Food Frontiers

Zappia's manuscript explores the evolution of food in the early American West. It closely examines the political-economic, cultural, technological, and environmental transformations that helped create new food systems across the vast distances of continental North America. Within this region, food systems required myriad supporting components, including infrastructure, transportation networks, producers, consumers, and irrigation. In similar ways, Natives and Euro-Americans employed varying agricultural and horticultural techniques over a period of three centuries, ultimately converging on complex, overlapping systems of grass management by the early 1800s. As in the Great Plains, grass supported large herbivores like livestock (especially horses, mules, sheep, and cattle) that simultaneously fueled regional and global markets for hides, wool, tallow, and slaves. By closely examining the intimate connections between families, villages, migrations, and land use that stitched together Indigenous and Euro-American food systems, we can better understand the ecological forces that paved the way for the modern Far West.
​
This work has benefited from the generous support of several fellowships and grants, including those from UCLA's Institute of American Cultures, NEH, Huntington Library, Autry National Center, New York Public Library, and American Philosophical Society. Sections of this work appear or will be featured in Environmental History, World History Connected, Great Plains: An Environmental History, and Early American Studies.