Changes

===Ethnic foods===

===Ethnic foods===

Immigrants from Europe 1840-1910 all had experienced hunger in their countries of origin. Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews looked at America as a place where food was abundant and available to all. The prospect of improving their limited, sometimes meager, diets was a major "pull" factor in their decision to emigrate to America. The new land fully delivered on that promise: Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants enjoyed a better, richer, more varied diet in the United States than they ever did in the past. The abundant availability of food significantly shaped subjective and collective identities. On the one hand, it helped redefine immigrants into free consumers in a single democratic market. In this perspective, the abundance of food that immigrants encountered in America function as a shaping element in a common American culture. On the other, these dietary revolutions made the construction of private and public ethnic rituals possible and thus played an important role in the parallel processes of “ethnicization” of immigrant groups.<ref>Diner (2001) p. 229</ref>

Immigrants from Europe 1840-1910 all had experienced hunger in their countries of origin. Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews looked at America as a place where food was abundant and available to all. The prospect of improving their limited, sometimes meager, diets was a major "pull" factor in their decision to emigrate to America. The new land fully delivered on that promise: Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants enjoyed a better, richer, more varied diet in the United States than they ever did in the past. The abundant availability of food significantly shaped [[Subjectivism|subjective]] and collective identities. On the one hand, it helped redefine immigrants into free consumers in a single democratic market. In this perspective, the abundance of food that immigrants encountered in America function as a shaping element in a common American culture. On the other, these dietary revolutions made the construction of private and public ethnic rituals possible and thus played an important role in the parallel processes of “ethnicization” of immigrant groups.<ref>Diner (2001) p. 229</ref>

Diner (2001) shows that Italian immigrants created a symbolically lush Italo-American food culture based on their memories of crushing poverty and landlord exploitation in peasant Italy, while the Irish, whose ethnic memory linked [[Irish Famine|colonialist starvation]] to collective identity, did nearly the opposite, eating because they must but refusing to elevate food to any sort of iconic status (such symbolization was reserved for hunger).  

Diner (2001) shows that Italian immigrants created a symbolically lush Italo-American food culture based on their memories of crushing poverty and landlord exploitation in peasant Italy, while the Irish, whose ethnic memory linked [[Irish Famine|colonialist starvation]] to collective identity, did nearly the opposite, eating because they must but refusing to elevate food to any sort of iconic status (such symbolization was reserved for hunger).