Picnics and Porcupines

Book excerpt: Journey to the edges of the Great Lakes in this engaging history of picnicking, wilderness, and foodways. This stunning venture into the American picnic explores how innovation, exploitation, and the changing wilderness of Michigan's Upper Peninsula have shaped the experience of eating outdoors. From a photo of her grandmother picnicking in 1911, to the outdoor lunches of miners and loggers, to the picnics of vacationing celebrities like Henry Ford and Ernest Hemingway, author Candice Goucher opens an aperture into historic memories of picnics past to consider what the picnic sparks in our senses and to bring the borderlands of humans and nature into view. Through pictures, postcards, paintings, and recipes, Goucher traces the creation of a modern notion of wilderness as it emerged in the North American imagination and popular culture to navigate an entangled environmental and culinary history of the Upper Peninsula. Drawing on themes from Indigenous knowledge and the African American experience to labor activism and women's history, this tantalizing chronicle offers a taste of Americana, seasoned by the changing global forces of industrialization, transportation, immigration, tourism, war, and climate.