Eating History
Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Food expert and celebrated food historian Andrew F. Smith recountsin delicious detailthe creation of contemporary American cuisine. The diet of the modern American wasn't always as corporate, conglomerated, and corn-rich as it is today, and the style of American cooking, along with the ingredients that compose it, has never been fixed. With a cast of characters including bold inventors, savvy restaurateurs, ruthless advertisers, mad scientists, adventurous entrepreneurs, celebrity chefs, and relentless health nuts, Smith pins down the truly crackerjack history behind the way America eats.
Smith's story opens with early America, an agriculturally independent nation where most citizens grew and consumed their own food. Over the next two hundred years, however, Americans would cultivate an entirely different approach to crops and consumption. Advances in food processing, transportation, regulation, nutrition, and science introduced highly complex and mechanized methods of production. The proliferation of cookbooks, cooking shows, and professionally designed kitchens made meals more commercially, politically, and culturally potent. To better understand these trends, Smith delves deeply and humorously into their creation. Ultimately he shows how, by revisiting this history, we can reclaim the independent, locally sustainable roots of American food.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With an incisive style, food writer and editor Smith (Hamburger: A Global History) cuts deep into the origins of modern American culture with 30 succinct servings of U.S. food history. Beginning with Oliver Evan's automated mill in 1784 and ending with the present-day development of food conglomerates like Kraft Foods, Smith offers ample context for the way Americans currently consume (and think about) food. Easy-to-digest prose and modest portions make these stories compulsively readable, and reveal new angles on old stories, like Sarah Hale's successful efforts to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, the first food magazine (recently-shuttered Gourmet), to a recurring examination of the American obsession with French cuisine. Exhaustively researched by a professional expert, Smith can be slowed by lists of names and numbers (especially in the mergers section), but anyone interested in food will learn much, especially about the serious consequences of decisions regarding our food supply.
Customer Reviews
Real History
This is not a conventional "and then they discovered coriander!" culinary introspection, but an expansive and integrative look at food history, including generous doses of business and technology history along with more traditional biographical sketches and institutional studies. The writing is mostly clear and often lively with short, focused chapters, and well-footnoted. Suitable for almost any audience, from middle-school up, but don't let the accessibility fool you: this is real history, properly done and worth the time of historians and foodies alike. The only caveat is that the episodic and broad coverage leaves the book without much of a thesis beyond the idea that commerce, culture and cuisine are deeply interconnected, and that all three change over time.