We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans

Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780674001909
ISBN: 0674001907
Item Dimensions:7193095617
Label: Harvard University Press
Languages:EnglishUnknownEnglishOriginal LanguageEnglishPublished
Manufacturer: Harvard University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: April 17, 2000
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Studio: Harvard University Press

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:


Ghulam Bombaywala sells bagels in Houston. Demetrios dishes up pizza in Connecticut. The Wangs serve tacos in Los Angeles. How ethnicity has influenced American eating habits--and thus, the make-up and direction of the American cultural mainstream--is the story told in We Are What We Eat. It is a complex tale of ethnic mingling and borrowing, of entrepreneurship and connoisseurship, of food as a social and political symbol and weapon--and a thoroughly entertaining history of our culinary tradition of multiculturalism.



The story of successive generations of Americans experimenting with their new neighbors' foods highlights the marketplace as an important arena for defining and expressing ethnic identities and relationships. We Are What We Eat follows the fortunes of dozens of enterprising immigrant cooks and grocers, street hawkers and restaurateurs who have cultivated and changed the tastes of native-born Americans from the seventeenth century to the present. It also tells of the mass corporate production of foods like spaghetti, bagels, corn chips, and salsa, obliterating their ethnic identities. The book draws a surprisingly peaceful picture of American ethnic relations, in which "Americanized" foods like Spaghetti-Os happily coexist with painstakingly pure ethnic dishes and creative hybrids.



Donna Gabaccia invites us to consider: If we are what we eat, who are we? Americans' multi-ethnic eating is a constant reminder of how widespread, and mutually enjoyable, ethnic interaction has sometimes been in the United States. Amid our wrangling over immigration and tribal differences, it reveals that on a basic level, in the way we sustain life and seek pleasure, we are all multicultural.



Amazon.com Review:
Donna R. Gabaccia, a professor of American history, explores how ethnicity has influenced the eating habits of Americans and determines that America is "not a multi-ethnic nation, but a nation of multi-ethnics." Can a country that eats bagel dogs and Thai chicken pizza still find ways to preserve the "original" foods of its immigrants? Is this even a worthwhile task, if the immigrants themselves are eager to assimilate into the larger culture, and the food industry is just as eager to co-opt (and, Gabaccia notes, water down) their native cuisine? Through case studies and anecdotal accounts, Gabaccia takes a look at the state of American cuisine and the curious culinary situation that allows SpaghettiOs to remain a venerable lunchtime standard at the same time that many restaurants strive to produce an "authentic" Milanese risotto.

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