You know,
It's not the same overhead as opening a restaurant and
and having to like staff up and and do things
that way. It's a little bit of a smaller initial investment,
So I think people have a little more of a
sense that they can experiment without being like, my whole

(31:02):
life just went down the tubes. If a restaurant fails,
you might not recover. So it's not easy to recover
from any business failing. But a restaurant seems like a
much bigger initial investment than a food truck. So I
feel like that's why food truck culture has really brought
us some amazing and interesting and very creative things. So
as food trends wax and Wayne, we will no doubt

(31:23):
have opportunities to sample all kinds of other foods in
the United States. But for the moment, the heavy hitters
in terms of these international foods that have made their
way into like especially White American, mainstream, Chinese, Mexican, Italian,
will continue to be the big three most likely. Yeah,

(31:44):
especially I think once you get out of a city,
it drops off pretty significantly. How like the the amount
of different cuisines available to you will be unless you
live in Like one of the great things I have
discovered is if you live in like a military town,
like an air force town, where there might be more
people from different parts of the globe, those often have

(32:05):
really interesting, um you know, food scenes where you can
get some pretty yummy and different stuff. Yeah. Well, and
the places sometimes the places that are small but also
have a big tourism industry. Sometimes we'll have really really
interesting restaurant scenes, so you know, little places that maybe

(32:27):
have fifty people but a lot of tourism will often
have in pretty interesting restaurant selections. Given the size of it.
Do you want to do a little listener mail? I
sure do. Uh this listener mail it comes from our
listener Kim, And I will tell you that when I

(32:47):
opened it, our office manager Tamika, who I adore, had
come over to talk to me, and she just saw
me grinning like a fool, and then I had to
share it all with her because it's so cool. So
Kim writes, Dear Tracy and Holly, your podcast have kept
me entertained, informed and inspired for many, many hours. But
I'm writing you today because last year's episode on French
protest hats, that's when we had our guest, April Callahan

(33:09):
on inspired an entire art exhibition that is now on
display at the Doyle Art Pavilion at Orange Coast College.
I was considering curating a show of hats by the
Birthday Crown Society UH, a group that began by accident
when Kathleen McMurray asked a friend to make her a
personal crown for her fortieth birthday. Kathleen was protesting the

(33:30):
popular idea that we should dread getting older and wanted
instead to celebrate the empowerment of entering middle age. Her
crowning ceremony was such a success that all her friends
wanted crowns for their round number birthdays of any decade,
and since tradition has been spreading here in Southern California
with more than sixty coronations. Your episode on the French
Ladies Fabulous Protest Hats gave me the historical context I

(33:53):
needed to see the birthday crown Society hats as both
folk art and a form of social protest, and that
motivated allery director Steve uh Rda Savach and I to
pursue the exhibition Crowning Glory and an accompanying catalog, which
I have included for you as a thank you for
your inspiration. This catalog contains portraits by photographer Erin Namura
that capture many silly people proudly acting their ages while

(34:16):
wearing funny hats. It also includes an art historical essay
that references the French protest hats and the stuff you
missed in history class episode. Thank you and everyone at
the podcast for the inspiration from this episode and every episode.
Your work really does affect our lives and helps us
listeners make connections and generate new ideas. Um, this is
the coolest thing. She also adds one more thing. Sometimes

(34:36):
people ask how they can get a hat for their
round number birthday, and the answer is you ask your
friends to make you one, which is great. I love it.
This book is gorgeous and it is so fun and
it is so up my ami because it's very creative,
really fun art um, just the wackiest, most wonderful. They're

(35:00):
all sort of art pieces that represent the person who
will be wearing them for their birthday. I'll try to
uh share some pictures on our social Some of them
are absolutely breathtaking and gorgeous. Some of them will make
you laugh and laugh and laugh. Um. Everything from hats
that look like bird's nest, two hats that look like
giant cookies, two hats that just have a million things

(35:23):
on them, And they're all just to celebrate people as
they they transition from one year to the next. And
they're really really fun and I think everyone should be
doing this because that seems like the most fun way
to celebrate a birthday. So thank you so much, Kim,
because not only is this a delightful letter, but this
book is spectacular and the whole thing brought a massive
smile to my face. I was literally grinning like a
fool looking through this this gorgeous book, so right, who

(35:48):
I need it? But if you would like to write
to us, you can do so at History Podcast at
house to have works dot com. You can also find
us across the spectrum of social media as missed in
History so that it's Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler, Pinterest. I
don't know if I forgot anything. Uh, you want to

(36:09):
visit our parents site. That's how stuff works dot com.
You could search for almost anything you're interested in learning
by typing it into the search bar, and you will
generate a load of results that will keep you busy
and hopefully happy and well informed. You can visit us
at misston history dot com for all of the episodes
of the show that have ever existed, as well as

(36:29):
show notes for the lens Tracy and I have worked
on and as of uh recently, we have consolidated show
notes into the episode page, so you can look at
our sources right there. At the same place you are
getting the podcast, which makes life a little easier fewer
clicks for you. Who doesn't want that? Uh So, Come
and visit us at Misston history dot com and how
stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands

(36:55):
of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com?
You do