A Short History of the American Stomach [Hardcover]

Frederick Kaufman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 2008

The extremes of American eating—our separate-but-equal urges to stuff and to starve ourselves—are easy to blame on the excesses of modern living. But Frederick Kaufman followed the winding road of the American intestine back to that cold morning when the first famished Pilgrim clambered off the Mayflower, and he discovered the alarming truth: We’ve been this way all along. With outraged wit and an incredible range of sources that includes everything from Cotton Mather’s diary to interviews with Amish black-market raw-milk dealers, Kaufman offers a highly selective, take-no-prisoners tour of American history by way of the American stomach. Travel with him as he tracks down our earliest foodies; discovers the secret history of Puritan purges; introduces diet gurus of the nineteenth century, such as William Alcott, who believed that Ònothing ought to be mashed before it is eatenÓ; traces extreme feeders from Paul Bunyan to eating-contest champ Dale Boone (descended from Daniel, of course); and investigates our blithe efforts to re-create plants and animals that we’ve eaten to the point of extinction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kaufman, an English professor at New York's City University, pursues a hip, journalistic approach to America's all-consuming relationship to the gut, from Puritan rituals of fasting to the creation of the Food Network. Kaufman maintains that the feast-fast syndrome that torments America—obesity, anorexia, overeating, dieting, fads and cures, gastroporn, pollution and purity of food, and self-sufficiency—all originate from our understanding of virtue and vice, first established by the Puritans. Indeed, these first settlers held that the stomach's equilibrium reflected one's spiritual state, and the process of digestion maintained the body's intimate fine-tuning between good and evil. Days of fasting were declared as ways of seeking spiritual guidance, and purges and emetics used to expunge evil and corruption from the system, much as today's advocates of raw foods and unpasteurized milk press their enzyme cures. To demonstrate examples of the ethics of eating, Kaufman discusses dietary restrictions such as kosher foods and, conversely, the lifting of all restrictions by the primal culinary tastes nurtured in the Wild West. Kaufman traces dieting to Ben Franklin's obsession with the virtue of temperance and offers myriad examples of how certain diets (e.g., vegetarianism, single-substance eating) were intended to effect one's transformation from within. With a final paean to endangered favorites such as bananas and oysters, Kaufman digresses forgivingly in this occasionally incongruous though entertaining study. (Feb.)
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Review

PRAISE FOR A SHORT HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN STOMACH

“This rollicking survey of our national food manias from Cotton Mather (‘Look after thy stomach’) to Rachael Ray is amiably peripatetic.”—New York Observer

“Witty and polemical . . . [Kaufman] makes some valuablepoints about how the stomach influences the waysAmericans view themselves.”—Los Angeles Times

 

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (February 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 015101194X
• ISBN-13: 978-0151011940
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,463,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally some perspective on the American Foodie Revolution, February 12, 2008

By 

Tristia (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Short History of the American Stomach (Hardcover)

In a concise, rollicking and eloquent study, Kaufman manages to bring to bear an immense body of historical research and sharp journalistic chops on the huge, convoluted subject of America's food fixations. By showing us how every diet craze and alimentary fad of the moment in fact represents an eternal recurrence of the same in American gustatory history, he allows us to make out the patterns in our approach to eating. By getting beyond the "food fight" element in all the raging debates about what is and isn't right to eat, he provokes us to think harder about the larger political/theological/aesthetic implications of American appetite as that consumes public attention at home--and chews its way through the world at large. This is one book that makes you think less about what you eat than about how you eat it...

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not another food book --, February 12, 2008

By 

Omnivore "Feed Me" (The world is my oyster!) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Short History of the American Stomach (Hardcover)

- and what a relief! This is one of those books you never knew you wanted until you had it in your hands. Kaufman's sense of history is direct, keen, and alive, informed by a sly, philosophical wit, and presented with a true sensualist's love of his subject. The result is snappy, readable, and laced with a profound, yet hilarious, understanding of Brillat-Savarin's often-misquoted, "Dites-moi ce que vous mangez et je vous dirai qui vous êtes" -- accurately translated by the immortal M.F.K. Fisher (who would have held this volume close to her heart) as, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are." Kaufman shows us, with clarity and charm, how that aphorism works in both directions, always has, and always will.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Foodies Beware, April 1, 2009

By 

S. A. Waggoner "pettacom" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Short History of the American Stomach (Paperback)

Like the Food Network it erroneously deems the sine qua non of the American gourmet scene, this book is sloppy, silly, and seems to have been written by someone who cares little about the food scene for those who care even less. The driving impulse seems to be a kind of jokey, adolescent urge to make fun of the obvious, and to that end the writing -- no doubt meant to be breezy and amusing -- is sophomoric, superficial, awash in self-indulgent aren't-I-clever rambling, and not infrequently inane. Sentences like "America has long been enchanted by triploid fruit" and "There are many benefits to eating a food that cannot enjoy sex" abound, as do hyperbolic adjectives like "mania" and "obsession." Also frequent are proclamations like "It must have come as some relief to the growing urban population that somewhere in the American wilderness roamed a giant named Paul Bunyan, who would consume nothing but raw moose meat" -- an example not only of the author's relentless generalizations but his disregard for facts: the best known food stories about Paul Bunyan involve his favorite food, flapjacks. Bunyan was a lumberjack who ate lumberjack food -- pancakes, pea soup, salt pork stew. I doubt any Americans, urban or otherwise, conjured him eating raw moose meat, much less would have found the image comforting. But why let facts intrude when the point the author is bolstering -- that "dissolute gourmandism was a clear indication of the actual frontier's death" is so sweepingly vacuous in the first place?

Paul Bunyan is not the only figure maltreated in this book. The author sites, and often quotes from, all the early samplers of American cuisine -- Bartram, Crevecoeur, Franklin, Irving et al. -- yet misses the point of each one by treating them in the same frat boy manner. The whole thing reads as if the author had lost his research notes in a fire and, locked in a room with a deadline approaching, decided to just wing it. There are no footnotes, nor is there a bibliography.

For a more sophisticated take on the same subject, read David Kamp's The United States of Arugula, which is carefully researched, highly informative, and much more entertaining.