Customer Reviews

A Revolution In Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (Arts and Traditions of the Table)

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

McWilliams' book is an exposition of how and why "traditional American" food as we know it today evolved in various places, and how and why these culinary evolutions in turn influenced historical movements.

We tend to take the task of gathering, planting, processing, and preserving food for granted in our 21st century lives; in truth, these are the most important tasks for our survival! McWilliams adeptly compared how culinary traditions evolved and developed distinct characters in New England, the Caribbeans, and everything in-between, depending on local resources and the people who lived in those areas. The latter part is determined by relations between the white settlers and the native Americans, and the West African slaves forcefully translated to the New World.

One fascinating aspect of the book is how closely the nature of work (or in many cases here, forced labor) and food are interconnected. Areas that grow sugar as a cash crop develop culinary traditions distinct from those that grow tobacco, and not only because of the obvious geographical difference. Social reality also had a strong interconnection to how food is cultivated or gathered.

McWilliams interspersed interesting re-examinations of the menu items that we take for granted today: How did smoked meats enter the American tradition? Why is Hoopin' John historically significant? What about the New England vegetable gardens come about?

Unfortunately, McWilliams tend to rely too much on including quotations of diary entries of people of the different eras. Rarely a page goes without any exultation of some random dairy farmer, or plantation operator, or inspector, or European visitor, on the "bountiful harvest of dis [sic] soiles [sic] .... " and "... are very resorrsful [sic] in gathering ... " After a while these quotations lose their charm and become bothersome and unnecessarily slows the pace of the main story.

Overall, this is an excellent and educational read. The subjects are well-researched and gives a fresh perspective of the "traditional" American cuisine as we know it today.

I quite like food history and environmental history and so came to this book with high expectations, based on the very positive reviews here.

On the whole, it does a credible job of giving a detailed, source-based overview of food in the American British colonies from settlement through the first post-revolutionary generation.

Yet, the while the descriptions are rich on detail, a poor editing decision to remove any call-outs for endnotes makes sourcing those details cumbersome and annoying. And when I did look through some of the endnotes, I found that quite a number of the primary sources were being cited only via other secondary literature.

This all the more disappointing as the author rarely interrogates such sources or questions the qualities of evidence they demonstrate or the viewpoints at stake. With some of the sources, his interpretations seem quite solid, but with other topics, such as the issue of Native American temperance movements in particular, his readings are frustratingly surface-level.

And when we pull back from the details, we see that they are assembled mostly in a descriptive fashion, such that they don't seem to this reader to actually prove the author's theses conclusively, while the theses themselves are at times so bland or vague that they feel merely tacked on.

So while I did enjoy the book enough to read it as my main accompanying pleasure literature for three months, by the end of the experience, I cannot say that I was left all that satisfied.

McWilliams' book is fascinating and completely unexpected. I'd never given a thought to what explorers, settlers, slaves, and/or Native Americans ate beyond the traditional stuff of Thanksgiving. A Revolution in Eating starts with survival basics and takes you through New World regional "foodways" and drinking habits to a new undestanding of all sorts of familiar American traditions and beliefs about people, places, and things that turn out to be fundamental to our social, economic, and political independence as a nation. I couldn't put it down.

I loved this book. It's a wonderful mix of journalistic flair, history, and gastronomy that gave me a whole class-worth of knowledge and a new perspective on who our Founding Fathers were.

Without coming out and saying it, McWilliams shows that most of the early money that came to this country was quite an optimistic bumbling bunch, flying by the seat of their pants, relying on the good manners of Native Americans and the farming skill of African slaves. Importantly this record of well documented research also reveals what an incredible abundance Europeans found on their arrival, a relative bounty that becomes especially relevant to our dreams of sustainability in these times of crashing ecosystems.