Plenty of ink has been spilled about twenty-first century Americans’ bizarre, conflicting views towards food—our simultaneous obsession with eating and weight loss, escalating struggles with anorexia and obesity, cultural love of both triple cheeseburgers and Master Cleanse diets. Such attitudes are usually characterized as distinctly modern phenomena, fueled by post-war advertising and the ever-growing influence of mass media. But in A Short History of the American Stomach, Frederick Kaufman argues otherwise. “The feast and the fast,” he writes, “have always been American twins.” Kaufman claims that elements of today’s food culture—from fad diets to binge eating to the equation of diet with virtue—date back to Puritan times. The United States, in his conception, “was and remains one of the most...
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