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plan called for line drawings, possibly by Ross Santee, a cowboy artist and writer who for a time directed the Arizona Project, but they were never made—it was first discussed three days before the Pearl Harbor attack. I decided to make linocuts, a popular book-illustrating technique of the period, and add a few photographs from the remarkable WPA photo archive. The files make it clear that the editors had intended to borrow, wherever necessary, from other WPA projects—they included in the manuscripts several guidebook items, some previously published and others unused.
    Had America Eats been published as planned, we would have had a well-thought-out and organized, clearly written guide to the nation’s food and eating customs just before the war. The southern section was to include a smoothly written fourteen-page essay by Lyle Saxon titled “We Refresh Our Hog Meat with Corn Pone,” summing up the information from the essays, and one other individual piece, “South Carolina Backwoods Barbecue” by Genevieve Wilcox Chandler. Instead, we have a chaotic and energetic assortment of reports, stories, and poems on America and its food by hundreds of different voices, including a few who became prominent writers. Together these many writers in their different voices bring to life the food and people of 1940 America in a way the single-voiced, well-edited book would not have.
    It is rare to find this kind of untouched paper trail into the past. Merle Colby, the Massachusetts writer of several of the guidebooks who had stayed on to the very end to edit service manuals, wrote the final report on America Eats to the Library of Congress, ending with the hope that “Here and there in America some talented boy or girl will stumble on some of this material, take fire from it, and turn it to creative use.”

THE NORTHEAST EATS

    NEW JERSEY— responsible for the region
MAINE
NEW HAMPSHIRE
VERMONT
MASSACHUSETTS
RHODE ISLAND
CONNECTICUT
NEW YORK CITY
NEW YORK STATE
PENNSYLVANIA

The Northeast
    T he strange bedfellows produced by collecting states in the U.S. Census groupings can be seen in this Northeastern segment. It may make sense to those from other parts of the country, but as any New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox fan can explain, New Yorkers and New Englanders regard their cultures as completely different. It is an age-old competition that began long before baseball, originating in the seventeenth century when conservative religious colonies controlled by England were competing with a commercial colony controlled by a Dutch trading company. Even after the British took over New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed it New York, the competition between the ports of Boston and New York continued.
    It is interesting that the FWP split New York City and New York State into separate groups because it is clear from their food contributions that New York State, especially Long Island, which was settled by people from Connecticut, has more in common with New England than with New York City.
    New York City, Massachusetts, and Connecticut had all been stars of the FWP. But while New York City offered imaginative contributions despite having lost its most distinguished writers, the leading New England states were contributing very little by the time of America Eats , and Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine became more important.

Eating in Vermont
    ROALDUS RICHMOND
    Roaldus Richmond was born in Barton, Vermont, in 1910 and died in New Hampshire in 1986. Starting out as an inexperienced young man in the Vermont Writers’ Project, he went on to become a supervisor and started finding work writing Western adventure stories, including “The Chopping Block Kid,” which was published in Dime Sports Magazine in 1941, and “Duel with Death” for Five-Novels magazine in 1947. He later worked as an editor.
    I n Vermont farmhouses and village homes there are three meals a day, breakfast, dinner and supper, and dinner comes at 12 o’clock noon, which