Review - A Short History of the American Stomach by Frederick Kaufman
May 3rd, 2008 John Posted in Books, Reviews |
In titling his book “A Short History of the American Stomach,” Frederick Kaufman is certainly cutting to the chase. Though it seems prior to cracking the book open that this will be another in the spate of books and documentaries examining the food we eat and what it means, Kaufman’s goals are more abstract, more psychological. Instead of revealing an ethical or healthy way to eat, Kaufman’s goal is to trace why we eat the way we do and his success at doing so is a wild ride through American absurdity born from one singular trait in the history and present day of our country: repression.
As documented through Kaufman’s work, America is the the ultimate binge and purge society and the whole of the book suggests that anorexia and bulemia are diseases ingrained in the psychology of Americans that only need an appropriate zeitgeist through which to ignite them. With a society birthed of Puritan mores, national days of fasting were common in our country up through the 19th Century, often declared by our presidents as a way of reflection on national issues of the day. Add to this the common medical misconception that all ills — physical or psychological — were centered around your diet and the only way to cure anything from a cough to a coma was to vomit, and you’ve created a dysfunctional relationship with eating that goes across a society.
Kaufman opens the book comparing food shows to pornography and he is right on the mark, going as far as sitting down with a porn filmmaker to dissect the camera techniques. In a binge and purge society, the excess of cooking shows is directly comparable to the idea that something so physical can be experience indirectly, that the visual suggestion can elicit savory excitement within the soul. You can’t eat it, but you sure can watch it.
Such is America’s self-flagellating relationship with sex and food — indeed, pleasure is something we overload on, even as we condemn others doing so. We like to blame the victim of the same temptations any of us have — we aren’t a kind lot. The diseases of being overweight are viewed with the same disdain as sexually transmitted diseases — it’s all their fault. Still, most of us are overweight, few of us have total self-control and the national obsession with dieting is an organized form of psychologically troubling binge and purge that is not only directly from the medicinal scrawls of crazy Puritan Cotton Mather, but a loud mixed message beamed out to every person suffering from an eating disorder in present day society. And it’s no accident that so much of the craziest dietary advice throughout our history have come from people who mix religious thought with food, suggesting that religion should be considered the third sensual pleasure we overload on and abuse.
As American history moves on, so does Kaufman’s sight, taking readers through the early American urge to eat anything that walks and in great abundance — something that culminated in insane, gluttonous meat parade through the streets of New York — through to the American obsession with dieting. His efforts reveal that the same conversations and outrages we have today are ones we’ve been having for a century or two.
Unlike other works that share the same territory, there is little finger pointing in Kaufman’s work, more a commiseration, an understanding. It’s like a clandestine meeting with your siblings where instead of complaining about your lives or your parents, you just look at the way you were raised and they way they were raised and just nod your heads during the analysis — it’s past blame and we’ve moved onto the acceptance and understanding phase of the discussion.
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