What America Ate was created by almost forty professors and students at the University of Michigan. While the majority of those working on this project specialized in digital humanities, people with other areas of study including design, multimedia, and American studies worked on the project. There is no information on the site as to how long the project took to put together, but with the amount of records that were digitized, researched, written about, organized and published, it can be assumed that it has taken many years.

The project pulls its materials from multiple sources, the foremost of which is America Eats, a Depression Era project meant to document regional food traditions in America and provide jobs for many people throughout the country. According to the What America Ate website, employees of this Depression Era project worked “interviewing cooks and eaters, transcribing recipes, collecting songs and jokes and poems, and describing all sorts of food customs. . .” In addition to these materials, What America Ate draws from over 200 community cookbooks, food packaging, and food advertisements from across the United States.

Using these materials, What America Ate seeks to “reveal previously hidden aspects of American life during a time of vast economic and social change.” The goal of this project was to use technology to make historical records about food and the culture surrounding it during the Great Depression accessible to the public. What America Ate seeks to share the history and evolution of meals in America as well as the historical and regional context for dishes made throughout the country during the Great Depression.

The creators of What America Ate have organized the materials on their website in multiple formats that appeal to a number of audiences. The site appeals to historians by offering a section divided into categories such as food advertising, domestic workers in the South, and poverty, malnourishment, and racial inequity in the South. Each of these sections contains an essay to inform users as they browse through the materials on the site. It also appeals to cooks who would like to try the recipes collected from the America Eats project by organizing digitized recipes by food category—just like a cook book. Those who are interested in learning about American culture by food and region will likely use the map, which enables users to search by region and state.

The America Eats project split up their materials regionally, so What America Ate has organized their materials the same way. However, on their website, they acknowledge that classification by region is not accurate because food traditions were mobile and spread across borders. In creating What America Ate these scholars concluded that the materials on the website are more an indication of the time they were created than their region. They have concluded this by digitizing records, transcribing their content, researching the history of food in America, and organizing them by region. They also welcome volunteers to help transcribe images.

The foremost scholarly primitive that this project employs is sampling. While the site has thousands of materials, it does not contain all of the recipes, advertisements or cookbooks in the U.S. during the Great Depression. What is included is a sampling of what there was at the time. This also aids the function of representing as this sampling of information is roughly representative of food traditions by region.

What America Ate has an appealing design and multiple ways to search information that appeal to a variety of audiences. However, some of the materials were organized somewhat randomly in their regional category and could have been organized by their date to make them more easily searchable.