Culinary Historians | Wealth and Want: Food in the Gilded Age
The Gilded Age was defined by extremes of wealth and want, and those extremes played out dramatically in the ways Americans ate. For the elite, daily meals were extravagant and formal banquets became complicated rituals of luxury and intentional waste. While a wealthy minority feasted, many other Americans struggled to feed themselves, and hunger and misery were widespread among the rural poor and those in city slums.