Beyond the Burger: USA Food Stories in the British Library's Oral History and Food Industry Literature Collections

This project will draw on the oral history archives and food industry literature in the British Library to explore food and its production, with a focus on the interplay between American food systems and the creation of British culinary culture since 1945. It will examine labour conditions, attitudes to different foodstuffs and their novelty and/or ubiquity; it will provide a unique view of the negotiations of structure and agency in food purchasing and consumption. Research into the British Library’s oral history archive will enable an analysis of the attitudes and motivations of the people involved in food production across US-UK foodways. Research into the food industry literature will show how foods travelled and were marketed. The student will benefit from the expert training they receive at the British Library (in oral interviews, for example), as well as training at Keele, and insights gained in the PhD research will feed into their BL activities, including new oral histories and public workshops. Food's meanings have always been contested, and as American culture – newly on television screens, already here in literature and film – became recognisable and present, food was at the centre of the cultural shift. We will examine the effect this already-hereness and concurrent strangeness had on the ways people viewed American food and its production, as well as the ways people viewed British food as compared with, or in contrast to, their imaginings and experience of US food cultures. We will consider the ways US-UK foodways shifted during the Cold War and post-Cold War period. For instance, when and to what extent did British views of American foods shift from privileging the abundance of American capitalism to stressing excessive consumption, and the health costs of cheap, calorie-dense food; and how did those in the food industry adapt to these shifting opinions? Building upon the studies of scholars such as Nelson Lichtenstein (Retail Revolution), oral histories and food industry materials will also offer insight into the ways models of working associated with major US food corporations were adopted, adapted or rejected in the UK. This attention to labour and production will allow our study also to shed light on global influences shaping the late twentieth and early twenty-first century proliferation of low-wage work in post-industrial Britain (see, for instance, Lee, Green and Sissons, ‘Low-wage sectors, earnings mobility and economic policy in the UK’). The student might also choose to focus on the adoption of American food production systems in Britain: automation, industrial agricultural practices, supermarket and retail consolidation, branding and marketing. We intend for the CDP-holder to analyse two networks of meaning: oral histories of food production and the foodways by which food travelled, as well as work patterns and production methods relating to those foodways. We are not only interested in fast food, or in food explicitly coded ‘American.’ The PGR will be enabled to examine cultural foodways from China, via the US, to the UK and China to the UK, to the US; Southern soul food and its heritage in African and European traditions; European food adapted in the US and then repackaged as ‘American' in the UK. Ultimately the PGR’s focus will depend on what they find and we will encourage them to develop their interests.