On New Year’s Day 1836, President Andrew Jackson received a momentous culinary gift, a humongous cheese, 2 feet thick, 11 feet in circumference, and weighing 1400 pounds. It was created in the summer of 1835 by Col. Thomas S. Meacham, a prosperous dairy farmer with lands near Lake Ontario north of Syracuse New York. The mammoth cheese was sent by boat along the Erie Canal on to Washington. It was a public sensation. James Fenimore Cooper wrote of the same area of New York only two generations before as a wilderness that only gradually was being transformed.

The world of food sure started changing fast in America.

The small ears of corn grown on the land by Native Americans have become row upon row of cornflakes on supermarket shelves. The immense seas of grass and the animals that they supported are now colossal farms with enormous yields of soybeans, corn and wheat that feed the world.

But how did this happen and why? From the first Native Americans to modern industrial farmers, people have shaped the North American continent and its climate based on the foods they wanted and the crops and animals they raised.

Please join as one of America’s most distinguished culinary historians, Dr. Bruce Kraig, looks at the food people have dished up from their kitchens or eaten in public dining places throughout American history. Dr. Kraig will also give us some savory insight on the creation of modern American food systems. Copies of Dr. Kraig’s latest book, A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America, will be offered at the discounted price of $30, including tax. (Full retail is $39.)