CHOPPING BLOCK: What's Cooking in Our National Parks
A New Series About Could-Be-Banned Cookbooks
When I polled my fellow food scholars about food studies trend predictions for 2025, the very first person to reply was my good friend Carlynn (she writes a wonderful food and lit focused newsletter called Grown in Florida). Her cheeky prediction centered on cookbook bans:
Book bans in public schools were just an aperitif, folks. Next on the menu: They’re coming for your cookbooks. It doesn’t matter why feijoada and Hoppin’ John are so similar; no more histories of curry, either. Take out all the stories about slave cooking and baking as resistance and culinary adaptation to oppression or climate or diaspora. Get rid of the gay recipes, the Jewish traditions, the Chinese calendars. And, most of all: Stop calling pepper “black,” okay? Enough is enough; all peppers matter. We are one nation under God. Indivisible! With liberty and justice for all!
A few months ago, a cookbook ban seemed inconceivable, silly, why would they even bother. But, if you’ve been paying attention to the bread and circus happening in the United States, you know well the kind of inconceivable, silly even things the new administration has been doing. There’s obviously a lot of very serious, not at all silly damage being done, too.
To keep from fully spiraling or becoming a recluse who works to tirelessly finesse a humidity-proof divinity candy recipe, but DOESN’T share even the briefest moment of her trials on the content-monster that is the Internet, I thought it might be morbidly funny to think about the possibility of banned cookbooks.
And because I have shelves upon shelves of cookbooks old and new, I figured I could turn this into a little newsletter series. I bet you, dear readers, have great cookbook suggestions, too. So without further ado, here’s the inaugural newsletter for CHOPPING BLOCK: A New Series About Could-Be-Banned Cookbooks.
Before we dive into actual book titles, let’s review the recent history of book bans. In the United States, there’s not really a way to outright ban a book full stop (for now…), instead books can be banned from specific spaces, most notably schools. In general, public libraries cannot ban books as such acts violate the First Amendment (for now…).
These site-specific parameters are perhaps a large reason why cookbooks aren’t typically on the banned book chopping block. That and I guess we don’t really expect kids and other impressionable people to really be reading them in subversive ways.
Well jokes on you, people who like to ban books, because cookbooks have been a tactic for sharing subversive information for generations! From the suffrage movement to reproductive healthcare access, cookbooks have been vessels for it all (but that’s another post entirely).
According the American Library Association, books are often “challenged,” with the ultimate goal of censorship or banning, for one or more of the following reasons:
the material was considered to be "sexually explicit"
the material contained "offensive language"
the materials was "unsuited to any age group"
In 2023, “the number of titles targeted for censorship at public libraries increased by 92% over the previous year,” and “titles representing the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals made up 47% of those targeted in censorship attempts.”
Given the trajectory of the current administration, these challenges will assuredly continue and likely expand to include other key terms on The List of Trump’s Forbidden Words, anything related to DEI, as well as any of the federal agencies and services currently being gutted by DOGE, such as the National Parks Service.
Which leads me to our very first entry in the CHOPPING BLOCK: Could-Be-Banned Cookbook Series, the What’s Cooking in Our National Parks Cookbook.
What’s Cooking in Our National Parks
This cookbook was compiled by a specially organized volunteer Cookbook Committee made up of federal employees of the National Park Service (Western Region). The recipes were collected from fellow NPS employees from parks, sites, and monuments across Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, as well as the NPS Director’s Office in Washington, D.C. Described as “a choice collection of over 500 highly prized recipes from employees of our National Parks,” this cookbook includes a special section on Outdoor Cooking (obvs) and numerous photos of the National Park System. As detailed in the dedication, the proceeds from the sale of the cookbook went to the National Park Service’s Employees and Alumni Association’s Educational Fund.
Publication date: 1973 (reference copy was 4th printing, 1974)
Possible reason for ban: It promotes love for our National Parks and it also includes several recipes from non-National places such as Mexico, Korea, Japan, Armenia, Greece, Hawaii, Missouri, and Australia. Also frequently mentions bachelors (see. Bachelor Day Baked Beans, p. 177) and poor/lazy man (see Poor Man’s Rumpot, p. 146).
Bannability rating: 6/10
Most bannable recipe and reason: Vegetable Mingle (p. 35) - per new executive legislation, vegetables should not mingle
Other concerning recipes: Australian Fried Chicken (p.56), Red Devil Franks (p. 75), Elephant Stew (p. 99)
Forbidden words: Mexican, California, Korean, Halloween, Amy, albondigas, chutney
Where to buy/read: Used book stores, eBay, longtime-but-recently-terminated NPS employees’ private collections
Be a part of the next CHOPPING BLOCK post:
Submit a could-be-banned cookbook title!
Suggest other metadata for the bannability rubric!
Write your elected federal officials and remind them about the importance of the First Amendment and how dumb these DOGE cuts are, tell me you did, then I’ll say something special about you in the next post.
Welp, looks like it’s time to go ahead and get all the food history books on my wishlist. Now or never.
Albondigas 🤣🤣🤣