Customer Reviews

Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration

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This is a trully intriguing work about three parallel immigrant cultures, and how hunger for an adequate diet was one of the predominant incentives to them for immigration. What makes this study so interesting is how the importance of food manifested itself so differentially among these separate groups once in the United States based upon the histories of the country of origin.

Being of Irish extraction I learned for the first time, definitively, why unlike my Italian, Jewish, and Latino friends no Irish "ethnic" foods (other than soda bread) were part of my background. And, it helped me to better understand the critical, but differing, importance of food in the Jewish and Italian cultures I grew up along side.

Readers should be advised that this is a serious academic work, one which would be an appropriate college history text. Therefore, the introduction and summary chapters will seem dry and..."academic" to those seeking a purely recreational read. I advise them to walk on the edge and learn something; it's well worth the time invested.

I've seen the brand Contadini many times in the grocery store, but I never
knew what it meant. I also never realized that spaghetti isn't really an
Italian food. Ms. Diner included some enlightening facts about the
development of immigrant diets and why certain groups of people felt the
way they did about food coming into this country.
I found the information about Irish food culture, or the lack of it, really
interesting. Unfortunately, that section of the book is unnecessarily
lengthy and repetitive. I learned some valuable and relevant information
from Hungering, but I don't see very many people reading the entire thing
if they just pick it up out of curiosity or a passing interest in the
subject matter.

Unfortunately while this book does try to explore a fascinating and worthwhile subject, it suffers the same predicament that most non-fiction books for the past three decades have fallen under - incompetent editing. The author repeats, and repeats, and repeats, and repeats, and repeats her ideas and observations. Perhaps she was trying to meet a minimum word limit ordained by her publisher but that consideration shouldn't elicit anyone's sympathy. The constant re-iteration of points (and the author's desert-dry "voice" that exacerbates the repetition with its monotonous tone) makes for such a frustrating reading experience that I could not go past the second chapter.