Cult Food: How Breakaway Religions of the 1900s Shaped the American Diet (Online)
Taught by Sarah Lohman
Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and the author of the bestselling books Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods and Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of food as a way to access the stories of diverse Americans. Endangered Eating was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon’s Editors, Food & Wine, and Adam Gopnik on the Milk Street podcast. It was a finalist for the Nach Waxman Prize for Food & Drink Scholarship and winner of the Ohioana Library Book Prize for Nonfiction. Lohman’s work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR. Lohman has lectured across the country, from the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, DC to The Culinary Historians of Southern California
Location: Online Class
America in the mid-nineteenth century is thought of as a time of repression, but it also birthed a legion of free-thinking, free-lovin', agrarian societies. Although these utopian groups were often focused on building a better world through food, many of these gatherings led to disaster.
In Part 1 we'll cover Louisa Mae Alcott's Dad's vegetarian farm cult the Fruitlands; the silverware making vegetarian sex cult the Oneida Community; and the father of Oregona's apple industry's Quaker sex cult.
Come meet the characters that ran these cults and learned how their dietary choices influenced America!
This is a live, online class via Zoom. You can also sign up for part 2 on October 29th.
