By Isabella Figueroa
A new book explores how picnics in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula have brought communities together, connecting the past through nature with a shared meal outdoors.
“Picnics were social occasions that symbolized both freedom and belonging,” historian Candice Goucher writes in her book, “Picnics and Porcupines: Eating in the Wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.”
Goucher, a history professor at Washington State University Vancouver, was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich. She had planned to write a general history of food in the eastern U.P., where her family ties go back to her great grandmother.
When she found her grandmother’s album full of picnic photos from the 1910s and 1920s, she shifted her focus to the history of picnics.
“It was just these really compelling images of women in beautiful long white dresses holding watermelon slices and grinning,” Goucher said “It was a very romantic image of food that veered me off into a different direction with my research.”
The book explores the act of eating outdoors from aristocratic European outings to the working-class gatherings of industrial America. Picnics have always been about more than just the meal, Goucher argues—they’re a reflection of time, place and people.
The book discusses topics from Indigenous summer gatherings for the wild rice harvest that brought families together in outdoor camps, to the immigrant communities that brought their own picnic traditions that evolved in response to the local environment.
“The Upper Peninsula was thus a complex mosaic of linguistic and cultural influences in which the picnic played a critical social role,” Goucher writes. “The picnic tableau helped de-emphasize some cultural differences, giving a commonality of shared place, if not always a shared diet. The unfolding of a regional identity was above all linked to the activities of the outdoors: hunting, fishing, and picnicking.”
Beyond their cultural significance, picnics have also been shaped by technological advancements and industrialization. In the early 1900s, trains improved access to designated U.P. picnic sites. Mining trains would carry leisure-seekers on their off days.
“On a Sunday, they would take the same train that carried all the iron ore and open it up for people to come on as passengers,” Goucher said. “And these trains would stop, and people would pay a small amount of money to get on them and be taken to a picnic ground where they could join others and enjoy the afternoon.”
“Picnics and Porcupines: Eating in the Wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,” published by Wayne State University Press, is available for $26.99.