Short History of the American Stomach or The Physiology of Taste

Short History of the American Stomach

Author: Frederick Kaufman

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.

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.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Elizabeth Rogers <P>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. - School Library Journal

Vastly entertaining as it leads us through America's digestive history, this book serves up Kaufman's notion of a country whose development can be traced by the way its citizens eat, grow, digest, and think of food. Kaufman (English, CUNY) draws parallels between national policies and digestion: limiting meals to a single food, for example, became a symbol of political isolationism during America's antebellum period. We've spent much of our recent history involved in "imperialist eating," colorfully illustrated by the author's description of competitive eaters (aka gurgitators). Americans proudly celebrated National Days of Fasting well into the 19th century. Kaufman also addresses the benefits of ingesting raw milk, the extinction of bananas (which he writes will come within the next decade), days when lobsters were five to six inches long, the concept of our bodies as a business, and the romance of westward expansion as pioneers were led by their stomachs. Recommended for public library collections.

Kirkus Reviews

A series of trenchant arguments about the consistency of Americans' feelings for food, our great common denominator. Suspecting that the consumption-crazed, binge-and-purge culture is nothing new, Kaufman (English/CUNY) quotes young Washington Irving, who in 1803 marveled over the stunning culinary delectations available in New York City. The author then jumps forward two centuries to investigate the term "gastroporn": Watching a generous amount of Food Network programming, he gleefully compares the structure and style of X-rated films with the loving close-ups and sensuous phrases that are staples of cooking shows, Emeril Lagasse's "kick it up a notch" being one example. Kaufman notes that "the money shot"-the finished dish-is seldom the actual product of those ingredients you see the chefs squeezing and manipulating. Even the Puritans were obsessed with food, he declares, speculating as to the full menu of their first Thanksgiving. Kaufman's jolting chapter on vomiting (he prefers "puking") displays a masterful wit. He begins by elaborately, eloquently apologizing for raising the topic at all, then lays out a finely researched, deeply ironic chronology of how early Americans viewed vomit. Indeed, it's never sufficient for him to opine that the Puritans "adored laxatives and diuretics" when he can also dissect the inscrutable food writing of Cotton Mather. As Kaufman slowly returns to the present, he addresses a string of intriguing issues. An indictment of the milk-processing industry includes an account of his adventures within a secret raw-milk collective. Artificial genetic modifications have fundamentally altered many foods, he reveals, the sumptuous oyster in particular. Oneamusing passage skewers actress and diet/fitness guru Suzanne Somers, whose "misty never-never land of personal, economic and domestic bliss [is] meticulously documented on every overproduced page of her modern gastrosophical masterpiece, Get Skinny on Fabulous Food."Gourmets and gourmands alike will savor Kaufman's keen, caustic anatomy of the American palate.

Table of Contents:

Contents

                Preface   ix

1.             Debbie Does Salad              1

2.             The Sweet Taste of God     29

3.             The Secret Ingredient          59

4.             Manifest Dinner   87

5.             Gorging on Diets  117

6.             The Gastrosopher’s Stone 151

7.             Gut Reaction         187

                Acknowledgments               195

                Index      197

Go to: Explosive Lifting for Sports or Lo esencial de Atkins

The Physiology of Taste

Author: Jean Anthelme Brillat Savarin

A masterpiece on the subject of cooking as an art and eating as a pleasure, this 1825 classic on the joys of food and drink was written by a French politician and man of letters whose true passion centered on gastronomy. Includes recipes for pheasant, Swiss fondue, and other dishes. 41 illustrations.