Frederick Kaufman: American Stomach

By ALEXANDRA GREELEY (special to Super Chef) If you are to believe Frederick Kaufman in his newly published American Stomach (Harcourt 2007), Americans are food obsessed. And we have been ever thus since the Pilgrims first stepped on to this soil and enjoyed their first Thanksgiving feast, apparently a rollicking semi food frenzy, featuring, experts agree, plenty to eat but not roast turkey or pumpkin pie…hold the vanilla ice cream, please. As Kaufman sees it, America’s destiny has revolved about its stomach, and as we push our American ideals into the global stage, the star of the show is…the stomach. “The stomach lies at the center of this American idea,” he writes of how America has become a pervasive force. Our understanding of virtue and vice, success and failure, has long been expressed in the language of appetite, consumption, and digestion. (p. xiii) In Kaufman’s view, the major factors that have come to symbolize America’s obsession with food and the stomach are the orgasmic cooking shows; the obsessive need to collect recipes and the enormous numbers of cookbooks to help us do so; the modern-day availability of exotic and/or exceptional ingredients; and the growing number of food media who in their broadcast, online, and print chats have made celebrities of restaurants and of chefs who are just doing their jobs. Much of this “celebritizing,” he feels, is really thanks, in great part, to the Food Network. And that network, in its stead, owes its debt to Julia Child. “We all know that cooking on camera experienced its first hit with Julia Child on Boston public television, but attained its present commercial status only in the last decade of the twentieth century.” (p. 11) Kaufman details how he spent some time viewing porn flicks running side by side with cooking shows, using the phrase “gastroporn” to describe the earthy/fleshy/sexual food shots, which “addresses the most basic human needs and functions, idealizing and degrading them at the same time.”(p. 17) In fact, Kaufman suggests, Americans have come to think about life and its many issues with their stomach and not with their brain. How did we get this way? Kaufman takes a long, sometimes humorous, and always detailed look at the history of food and of eating in America, book-ending the topic with the extremist Puritanical food-and-fasting for health with the modern-day plethora of diet how-tos and its welter of foods and fads to help Americans slim down after centuries of great excess; since Cotton Mather’s day (he was born in 1686) the national food debate has shifted from purge to splurge, suggest Kaufman. In between, Americans have sworn off meats in favor of grains and greens; have sworn off most grains and greens in favor of meats; have rallied for raw milk and raw ingredients; have demanded organic and pure foods; and have searched for the health benefits derived from almost every kind of ingredient possible—to list a few fads. But there’s also another facet to America’s food obsession, Kaufman maintains, which is how America celebrates those who can consume the greatest amount of food in the shortest time. He describes Eric Booker’s 2006 record setting for downing the most matzoh balls (21 in 5 minutes), but he links such overeating efforts to past American exploits in mass consumption. Did you know that such food orgies possibly evolved from the early pioneers’ ability to eat almost anything to survive, such as deer fetus, pancakes fried in bear grease, and broiled horse intestines? (p. 99) For a twenty-first century foodie, all this seems fairly dispiriting. If Kaufman is correct, then our gastronomic history is not particularly glamorous or even very rational. It would have helped him making his case had he used early-times recipes—should they have existed—and set the time lines more clearly. As it is, Kaufman quotes extensively from early texts, breaking the rhythms of his own writing; this does lead to some confusion, necessitating having to flip back pages to follow the point he was making. In the end, though he makes a persuasive case that Americans think with their stomach, most readers will probably still obsess over the Food Network and marvel at the Iron Chef episodes. Previous articles: Jenni Ferrari-Adler: Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant James Villas: The Bacon Cookbook Bonny Wolf: Talking with My Mouth Full Gifford & Baer-Sinnott: Oldways Table Modern Indian Cooking: Khanna and Nayak Serves One: Toni Lydecker [Cookbook Reviews - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging --> back to Super Chef