America’s eating habits—
our separate-but-equal urges to stuff and to starve ourselves—are easy to blame on postwar plenty, overstressed adolescents, trans fats, and McDonald’s. 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 an 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 America’s mouth. Travel with him as he tracks down our earliest foodies; discovers the secret history of Puritan purges; introduces diet gurus of the nineteenth century; 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.

Whether you binge or purge, eat too much or eat too little, eat to live or live to eat, you’ll find your ancestors in Kaufman’s raucous anatomy of the American stomach.

© Elizabeth Berger

Frederick Kaufman is a professor of English at the City University of New York and CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. He has written about American food culture and other subjects for Harper’s Magazine, the New Yorker, Gourmet, Gastronomica, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. He lives in New York.