A Short History of the American Stomach
by Frederick Kaufman
Harcourt, 2008
$23.00, cloth
205 pages
In his review of American eating habits and attitudes, author Frederick Kaufman recounts the variety of diet books that are consistent bestsellers in contemporary America-Sugarbusters, The Zone Diet, Love Yourself Thin, The Weight Loss Breakthrough, Breaking the Food Seduction, and more.
But Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Dr. Sylvester Graham, and William Alcott were there long before Pritikin and Atkins. Americans it seems, gorge on everything, even diets.
America's early settlers, the Puritans, writes Kaufman, modeled themselves after the ancient Israelites, "who had been blessed with manna from the sky everyday they wandered through the wilderness..." So if you are a God-centered culture and you dare come to a new land, and your god showers you with manna-turkeys, corn, pumpkins, and cod-how can you not see yourself as blessed and deserving?
But at the same time that American was advertised as a spiritual nirvana, equipped with plenty of firewood and food, writes Kaufman, settlers faced sickness and as John Winthrop recorded, "terrible Famine," brought by God, whom they attempted to propitiate with regular fasting days.
America's food culture is equally shaped by the strictures the Puritans placed on themselves and the stunning abundance of the new world they settled.
Kaufman is tackling the American stomach in this book, not our kitchens, industrialized food production, or regional foodways, but "our separate but equal urges to stuff and starve ourselves." It is a central contradiction of American life that becomes wrapped up in power, morals, religion, and capitalism.
He begins with a amusing analysis of the Food Network by a soft core pornographic film producer. The conventions are startlingly similar, from pacing to close-ups, and it's all about looking, but not having. The producer finds parallels to every fetish and preference, from the leaping flames and macho posturing of Iron Chef to the girl next door appeal of Rachel Ray. And it all leads to a food swoon on tasting the finished product.
And while the Food Network may be the latest manifestation of our gurgling American stomachs, gluttony began early, with those stern moralists, the Puritans. They established by practice and myth the first Thanksgiving, the American holiday that commemorates nothing but our blessed abundance.
As Kaufman notes, this pendulum of indulgence and limits has arced through American history-eating up a continent as the nation expanded west, chastising ourselves with Lydia Maria Child's best-selling cookbook, The American Frugal Housewife.
As well as embodying the conflict between abundance and limits, Child "brought science to bear on the stomach." Though it seems an odd kind of science that finds "deception in geese" and is suspicious of cucumbers as an "unhealthy influence."
But is it any odder than our own science, announced almost daily in newspaper health sections and as television news items, that blueberries or tomatoes contain the invisible chemicals of eternal life, or the ever-wavering health benefits of eggs, coffee, or alcohol?
Think of an American table, and it ranges from Norman Rockwell's plain and well-enough Thanksgiving image to the raucous competition of a Coney Island hot dog eating contest, held on July 4th no less. We are torn at the table, fearful for our own health and the planet's, nervously turning food into medicine. It is a mindset Kaufman illustrates in a secret meeting of chic New Yorkers who gather to buy illegal raw milk.
Through anecdotes, historical research, and observation Kaufman conveys the squiggling, hard-to-put-your-finger on national attitudes about food that will sustain us or kill us, but only incidentally give us pleasure.
© 2008 Claudia Kousoulas
