Man, We Are in Big Trouble.

"As the election of 1840 showed, food reflects and shapes individual and national identity. Although we still remember the remarkable Jean-Anthelme Brilliant-Savarin for his claim, 'Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are' . . . the leading nineteenth-century philosopher of the kitchen also insisted that 'the fate of nations depends on the way they eat.'"

Food and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century America

by Mark McWilliams