Hungry, hungry hikers: Fitness, cooking, and gender in American hiking, 1890s–1920s

Abstract

This article examines the recollections of American mountaineers and hikers written between the 1890s and 1920s to interrogate the evolving relationship hikers had with food consumption and physical fitness on the trail. It centres firstly on the trail accounts of Appalachian Mountain Club (1876) and Sierra Club (1892) members, before moving towards articles that appeared in outdoor recreation magazines such as Outing. Contrasting itself with existing scholarly work that has focused on the ecological impact of industrial food systems within environmental history, this article seeks to explore the unexamined social and cultural power of food on early American outdoorsmen and women. By highlighting the high-altitude discourses surrounding food and physical ability on the mountainside, the article demonstrates how potentially productive debates about food and modernity are complicated by contemporary ideas of gender and propriety. It also further demonstrates how early suspicions about nutritional science and the privileged, often-chauvinistic culture of American mountaineering limited the ability of these wealthy fitness communities to communicate a wider message about the nation’s shifting health fortunes.