Bye Bye American pie

[Gob]

Resting on gingham cloth, a sugar-crusted apple pie cools on the window sill of a midwestern farmhouse.

Nothing could be more American. Officially American. The Department of Defense once featured the pie in an online collection of American symbols, alongside Uncle Sam and cowboys.



Not that apples are particularly American. Apples were first domesticated in central Asia, making the journey along the Silk Road to the Mediterranean four thousand years ago. Apples traveled to the western hemisphere with Spanish colonists in the 1500s in what used to be called the Columbian Exchange, but is now better understood as a vast and ongoing genocide of Indigenous people.

Not that the recipe for apple pie is uniquely American. It’s a variant on an English pumpkin recipe. By the time the English colonized the new world, apple trees had become markers of civilization, which is to say property. In Virginia, apple trees were used to demonstrate to the state that land had been improved. John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, took these markers of colonized property to the frontiers of US expansion where his trees stood as symbols that Indigenous communities had been extirpated.

Not that the sugar on the crust is uniquely American. Sugar cane was first brought to the US by Jesuits in 1751, but most US sugar remained an import until the Haitian revolution. When enslaved workers seized the French colony in 1791, European capitalists sought new sugar cane fields and workers. French merchants of sugar and slavery landed in Louisiana in the late 1700s. Within 50 years, the US produced a quarter of the world’s sugar cane, and New Orleans had become a concomitant hub of the slave trade. After emancipation, the economics of sugar shifted. The American civil war pushed the frontier of sugar westward. Hawaii’s sugar plantations grew during US Reconstruction. When the Philippines was a US colony between 1898 and 1946, Filipino workers were exempted from the “Asiatic barred zone”’ to work in the US sugar plantations in Hawaii, replacing more militant Japanese labourers.

Not that the gingham on which our apple pie rests is uniquely American. Columbus recorded cotton being used and worn during his first voyage by his Indigenous hosts. The gingham pattern likely originated in south-east Asia, the word deriving from the Malay genggang, a striped cloth that arrived in Europe as Europe colonized Asia. Cotton from India became central to the British East India Company, representing three-quarters of the corporation’s exports by 1766. As Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton tells, this war capitalism enslaved and committed acts of genocide against millions of Indigenous people in North America, and millions of Africans and their descendants through the transatlantic slave trade. In the process, cotton laid the basis of finance, police and government that made the United States.

Since this is quite a lot to acknowledge, it is easier to misremember. In the drama of nationalist culture, the bloody and international origins of the apple pie are subject to a collective amnesia. In the imagining of American community, the dish is transformed into a symbol of domesticity. By 1910, it’s possible for a theatre review to celebrate a wholesome play, “as American as apple pie”.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... -apple-pie

[Long Run]

Next you'll be expecting us to believe that the language we speak came from somewhere else.

[Sue U]

I think that history of apple pie is actually what makes it a perfect symbol of America.

[Bicycle Bill]

I remember when America was described as a melting pot — where everyone and everything blended together, like a pot of mulligan stew in an old-time hobo jungle, to make a unique, interesting, ever-changing amalgam or alloy.

Now we are like a rack of muffin tins, with each space labeled and each one of us assigned to our designated space.  And may God have mercy on you if you don't stay there.

-"BB"-

[Joe Guy]

Yes, but to be fair, that melting pot term was used at a time when minorities and ethnicities stayed on their side of the tracks and in their neighborhoods and always 'knew their place'. Nowadays everyone is screaming about their feelings being hurt because - for example, people don't call a certain group men with twats instead of an out-dated generic term like tranny.

[Burning Petard]

Joe, (and Gob) maybe a better symbol of America now would be a nice slice of Gooseberry pie.

snailgate

[Joe Guy]

Or humble pie.

[Gob]

I remember when America was described as a melting pot — where everyone and everything blended together, like a pot of mulligan stew in an old-time hobo jungle, to make a unique, interesting, ever-changing amalgam or alloy.

Now we are like a rack of muffin tins, with each space labeled and each one of us assigned to our designated space.  And may God have mercy on you if you don't stay there.

Well put Bill, I may quote you on that.

[MajGenl.Meade]

I am offended by the word "muffin".

UK viewers are well aware that Muffin the Mule is still illegal