MORE than 80 years before “Got Milk?” there was “Eat the Carp!”
The slogan was dreamed up by the United States Department of Fisheries in 1911 as part of an effort to push the uncomely fish into the American kitchen, just one of scores of ways the federal government has tried over the last two centuries to direct how Americans eat through promotional campaigns, nutritional admonitions, factory regulations and gardening tips.
Many of these are engagingly documented in a new exhibition, “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” which opens later this month at the National Archives here.
Through documents, food labels, film footage, photographs and other artifacts from the Revolutionary War to the 1980s, the show offers a fascinating and at times quirky reminder of the vast and perpetual role that the federal government has played in all things edible, with goals both laudable and perverse.
The ongoing debates in Congress concerning food safety, which stemmed in large part from a slew of E. coli outbreaks nationwide, was preceded decades ago by an outrage over deaths due to toxic candy sold by street vendors. That helped spark the regulation of commercial food, documented through photos and documents in the exhibition.
Long before the makers of fatty crackers tried to sell Americans on their nutritional value, the government was pushing enriched white bread as a fantastic source of vitamin B1, through public service ads displayed here. The ever-evolving food pyramid was presaged by a nutrition chart that counted butter as its own food group.
“Government has been involved in our food system since the earliest days of colonial America,” said Andrew F. Smith, a food historian and author of numerous books on the subject. “I think among virtually all the foods you eat, the federal government has certainly had a role in it.”
In some cases, the goal of government has been turned on its head over the years. Federal nutritional advice is now designed to tell people, subtly, to stop being so fat, while in the early decades of the 20th century, the goal was to combat malnutrition.
But often, trends that seem modern and forward thinking (speaking with lust about, say, the fresh shelled pea) turn out to have been pushed by the government years ago.
Front and center of the exhibition is a giant poster, printed to highlight the brilliant green of a bell pepper and the rich red of Uncle Sam’s trousers, which reads: “Uncle Sam Says Garden to Cut Food Costs.” Produced by the Agriculture Department during World War I, the poster would scarcely look out of place in an issue of Saveur.
The idea of a show exploring the government’s place in the national food chain was hatched by the archive’s director of exhibits, Christina Rudy Smith, who stumbled upon a document from 1776 designed to entice men to enlist in the Continental Army through the promise of three solid meals a day. (While few would be seduced into service by today’s M.R.E.’s, patriots were apparently beguiled by a pound of meat and a quart of spruce beer.)
Her inkling that the archives could be harnessed to tell the history of food in the United States was bolstered by the discovery of other items, like a receipt for portable soup left behind from the Lewis and Clark expedition.
“People have been concerned with exactly the same things, from nutrition to food safety, for hundreds of years,” said Alice Kamps, the curator of the show, who dived into the archives, from file cabinets to crumbling notebooks filled with records from the late 1800s, to bring it all together.
The exhibition is organized in four parts: farm, which explores the relationship between government and growers; factory, which looks at the history of food regulation and processing; kitchen, which includes displays of nutritional studies and government education campaigns concerning food; and table, which documents the way government has fed people from schools to military bases. There were so many items in the archives for each segment, “I had trouble narrowing it down,” Ms. Kamps said.
Among her findings:
• In the early 1900s, the Agriculture Department sent explorers throughout the world, Indiana Jones style, to study new plant breeds and bring them back to the United States. Their discoveries were gained at some peril, including but not limited to Siberian tigers and Boxer Rebellion fighters, making a knife and revolver required tools for all researchers. The most famous among them was Frank Nicholas Meyer, who discovered the lemon that would later bear his name, favored large wooly capes and died in 1918 under mysterious circumstances during a trip along the Yangtze River.
• Americans once volunteered to taste tainted food as part of a “poison squad” that helped scientists better understand the effects of boric acid and other additives. News articles were hugely influential in forming the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
• Tea was the first food to be regulated by the federal government (in 1897), Birds Eye got the patent for the first frozen-food processing machine and ketchup was among the first commercial convenience foods to take off. This did not go so well at first. It seems that mom-and-pop producers (who today would be touted as artisanal locavores) were making ketchup from tomato cannery refuse, which would ferment in American pantries and explode. Housewives were warned of perils of errant ketchup with a cartoon featuring “Mrs. Dupagnac,” standing forlornly in her Victorian gown in her walk-in pantry amid bottles of the exploding condiment.
The old ad campaigns and nutritional charts, some of them striking works of art in themselves, are both the strangest and most compelling parts of the show. “Patriots Eat Doughnuts” is a fun poster, but “Eat The Carp!” a flyer that is heavy on the semicolon (“Eat the roe; can the roe”) is among the most amusing.
“Carp were introduced to American waters in the 1880s and proliferated to the point of overcoming native fish and fauna,” Ms. Kamps said. “Americans did not take to them as hoped, so the campaign was an attempt to promote them as a food fish.”
The show also peers into the White House kitchen, with menus from state dinners, President Lyndon Johnson’s barbecue apron and a smattering of recipes, like ones for Queen Elizabeth’s scones and Lady Bird Johnson’s chili, published at nytimes.com/dining with the caveat that it owes its place in history more to its author than to its own intrinsic charms.
In one nod to modernity, José Andrés will transform his Café Atlantico restaurant, near the archives, into a temporary restaurant, American Eats Tavern, as an extension of the exhibition.
The menu will be inspired by the show, with items like clam chowder, burgoo and oysters Rockefeller. The décor will feature vintage photos of markets and farm, renderings of the American flag and the like.
The first floor will have a cafe menu with a big focus on cocktails, and the second and third floors will be serving more-refined dishes. “I am tasting 25 different drinks right now,” Mr. Andrés said last week in a telephone interview. Expect some milk punch, based on Benjamin Franklin’s recipe, as well as a Champagne cocktail first featured at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. “I am very much using every piece of information to create the dishes,” he said.
Frank Meyer would undoubtedly love it.
“What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government’s Effect on the American Diet.” National Archives, Lawrence F. O’Brien Gallery, Constitution Avenue NW between Seventh and Ninth Streets, Washington. June 10 to Jan. 3; America Eats Tavern will be at 405 Eighth Street NW, Washington.
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