Eating HistoryAndrew F SmithLabel: Columbia University PressDescription: Food expert and celebrated food historian Andrew F. Smith recounts--in delicious detail--the creation of contemporary American cuisine. The diet of the modern American wasn't always as corporate conglomerated and corn-rich as it is today and the style of American cooking along with the ingredients that compose it has never been fixed. With a cast of characters including bold inventors savvy restaurateurs ruthless advertisers mad scientists adventurous entrepreneurs celebrity chefs and relentless health nuts Smith pins down the truly crackerjack history behind the way America eats. Smith's story opens with early America an agriculturally independent nation where most citizens grew and consumed their own food. Over the next two hundred years however Americans would cultivate an entirely different approach to crops and consumption. Advances in food processing transportation regulation nutrition and science introduced highly complex and mechanized methods of production. The proliferation of cookbooks cooking shows and professionally designed kitchens made meals more commercially politically and culturally potent.To better understand these trends Smith delves deeply and humorously into their creation. Ultimately he shows how by revisiting this history we can reclaim the independent locally sustainable roots of American food.
