n the early 1900s, the United States was at war—over pie. On one side were the traditionalists, who saw pie as “an article of necessity in every household as much as the bed and cook stove,” according to a Chicago Daily Tribune report in 1899. On the other side were the food reformers, who wanted to break this unhealthy and corrupting habit. “Pie really is an American evil,” Kate Masterson wrote in the New York Times in 1902. It is an “unmoral food,” she warned, offering advice for spotting pie eaters: They have “sallow complexions” and “lusterless or unnaturally bright eyes” and, of course, they “are all dyspeptic.” “No great man,” she wrote, “was ever fond of pie.”
Those were fighting words. Pie eaters traced their love of the dish back to the founding fathers—a particular pumpkin pie recipe credited to the Adams family was said by the Kansas City Star to have “raised a well-fed race of jurists, scholars, orators and Presidents”—and still further back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
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