In his new book A Short History of the American Stomach, journalist Fred Kaufman turns a critical eye on the cultural and digestive history of the United States, drawing connections between current culinary trends and the extreme food philosophies of our nation's forefathers. He sat down with SAVEUR recently to discuss the link between the Puritans and crash diets, the allure of food television, and why it's worth paying attention to what we feed Fido.
In A Short History of the American Stomach you note that the Puritans who settled New England had a long history of purging and fasting. To what degree do you think that tradition still influences the way Americans eat today?
It's at the basis of our diets today. The Puritans gave birth to bulimia, anorexia, and the idea of perfecting ourselves through what we may and may not eat. They believed that the soul was the great digester and that what came into and out of the stomach was a specific indication of your relationship to God. In other words, when people were advised to vomit—which was a very common Puritan cure for any ailment—it was seen as a form of exorcism. What we've inherited from the Puritans is an obsession with the purity and the pollution of the stomach. Today's diet books are all about perfecting your body as opposed to falling prey to food sin.
So, modern eaters should pay attention to the eating habits of 17th- and 18th-century Americans?
I think we can go through our lives beautifully day to day forgetting about yesterday. When I looked into the history of the American stomach, I thought I was going to find a situation very different from what we have today, but I was wrong. It's instructive to understand that the way we feel about our stomachs, and eating and not eating, has been with America for a long, long time. Even Benjamin Franklin was a big foodie who thought the key to personal perfection began with what you ate.
Lately many Americans have grown nostalgic for a time when food was more seasonal and regional. In fact, at the end of 2007, Oxford University Press made locavore its word of the year. What do you make of this trend?
Once again, we think it's a new thing, but it's not. The first Thanksgiving was about local foods. William Alcott, a graduate of the Yale medical school and one of the great food gurus of the early 19th century, was a great believer in local food; he instructed housewives to make plain, "unperverted" puddings for their households. The ideology reached its culmination in Sylvester Graham's paranoia about store-bought bread. The original graham crackers derived from his recipe for making bread in the biblical way. Graham believed that we should return to our original ways of making food because food was the key to salvation.
|
