Two quotes worth chewing.  With your bacon.

America’s early attraction to various forms of scientific eating may also have reflected discomfort about the way other people eat; the weird, messy, smelly, and mixed-up eating habits of immigrants.  How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity, which is exactly what you don’t want in a society dedicated to the ideal of “Americanization”.

In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

That night, while Grandmother was getting supper, we opened the package Mrs. Shimerda had given her.  It was full of little brown chips that looked like the shavings of some root.  They were as light as feathers, and the most noticeable thing about them was their penetrating, earthy odour.  We could not determine whether they were animal or vegetable.

“They might be dried meat from some queer beast, Jim.  They ain’t dried fish, and they never grew on stalk or vine.  I’m afraid of ‘em.  Anyhow, I shouldn’t want to eat anything that had been shut up for months with old clothes and goose pillows.”

She threw the package into the stove, but I bit off a corner of one of the chips I held in my hand, and chewed it tentatively.  I never forgot the strange taste; though it was many years before I knew that those little brown shavings, which the Shimerdas had brought so far and treasured so jealously, were dried mushrooms.  They had been gathered, probably, in some deep Bohemian forest…

My Antonia, Willa Cather