From paintings celebrating a Land of Plenty, to cookbooks championing political causes, there’s a lot to chew on in American food history.
Two exhibitions this fall at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio, in Lancaster, offer tastes of America’s foodways as represented in art and cookbooks. Food for Thought: A Taste of the Canton Museum of Art and Essential Ingredients: Cookbooks as History will be on view Sept. 27, 2025-Jan. 4, 2026.
Exhibition curator Kaleigh Pisani, curator of collections and registrar at the Canton Museum of Art, says the many food-related artworks in the museum’s permanent collection inspired her to create Food for Thought, which first ran in somewhat different form at the Canton Museum in 2019.
“It made me think about my own history with food and how others connect with it. I think it’s a really good way to connect with people on a universal level,” Pisani said.
The artworks in Food for Thought also illustrate tropes and trends in American food history.
“We (in America) started painting still life pictures of food and putting those in the dining room, because that showed our abundance in the United States,” Pisani said.
As time went on, artists came increasingly to convey emotions and opinions in depictions of food, its environments and the people who cultivate it.
“I think more so in contemporary times, artists use food often times as social commentary. In pop art food was used a lot—the Campbell’s soup cans to comment on commercialism and consumerism and that sort of thing,” said Kate Hatcher, curatorial assistant for Food for Thought and at the Canton Museum of Art. “Food really is rooted in a lot of periods throughout American art.”
Food for Thought presents more than 80 artworks depicting food, the natural environments from which it comes, the human processes that bring food to the table and actual tableware used for eating. The artworks are organized around four themes—Americana, Land and Sea, the Rituals of Food and In the Garden. Paintings of gardens and other outdoor settings where food is cultivated, works depicting hot dogs and ice cream parlors and a table set with tableware from various cultures—from a Native American seed pot to Japanese tea vessels—present a smorgasbord of stories about America’s food culture.
The exhibition includes work by many noted artists, including Andrew Wyeth, Charles Bell and Toshiko Takaezu, a trailblazing ceramist who lived in Ohio while serving on the faculty of the National Cleveland Institute of Art.
Along with her artwork, the Hawaiian-born Takaezu’s recipe for a Japanese-American pork dish will also be on display. That recipe and those from other artists in the exhibition form a bridge between Food for Thought and Essential Ingredients, an exhibition of American cookbooks, running concurrently in the Decorative Art Center of Ohio’s Lower Gallery.
“It’s a very dynamic pairing, when you’re looking at Food for Thought, which shows the actual product of the food, and then you go look at Essential Ingredients, and you look at how (food is) made,” Hatcher said.
In Essential Ingredients: Cookbooks as History, exhibition co-curators Elizabeth Hewitt and Jolie Braun bring together approximately 70 cookbooks from the Ohio State University’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Items in the exhibition, which first appeared in OSU’s Thompson Library in 2024, range from a copy of American Cookery (1796), the earliest cookbook written by an American for an American audience, to cookbooks penned during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Together, the cookbooks on display tell stories on a range of subjects over more than 200 years of American and global history.
“We really wanted to think about the ways in which, obviously, cookbooks tell food history, but they also talk about food history attached to other things that we might think of as more historical subjects. And we organized the show to see how those histories could be huge macroscopic histories of an entire nation but, if you put a different filter on them, they could, in fact, give you a vision of an individual person or an individual family,” said Hewitt, who also serves as professor and chair in the Department of English at Ohio State University.
The cookbooks on display speak to several broad themes, including Cookbooks and Global Foodways, Cookbooks and Social Action, Global Events and Crises, Food and Technology Iconic Cookbooks and Cookbooks and Local History. An 1876 cookbook, created at the American centennial by the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, stands as a testament to the global foodways of the U.S., featuring recipes for dishes made with indigenous ingredients, like American-grown corn, alongside recipes from British and other European cultures.
A 1915 cookbook contains recipes from supporters of the women’s suffrage movement and writing that argues for giving women the vote. A cookbook published in 1887 in Cleveland, Ohio, supports the women’s temperance movement. A series of broadsides published in San Francisco in 1987 with recipes from renowned eateries, including Chez Panisse and Zuni Café, was intended to help raise awareness and funds for AIDS research and support.
“These cookbooks—they weren’t just fundraisers, but they actually made arguments on behalf of the cause within the pages of the cookbook,” Hewitt said.
As new foods and food technologies entered American culture, cookbooks devoted to them also appeared. Essential Ingredients features one of Sunkist’s recipe cards for cut oranges, a new dish to many Americans after oranges came to the national market beyond California and Florida in the 1920s.
“Essentially what we wanted to think about was how cookbooks get created when new foods and/or food technologies or techniques get introduced into households,” Hewitt said.
And while households vary widely in the cuisines on their menus, food brings us all to the table.
“I think one of the things that’s really great about the show,” Hewitt said, “is it’s an opportunity to think about the collectivity by way of food and the cookbook as a particular genre.”
Food for Thought: A Taste of the Canton Museum of Art and Essential Ingredients: Cookbooks as History will be on view Sept. 27, 2025 to Jan. 4, 2026, at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio, in Lancaster.
