Food For The Puritans

The biggest change over time in our eating habits has been how involved we are with our food. In the 1700s colonists grew many of their own crops and hunted their own game. Most individual families also had a dairy cow in their backyard, especially in New England. This was a tradition that they brought back with them from England. They would use the milk for cooking steamed puddings, cheeses, and custards. It also provided colonial families with fresh milk in the morning. Preparing meat was very laborious and difficult in the 1700s. Colonists had to prepare a dead animal, not just parts of it. The cookbook we read in class walked us through how to dress a turtle and the entire process of preparing it used to take hours. This shows that food would not have been made every day. Colonists had to grow their fruits seasonally and did not have the opportunities to go out and purchase what they did not have.

One of the important things during the time of the Renaissance was food. Food was very important to the people. They cooked and served food in a unique way. Others had ovens and others did not. Others who did not have ovens, they cooked their food over an open flame. In Renaissance times, food relied on what your social class is. There were the upper class people and lower class people. The upper class people had more choices of what they wanted to it and the lower class people didn’t have many choices of what they wanted to eat. Some of the foods were expensive. For them to have food they had farm. The upper class owned farms and they planted crops and harvested the crops for food. They raised animals for them to have meat and milk.

Pollan first establishes his ethos by citing nutritionist Joan Gussow. This not only shows us that he has done his research in the field, but shows us his reflection to her speech; this makes him appear more as an equal peer talking to us about why food should be redefined. He continues to draw the reader in by bringing a pathos aspect; bringing up your great grandmother. Pollan explains, “We need to go back at least a couple of generations to a time before the advent of most modern foods” (107). He continues to encourage the reader to imagine grocery shopping with your great grandmother. Pollan brings an emotional aspect to making the reader reminisce about great grandmothers cooking and possibly guilt the reader to think about how grandma would complain about how unhealthy food is today. Then he tells us to avoid foods she would not recognize as a food that contains familiar

In Chapter 4, we discuss how the Puritanism changed New England during the seventeenth century. Puritans immigrated to North America to escape the hardships and persecution they faced in England, because of the English reformation. They wanted to form a new, orderly Puritan version in New England. However, many of the New England colonists were not Puritans, Puritanism remained a strong influence in New England’s politics, religion, and community. Many of the New England colonists,settled in new towns and tried to steer clear of the Puritan religion. Eventually to the fatal decline of Puritanism in New England.

Once the colonists’ left England and arrived in North America, their diet changed dramatically. Instead of having the foods they were accustomed to, they had to adapt to fit their environment. The colonists were also accustomed to a regular eating schedule that they would soon have to change. The colonists would eat an early breakfast, an early dinner and a late supper, lunch were not included; however, all this schedule and way of doing things would soon change.

The New England colonies were founded by English Puritans. While most Puritans sought to purify the Church of England from within, and not to break away from it, a small group of Separatiststhe Pilgrimsfounded the first small, pious Plymouth Colony in New England. More important was the larger group of nonseparating Puritans, led by John Winthrop, who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony as part of the great migration of Puritans fleeing persecution in England in the 1630s.

In the middle colonies they had perfect weather and soil for most of the crops needed

There was no typical meal for a colonial Americans, as the diets between a rich and a poorer citizen would have depended on what they could afford. This was also the case because of the different food sources that each of the colonies had. The breakfast of the typical colonial American consisted of bread, cornmeal mush, milk or tea, and possibly an alcoholic beverage. The poor would eat dinner midday while the rich would have it midafternoon. Dinner may have consisted of one or two meats, pudding, cheese, pickles, vinegar, salt, roots, and vegetables. The evening meal was called “supper” and consisted of foods similar in content to breakfast. Butter, spices, sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, and alcohol were considered luxuries and were only consumed

In Whitebread Protestants by Daniel Sack, highlights how religion and food play a prominent role in American Culture.Taking a closer look at the mainline Protestant church, food has a deeper meaning. As the reading mentions food is the most important after oxygen and water. It is interesting to see that the reading states that scholars view protestants food to be “boring” when compared to “exotic” plates from the Jews and ethnic Catholics. I wonder how they define food to be “exotic”? At the end of the reading it talks about a parable and how there was this show and tell event and a Jew brought the star of David to represent his religion and a Catholic child brought the crucifix while a Protestant brought casserole, This is just to show how

During the Elizabethan era various types of foods were eaten and extensive details were added to these foods. Social classes also played a big role in what the rich or poor ate.

Massachusetts Bay Colony settled by a group of somewhat 1000 Puritans refugees from England. The Puritans came up with a theocratic government with the franchise which was limited to church members. Leader were trying to find a way to prevent independence of religious views and other religious views. By the mid 1640’s the population grew to approximately 20,000 people.

Puritans were a group of English Protestants who believed that the Reformation of the Church of English was still to stuck on Catholic formalities and wanted to simplify and regulate types of worship. The Puritans left England out of a need to purify the church and their own lives. They followed the writings of John Calvin to America and formed The Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was one of the original settlements, settled in 1630 by a group of about 1,000 Puritan refugees from England, under the guidance of Governor John Winthrop. In 1929, The Massachusetts Bay Colony received a charter from King Charles I allowing them to colonize in New England between the Charles River and the Merrimack River. The Puritans created a government with theocratic rule which was limited to church members. The Puritans initially settled in Boston in 1630. After Boston, they settled in Cambridge, Lexington, Concord, Watertown, Charlestown, and Dorchester. The Puritan population, in New England, rose from 17,800 people, in 1640, to 106,000, in 1700.

Throughout fifteenth century England, Puritanism was severely persecuted. Puritans were forced to go to the Anglican Church where they were also pushed into associating with those that were predestined for Hell. The Puritans wished to purify the Church of England in a way that allowed them to not only practice their religion, but to do so in a different location than the Hell-bound. In 1620, the Puritans left England and settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they were free to practice Puritanism. The ideas and values held by the Puritans influenced the political, economic and social development of the New England colonies from 1630 to 1660.

The diet between the upper and lower class differed in what they could afford. The upper class citizens of the Elizabethan era ate lavishly and extravagantly. As they could afford the spices from Asia and the freshest meat on the market. While the lower class citizens ate poorly. The lower class diet consisted of many vegetables and fruits with meat as a rare luxury. Vegetables were seen as unfit for the wealthy because they came from the ground. While the diets of the upper classes seem to be very different from those of the lower classes, there are many similarities that can be

For the well-to-do, eating during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods was a fancy affair. A king or queen when going abroad could expect banquet tables filled with hundreds of dishes--for just one meal! There was much pageantry and entertainment. At Leicester, Queen Elizabeth I (predecessor of King James VI & I) was greeted with a pageant of welcome displayed on a temporary bridge. There were cages of live birds--bitterns, curlews, hernshaws and godwits. One pillar held great silver bowls piled with apples, pears, cherries, walnuts and filberts. Other pillars held ears of wheat, oats and barley, gigantic bunches of red and white grapes, great livery pots of claret and white wine, sea fish in quantity laying