Romantic sensibilities have significantly shaped the past of the national parks, and cosmopolitan tastes stand to shape their future. Romanticism, a movement that emphasized individual self-expression, emotion, imagination, nature, and the personal experience of the sublime (Swiggett 1903), gained traction in nineteenth-century Europe as a critique of the Enlightenment rationality that had ushered in the Industrial Revolution. Cosmopolitanism is a contemporary cultural discourse that values global perspectives, openness, and engagement with a range of cultural practices and groups (Skey 2012); it is often understood as a critique of nationalism, localism, and other parochial perspectives. These ideological frameworks animate experiences of travel and tourism in general and of eating in national parks in particular.
Far from the Madding Crowd: Romantic Contemplation, Nature, Gastronomy, and Taste
In 1865, Frederick Law Olmsted, best known as the father of US landscape design and landscape designer for New York’s Central Park, was an early key advocate for national parks. Influenced by Romanticism, Olmsted believed that the aesthetic experience of beautiful landscapes could free the imagination (Fisher 1986). Olmsted authored a report—a blueprint for the fitting together of travel, contemplation, class, and aesthetics—about his designs for the land that would later (in 1890) become Yosemite National Park.
In the report, Olmsted waxes rhapsodic in a manner bordering on purple prose about the features of the land there. Describing a stand of stately giant sequoias, Olmsted writes: there are hundreds of such beauty and stateliness that, to one who moves among them in the reverent mood to which they so strongly incite the mind, it will not seem strange that intelligent travelers have declared that they would rather have passed by Niagara itself than have missed visiting this grove.
Olmsted swipes at the so-called less intelligent travelers who would flock to Niagara Falls, overrun by industry and commerce, framing visitors to Yosemite as distinct in their reverence.
Olmsted argued for the preservation of the Yosemite land and its consecration as a national park largely on the grounds of the civilizing effect that appreciating its beauty could have.
The power of scenery to affect men is, in a large way, proportionate to the degree of their civilization and to the degree in which their taste has been cultivated. Among a thousand savages there will be a much smaller number who will show the least sign of being so affected than among a thousand persons taken from a civilized community. This is only one of the many channels in which a similar distinction between civilized and savage men is to be generally observed. The whole body of the susceptibilities of civilized men and with their susceptibilities their powers, are on the whole enlarged. But as with the bodily powers, if one group of muscles is developed by exercise exclusively, and all others neglected, the result is general feebleness, so it is with the mental faculties. And men who exercise those faculties or susceptibilities of the mind which are called in play by beautiful scenery so little that they seem to be inert with them, are either in a diseased condition from excessive devotion of be mind to a limited range of interests, or their whole minds are in a savage state; that is, a state of low development. The latter class need to be drawn out generally; the former need relief from their habitual matters of interest and to be drawn out in those parts of their mental nature which have been habitually left idle and inert.
Olmsted says in the report that rich people can buy land that inspires them and notes that they have plenty of opportunities to see this type of scenery for themselves, but he thinks the effects are so favorable for everyone that the government has a political duty to provide “great public grounds for the free enjoyment of the people under certain circumstances” (1865, np). He argues that “humble toilers” involved in “almost constant labor” have historically been provided by the governing classes with artificial pleasures for recreation, and that this has given them the appearance of “dullness and weakness and disease.” In contrast, he argues for the preservation of natural scenery so that even the humble toilers can stand to be transformed—civilized—by their appreciation of its beauty: “It is an important fact that as civilization advances, the interest of men in natural scenes of sublimity and beauty increases” (Olmsted 1865, np). Scenery could, in Olmsted’s mind, elevate popular taste (Sax 1980, 21), rather than just serving it. In this way, the national parks were imagined as tools for civilizing the uncivilized. Nature travel could be challenging in Olmsted’s day, but its transformative power was unparalleled.
Romantics valorized highly aestheticized personal experiences and, in doing so, created the context into which gastronomy could emerge. Commonly understood as “the art of the table,” the concern of gastronomy was defined in 1825 as “the preservation of man by means of the best possible food”; it was concerned with taste and “the action of food […] on the moral of man, on his imagination” (Brillat Savarin 1825, Meditation III). Romanticism coincided with the invention of the restaurant and a certain type of food writing and emblematized the sophistication and social positioning associated with modern gastronomy (Gigante 2007, section 1). Gastronomes around the turn of the nineteenth century made “fine art of food” and “crusaded for the value of the aesthetic in an age of increasing consumerism” (Gigante 2007, section 1). The culture of gastronomy awakened by Romanticism took food seriously as a canvas for the expression of aesthetic judgments and a site for flexing one’s intellect (Gigante 2007, section 9).
Travel has helped people to develop the ability to discern between environments that are aesthetically pleasing and unspoiled and those that are not (Urry 1995), and food is a central area of heightened discernment. Travel thus emerges as an important site for the cultivation of taste and the valorization of some tastes and experiences over others, and food in the context of travel is perhaps its apotheosis. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote,
The opposition between the immediate and the deferred, the easy and the dif-ficult, substance (or function) and form, which is exposed in particularly striking fashion in bourgeois ways of eating, is the basis of all aestheticization of practice and every aesthetic.
With their remoteness and visual splendor, the national parks are obvious sites of aestheticization, and the foodways there are animated by tensions between easy and difficult, form and function, and the immediate and the deferred.
The movement for national parks in the US, which took flight in the second half of the nineteenth century, just on the heels of the dawn of transcontinental railroad travel, exemplified Romantic sensibilities that intertwined religious truth and nature. The Romantics believed that people could, through introspection and observation of nature, experience the sublime and discover the divine (Campbell 1987, 182–3). Wilderness landscapes were culturally desirable because they pro-vided spaces for this kind of experience, and because the challenging nature of accessing them reflected well on the traveler. Visiting the wilderness was, for people of a certain social standing, a desirable form of leisure activity and an expression of good taste (Urry 1995, 213). Following Olmsted’s lead, the establishment of national parks and the development of infrastructure that reduced the difficulty of get-ting to them helped to cultivate the interests of a wider swath of humanity beyond the moneyed elite. What people ate while on these Romantic quests to parklands was the consequence of federal regulation, political and cultural disenfranchisement, and a changing national and regional food system, and had the power then (as it does still today) to convey something about who they are and what they value.