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A Short History of the American Stomach
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$ 13.16
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$ 14.95 |
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$ 1.79 (12%) |
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| Item Number |
2451172 |
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Item Description...
Overview
Traces the history of food and the ethics of eating in America from the Puritans to the present day, discussing such topics as colonial epicures, diet gurus of the nineteenth century, and the current production of bio-engineered foods.
Publishers Description
Frederick Kaufman offers a piquant sampling of American history by way of the 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 asWilliam Alcott, who believed that “nothing ought to be mashed before it is eaten”; 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 the plants and animals that we've eaten to the point of extinction.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 takes readers on a Bourdainmeets- Pollan tour of the American gut. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 224
Dimensions: Length: 7.9" Width: 5.3" Height: 0.8"
Weight: 0.5 lbs.
Binding Softcover
Release Date Feb 25, 2009
ISBN 0156034697
EAN 9780156034692
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Availability 1 units.
Availability accurate as of May 30, 2012 02:30.
Usually ships within one to two business days from La Vergne, TN.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Foodies Beware Apr 1, 2009 |
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.
| | | | Tons of information, so hard to read Jul 12, 2008 |
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. | | |  | There is a good book in this topic - this isn't it. May 25, 2008 |
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. | | | | I Want My Money Back May 17, 2008 |
Actually this was a gift but if the cover hadnt been creased I would have exchanged it.
Sounded promising but the writing was unreadable. Trying so hard to be clever but just pompous and overwritten, I couldnt make it past page 40. Sorry but bad books make me grumpy. Do Not Buy! | | | | a mess May 14, 2008 |
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? | | | Write your own review about A Short History of the American Stomach
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