Acquired Tastes: Stories About the Origins of Modern Food

ways that airlines in general and Pan Am in particular changed the course of eating: hydroponics research to feed crews at refueling stations in the pacific; Pan Am’s service to the US government during World War II and the space race; the changes in cuisine wrought by transporting fresh produce by plane; and the airline’s role in food security operations during the Cold War. The book touches on Pan Am’s role as an effective “arm of state” (2) for the US government, but its strength is in its discussions of gastronomy and in-flight eating. The book is full of fascinating stories that make it highly readable and entertaining, especially because it takes a light touch to theoretical work on globalization. Individual chapters, particularly in the latter half of the book, would do well in an undergraduate classroom. There are many potential avenues of future research to which the book points: the relationships of airlines like Pan Am and the military in developing critical food technology; the experience of attendants who faced the airline’s discrimination; the move to increasingly outsourced catering and the massive strike by catering employees in the 1970s. As Evans notes in the conclusion, Pan Am nostalgia is on the rise. A Pan Am restaurant recreates the inflight experience on a Hollywood set for upwards of $200 a diner; another company sells expensive replicas of the airline’s iconic blue bag. This nostalgia, it seems, is not merely for a time of better airline food, but for a time when the US commanded the symbols of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and glamor. As Evans’s new book effectively shows, Pan Am helped create the “American century” but “simultaneously expose[d] its flaws” (5).