A Short History of the American Stomach

by Kaufman, Frederick

• ISBN13: 9780151011940
• ISBN10: 015101194X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-02-04
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

The extremes of American eatingour separate-but-equal urges to stuff and to starve ourselvesare 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 Onothing ought to be mashed before it is eatenO; 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.

Author Biography

Frederick Kaufman is a professor of English at the City University of New York and CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism.

Table of Contents

Contents
Preface	p. ix
Debbie Does Salad	p. 1
The Sweet Taste of God	p. 29
The Secret Ingredient	p. 59
Manifest Dinner	p. 87
Gorging on Diets	p. 117
The Gastrosopher's Stone	p. 151
Gut Reaction	p. 187
Acknowledgments	p. 195
Index	p. 197
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

1Debbie Does SaladA modern epicure is almost always eating the present dish as a kind of introduction to something else.William Alcott, 1846In the year 2000 an American Cinco de Mayo celebration featured the worlds largest taco, fashioned from nine hundred pounds of meat. The taco generated a fair bit of press but could not compare to the sensation created almost two hundred years earlier when supporters of Thomas Jefferson presented the president with a New Years gift, a nine-hundred-pound Mammoth Cheese, said to have been produced from the milk of one thousand Republican cows. Such tales amuse but dont amaze us anymore. The outrageous demands of the American stomach have become our daily bread. But back in the day when Federalists walked the earth, the stomach could still engender shock and awe. In January of 1803, not too long after the presentation of that mammoth cheese, a young journalist who called himself Jonathan Oldstyle traversed the most fashionable streets of New York City, astonished by the extraordinary abundance of food, and by the extraordinary might of its consumption. He published his cultural observations in New Yorks Morning Chronicle:I had marched into the theatre through rows of tables heaped up with delicacies of every kind here a pyramid of apples or oranges invited the playful palate of the dainty; while there a regiment of mince pies and custards promised a more substantial regale to the hungry. I entered the box, and looked around with astonishment . . . The crackling of nuts and the crunching of apples saluted my ears on every side. Surely, thought I, never was an employment followed up with more assiduity than that of gormandizing; already it pervades every public place of amusement . . . The eating mania prevails through every class of society; not a soul but has caught the infection. Eating clubs are established in every street and alley, and it is impossible to turn a corner without hearing the hissing of frying pans, winding the savory steams of roast and boiled, or seeing some hungry genius bolting raw oysters in the middle of the street.Within a decade, this young food writer would become Americas most famous author. His name was Washington Irving. Irving was a social critic, and his food writing, social commentary. In an 1807 edition of Salmagundi (a literary magazine he founded with his brother and a friend), Irving declared thatthe barbarous nations of antiquity immolated human victims to the memory of their lamented dead, but the enlightened Americans offer up whole hecatombs of geese and calves, and oceans of wine in honour of the illustrious living . . .Irving had perceived that eating and drinking in the pristine nation introduced an entirely new set of rituals and sacraments, for food and food alone could embody the sublime spectacle of love of country, elevating itself from a sentiment into an appetite. A few decades after Irvings magazine pieces, the obsessions of nineteenth-

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Excerpted from A Short History of the American Stomach by Frederick Kaufman
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