Enjoy this excerpt from Matt Fitzgerald’s book Diet Cults

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States of America, was a celebrated epicure. The frequent dinners hosted at the White House during Jefferson’s tenure as head of state were legendary, his invitations highly coveted. His hand-picked chef, French expatriate Honoré Julien, was tasked to create meals of great variety and supreme quality for the president and his lofty guests. No fewer than ten dishes were served at a typical gathering: soup to start and then perhaps fish, beef, ham, mutton, veal, fried eggs, assorted vegetables, desserts ranging from custards and ice cream to fruit and cheese, and to drink: wine, cider, and malt liquor.

Present at many of these dinners was Jefferson’s personal secretary, a capable outdoorsman and army officer named Meriwether Lewis. On June 20, 1803, Jefferson penned a letter to Lewis in which the lieutenant was instructed to lead the first expedition across the continent of North America on behalf of the U.S. Government. Lewis spent the next eleven months in feverish preparation for the journey, and he put more time and effort into preparing to feed the expedition than he put into any other part of it.

Lewis was right to obsess over the problem of keeping a couple of dozen travelers fed for at least one year, maybe two, as they made a transcontinental trek of some five thousand round-trip miles through alien wilderness. It’s not as if they could pull up to a fast-food restaurant drive-thru window at any given freeway exit. The nearest thing they could count on—maybe count on—was trade with the Native Americans they would encounter along the way. To that end, Lewis was sure to include among the supplies he ordered for the expedition a vast quantity of colored beads and other gewgaws that the indigenes were said to covet. But he knew that exchanging beads for pemmican could not alone save his men from starvation in even the rosiest scenario. So Lewis also packed piles of firearms and plenty of gunpowder and shells for hunting (as well as for protection against Indians not amenable to trade). White men knew precious little about the flora and fauna of the deep interior at that time (gathering such knowledge was one of the objectives of the mission). But the prevailing belief was that the West was teeming with game, and Lewis trusted that fresh meat would be one of the most reliable sources of calories for the “Corps of Discovery,” as it was officially known.

Like Indian trade, however, hunting in unknown territory was a prospect in which Lewis could not afford to invest blind trust. The party would have to carry some lasting form of nourishment—not too much, lest its progress be impeded, but enough to see the men through emergencies. Transporting food was easier said than done in the early nineteenth century. Food storage and preservation methods were only slightly more advanced than they had been a couple of thousand years before. If the expedition had started only a decade later, the Corps of Discovery would have benefited from canning and bottling, technologies that did not exist in 1804. As it was, they had to rely on many of the same tools and practices that were used to feed the armies of Alexander the Great.

In his research into portable rations, Lewis discovered dried soup. He thought it ingenious. Meats were boiled down to a thick broth, dried, and cut into cakes that were packed into tin cans. When needed, the soup was reconstituted with boiling water. As long as it was kept dry in the interim, this ration of last resort remained usable for many months. Lewis ordered 193 pounds of dried soup for the expedition.

When Lewis set out from Pittsburgh with eleven men (William Clark and the rest of the party would join them in St. Louis) on August 31, 1803, he did not really know what the Corps would eat through most of the voyage. Yet he was confident that adequate nourishment would be obtained, even if many of the foods that provided this nourishment were unfamiliar. Such confidence rested on Lewis’s understanding of a basic fact of human nutrition: people can eat an incredible variety of things.

On the surface, the great feasts that Meriwether Lewis had enjoyed at the table of Thomas Jefferson and the very different ways of eating the lieutenant (now captain) would experience during the two-year expedition he undertook at the president’s behest were totally different. But on a deeper level they were much the same. Jefferson included dozens of species of plants and animals (among other edible things, such as honey and mushrooms) in his dinners. He did so because people enjoy variety in their eating. People enjoy variety in their eating because human beings have a long history of omnivorousness. And we have a long history of omnivorousness partly because we are a species of explorers, of men like Meriwether Lewis, and have been since we first left the trees.

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🤍 Thanks for reading,
Matt Fitzgerald and MarathonGuide Team