How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture Jennifer Jensen Wallach. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.

How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture Jennifer Jensen Wallach. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.From September 21, 2012 to March 22, 2013, the Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts, sponsored "Siting Julia: Julia Child Centenary Exhibition." One of the highlights of the exhibit was the Emmy Award that Child won for her TV show The French Chef, first produced by WGBH, Boston, in 1963 and one of the most popular cooking shows of all time. Child's Emmy was tribute to food in popular culture.At the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, a new exhibition ("Food: Transforming the American Table, 1950-2000"), closing in 2014, traces food production from the one who does the cooking to where meals are consumed to what we know about what's good for us and how new technologies and social and cultural shifts have influenced major changes in food, wine and eating in America.These two exhibitions, in different ways, highlight how food has become an essential component of popular culture, and this new book, How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture, by food and social historian Jennifer Wallach, an associate professor of history who specializes in African-American history and United States food history, is a study of America's diverse culinary history and an examination of the country's unique and unprecedented journey to the present day.The author notes that due to the complex American history of conquest, enslavement, and immigration, the United States has never developed a singular recognizable culinary tradition. Instead, food practices have been shaped by the various groups that have called the United States home, a "melting pot" of different cultures and cuisines that can yield insights into a variety of other human behaviors.A follow-up, not covered in the book, is the elevation of food to culinary diplomacy through the US Department of State's Diplomatic Culinary Partnership in conjunction with the James Beard Foundation, which utilizes a "smart power" approach by incorporating food, hospitality, and the dining experience to share our values and promote mutual understanding. It also strengthens the Department's formal diplomatic engagements with foreign leaders and fosters crosscultural exchange.This book will have great appeal in many areas of popular culture, not just to those who are participants in the Food Area of PCA/ACA. The broad outline of the book is chronological, beginning with European and Native American contact and the food that comprised the first Thanksgiving feast in Chapter 1 ("The Cuisine of Contact") to issues of food and ethics in the modern day in Chapter 8 ("The Politics of Food"), including the changes the Internet has wrought on food appreciation, the popularity of food and cooking shows, the establishment of a Food Channel, and the thousands of devoted fans who make these programs a part of their lives.In her introduction, the author notes that she has tried "to synthesize much of the groundbreaking research about American food history" (xv). As an example, in Chapter 1, Wallach attempts to separate facts from misinformation and accepted legends that have arisen over the years regarding what is usually considered the first Thanksgiving in the New World, which was held by the Pilgrims, one of the oft-told tales in American history but nothing like the romantic portrayal that Americans were taught. …