In Taste of the Nation, Camille Bégin explores an underexamined archive: the Federal Writers’ Project papers in the Library of Congress, documenting the never-completed America Eats project. This New Deal initiative sent writers, including Eudora Welty, Dorothy West, and Zora Neale Hurston, to explore regional cuisine and to create a vision (or, perhaps better, a taste) of authentic America. The America Eats editors were especially interested in collective experiences of dining; they wanted to follow church dinners, town barbecues, and state fairs in order to map the local and regional onto a robust sense of the national. As Bégin points out, America Eats is a striking counterpoint to our cultural memory of the Great Depression period, shaped more by breadlines and malnutrition than by community feasts and memorable flavors.

Bégin expatiates the idea of a “sensory economy,” a field of circulating representations of sensory data, necessarily filtered through ideals of gender, race, and class. As Bégin notes, many of the sense impressions of the fieldworkers and journalists are filtered “through clichés, including stigmatizing racial and gendered stereotypes … [and] rhetorical figures shape perceptions” (10). Because America Eats strove to define the authentic nation, it also tried to expel forms of eating that were standardized (industrial food) or exotic (ethnic food). At the same time, the collective eating and community events that it privileged often used industrial food, and ethnic food from certain regions (like tamales in the Southwest) became the ur-example of authenticity rather than its exception. As Bégin points out, “the anchoring of race and ethnicity at the core of the project was fraught with ambiguities, and the FWP could extol multiethnic food cultures while policing racial lines” (7). Bégin pays well-rewarded attention to paradox and tensions within narratives of nation, region, and race. These imagined communities are superimposed onto one another and also betray their incompatibility.

Bégin's claims for sensory history are not entirely borne out by the archive she examines, and I would have liked to see her explore in more depth the tension between an ideal of culinary authenticity and thick sensory description. Though Bégin avows that “carefully contextualizing sensory notations” can “unveil their capacities at both policing and undermining social construction” (10), she might have confronted more directly how often the America Eats narratives stress the scene of eating rather than its sensory dimensions. What does it say about the ideological conscription of food for nation building that the embodied senses must take a back seat to community and commodity? To confront the impoverishment of these sensory descriptions more directly (what does it mean to write about food without evoking how it feels, tastes, or transforms the body?) would have strengthened the project, which assumes that the dramatization of eating necessarily gives an account of the sensorium. Instead, the stronger sense in Bégin's analysis is vision: she parses the photographs in the collection powerfully for their racializing undertones in some of the finest and most revealing passages in this generally eloquent and persuasively structured book. What is the significance of the fact that race is easier to see than to eat in this archive?

Though it has a rich bibliography and a strong sense of food studies as a field, Taste of the Nation does not often look up from its archive to broaden its account of historical context or cultural production. Sometimes, this narrow view results in minor errors, as when Bégin claims that Eudora Welty was African American (84). The chapters are each case studies from this particular archive; there are missed opportunities to connect some of the America Eats work to FWP writers’ later or contemporaneous literary output about food and also to give a longer account of cultural trends that Bégin flags. For example, the ethnic restaurants she celebrates in the final chapter of the book also played a major role in the metropolitan nightlife of the 1920s. At the end of the book, Bégin makes an excellent point that food history leans all too heavily on the postwar period to investigate the rise of the food industry (and the rise of anxiety about the food industry), but her own scope in the project might have ranged a bit further in order to fully excavate the specialness of this archive that she plumbs so deeply and revealingly.