Customer Reviews

A Short History of the American Stomach

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1 star:		(5)

 

 

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...

- 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 ętes" -- 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.

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.

An extremely unfocused book. Kaufman has an excellent topic here, but does little with it. Like with Freakonomics, the book is a series of interesting tidbits that don't really add up to anything. Probably the most interesting thing I learned is that practically every food in America, except those including pork, is probably kosher, even if not supervised by a rabbi. There were some interesting tidbits about the Mather family, but why not go deeper into how their theories affected the average American?

There is a book to be written on this topic - this one isn't the right one. It merely skims the surface and isn't a coherent whole.

And don't let the length fool you. This is REALLY short. Without the index, it is 194 pages of the kind of type you see in young adult titles. I read this in about 2 hours, and I'm not a particularly fast reader.

American Stomach is a real mess. It's a rambling hodge-podge of ideas and topics as they occur (very randomly) to the author. The topics themselves have very little to them. It's mostly ruminations that are hard to follow, with very little meat. The author seems most intent on impressing the reader with his vocabulary, literary allusions, and cleverness. Transitions from one topic to another were particularly jarring and haphazard.

Here's a sample of what you can expect:

"American religion, American economics, American politics, and American media had all been devoured by the great maw. At the Plymouth harvest dinner reenactment [the topic of the chapter], where nothing was real except the food, the primal, eldest origins of the country had met the American stomach and gone down the hatch too. And still, the enteric brain pushed forward. It wanted more."

Breezy, clever-sounding - but what does it all mean, if anything?

This is one of those rare books that's nimble enough to move fast and be read in a couple of sittings, but smart enough to actually give some much-needed perspective on its subject, which is a big one: what we eat--and what we don't eat--and why. If FRENCH WOMEN DON'T GET FAT explained a great deal about French culture, viewed through the gustatory behavior of its female citizens, A SHORT HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN STOMACH explains us. Whether you are an epicure dreaming of the first morels of spring, or pretty happy with the new three-course $9.99 menu at Applebee's, Kaufman's book will delight you.

It has become common knowledge that America suffers from a severe feast and famine mentality. If we couldn't tell by our own observations, any survey of recent news articles proclaims the raging epidemic of obesity in our culture. A little less obvious, but of equal concern, are the high rates of bulimia and anorexia that we also find in our society.
What Frederick Kaufman makes abundantly clear in his short gastrological history is that these seemingly contradictory urges of feast and famine have been with us from the very beginning. It is deeply enmeshed in our societal psyche. It has strong religious, philosophical, and even physiological components. In fact, "stuffing and starving" is rooted in our bones, or more accurately, in our stomachs.
Although Kaufman certainly covers a lot of history of food consumption in this country from Cotton Mather and Washington Irving to Emeril Legasse and Sara Moulton, his book is permeated with the philosophical ramblings of a knowledgeable food fanatic.
During the course of his social history of American food and its consumption, Kaufman covers a series of loosely related topics- the rise of the Food Network, the religious fervor of raw food adherents, the allure of kosher food, the vast number of diet books produced over 200 years, the plethora of competitive eating contests, and the inevitable growth of genetically modified foods.

Although Kaufman sometimes seems to be reaching a bit too far to make a point, his thoughtful and sometimes humorous deliberations on "mutant ninja oysters" or the gastroporn aspects of Rachael Ray on the Food Network, make for a witty, interesting, and informative read.

In a riveting, often hilarious, and unforgettable account, Frederick Kaufman has written a witty polemical exploration of American history via its culinary history - or rather, to be so blunt, American stomachs - in his "A Short History of the American Stomach". Kaufman's surprisingly terse account echoes the young Tom Wolfe in crafting a most riveting narrative; one which cites the likes of Cotton Mather, Washington Irving, Mark Twain and Julia Child. He demonstrates how cooking can be seen as a metaphor for American sexual behavior, with the photographer Barbara Nitke - known for her sexually explicit photographs - as a most passionate, quite suitable, guide. Kaufman introduces us to eating contest champion Dale Boone (a direct descendant of Daniel Bone) as he surveys the history of extreme eaters ranging from Paul Bunyan to the present. He also bemoans the substantial decline - to the brink of extinction - of the American oyster due to overfishing and offers an informative account describing how genetic engineering might revive American oyster fisheries. Without a doubt, Kaufman has written a wonderful example of narrative nonfiction that should interest even those who have ample disinterest in American culinary history.

Interesting amalgam of facts and tidbits
strung together in a very hodge-podge way.

As the author said at one point he didn't
know how to work a particular oddity into
his book, so he just plopped it in. Written
like a poorly constructed paper for a college
class (merely an assemblage of relevant
material). Get the book from your local
library, certainly *don't* purchase it!
Much better you should read Your Inner Fish
- now there's an outstanding book.

I really wanted to like this book, having heard the author interviewed. But the writing is so ponderous, I just could not read this book. Here's a randomly selected sentence: "We see here the clinical ancestor of the much-dreaded, much-sensationalized antidigestive psychological plague of our own age, anorexia nervosa. We may feel superior to Mather's primitive descriptions of phlegmatic humours and angered constitutions, but the quest for the cure remains current."

Huh?

Which is what I kept thinking as I read.

Too bad. There is a ton of research here and lots of fascinating information about how our food habits came about. If only I could read it.