Short History of the American Stomach（ISBN=9780156034692）

"There's no better literary difestif." (New York Daiy News )"Vastly entertaining as it leads us through America's digetive history, this book serves up Kaufman's notion of a country whose development can be traced by the way its citizens eat, grow, digest, and think of food." (Library Journal )"This rollicking survey of our national food manias from Cotton Mather ('Look after thy stomach') to Rachael Ray is amiably peripatetic." (New York Observer )"Witty and polemical...[Kaufman] makes some valuable points about how the stomach influences the ways Americans view themselves." (Los Angeles Times )"Kaufman's witty historical analysis will be a treat for anyone interested in food. He even finds insightful things to say about obscenely dry historical figures like 17th-century minister Cotton Mather, whose diaries are ripe with passages of binge-and-purge Puritanism. By invoking the teachings of 'gastrosophists' such a Sylvester Graham (yes, as in the cracker), and linking them to our current food-crazed culture, he deftly illustrates how America always has, and probably always will, lead with its gut." (New York Magazine )

The extremes of American eating--our equal urges to stuff and to starve ourselves--are easy to blame on the excesses of modern living. But Frederick Kaufman followed the winding road of the American intestine back to that cold morning when the first famished Pilgrim clambered off the Mayflower, and he discovered the alarming truth: We've been this way all along. With outraged wit and an incredible range of sources that includes everything from Cotton Mather's diary to interviews with Amish black-market raw-milk dealers, Kaufman offers a highly selective, take-no-prisoners tour of American history by way of the American stomach. Travel with him as he tracks down our earliest foodies; discovers the secret history of Puritan purges; introduces diet gurus of the nineteenth century such as William Alcott, who believed that "Nothing ought to be mashed before it is eaten"; traces extreme feeders from Paul Bunyan to eating-contest champ Dale Boone (descended from Daniel, of course); and investigates our blithe efforts to re-create what we've eaten to the point of extinction.

Frederick Kaufman has written about American food culture for Harper's, The New Yorker, Gourmet, Gastronomica, Aperture, and the Village Voice Literary Supplement, and has been a featured guest on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" and "On the Media." Other nonfiction has appeared in numerous pulications, among them the New York Times Magazine, New York Time Book Review, New York Magazine, Spin, Spy, and Interview. He is a professor of English at the City University of New York and CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism. He resides in New York. 　

Preface
1. Debbie Does Salad
2. The Sweet Taste of 6od
3. The Secret Ingredient
4. Manifest Dinner
5. Gorging on Diets
6. The Gastrosopher's Stone
7. Gut Reaction
Acknowledgments
Index