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Profs & Pints: The Story of American Cooking

Profs and Pints presents: "The Story of American Cooking," an examination of our nation's culinary and eating habits over time, with Allen Pietrobon, adjunct professor of modern American history at American University and visiting professor at Trinity Washington University.

Want to be a big hit at the dinner table this Thanksgiving? Impress folks with your deep knowledge of American food history! Prepare by hearing award-winning Professor Allen Pietrobon tell the strange tale of what people have been cooking and eating since the Mayflower arrived on our shores. You'll learn how immigration, economic forces, politics, religion, gender, race, culture, foreign policy, and debates over national identity all have played a role in determining what went into our bellies.

Professor Pietrobon, who previously wowed Profs and Pints audiences with talks on prohibition and the gilded age, will start out by telling the real story of the first Thanksgiving. He'll seat us at a table at the world-renown American restaurants of the 1890s and trudge with us through the bread lines of the 1930s. We'll push a wonky-wheeled shopping cart through the 1950s dark ages of American cuisine with its cavernous supermarkets peddling frozen TV dinners and jello salads. We'll join the protests at the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s and venture into the edgy new "ethnic" restaurants in the 1980s. For desert, we can all scoff at todays $15 avocado toast.

He'll discuss how, over the course of the past century, the United States went from being revered for having one of the best food cultures in the world a cuisine so deliciously unique that in the early 1900s wealthy Europeans would travel to America simply for culinary tours to today being (however unfairly) the subject of international ridicule for our junk foods, fast foods, and processed frozen meals. String cheese and SPAM anyone?

What caused this change? Does cuisine really reflect a nations culture? You'll learn what food can teach us about a nations history. While you listen, you'll be able to dine on whatever delicious Afghan food you've ordered from Lapis, the restaurant upstairs. (Advance tickets: $12. Door: $15, save $2 with a student ID).