num_pages: 224
description: American Stomach examines how Americans have produced food cooked and filled their stomachs from the colonial era to the present. Due to the complex history of conquest enslavement and immigration the United States has never developed a singular cohesive culinary tradition. U.S. food practices have been shaped by the various groups that have called a certain geographical space home. However more than fusion and friction between different racial and ethnic groups went into creating American foodways. Wallach demonstrates for example that technological innovations and ideas about industrialism and progress have also impacted what and how Americans eat. Moreover the American diet is the product of more amorphous factors the outgrowth of both shared and competing values. The history of food in America reveals changing and contradictory ideas about subjects including nationality race technological innovation gender politics religion and patriotism.
language: None
title: How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture
publisher: Rowman & Littlefield