American Appetite: The Coming of Age of a Cuisine

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Summary: Too long -- should have been a magazine article
Review: I was looking forward to this book, but was diappointed with it once it was over. I felt that too much of it was filler. Had she trimmed 200 pages she would have had a concise, facinating article on the development of American cuisine. Instead, it's watered down. This would have made a killer cover story for Food & Wine, Bon Appetit or Saveur, but as a book it's too ambitious.

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Summary: Brenner's autobiography of food
Review: Tries to summarize how Americans in the past century have learned to eat better, but could more accurately be called an autobiography. Most of her stories are anecdotal. She summarizes the influence of Julia Child's publishing of a French cookbook in the 60's, Alice Waters' emphasis on fresh ingredients in the 70's, and tons of anecdotes about the effect of an ethnic cooking boom in the 80s and 90s. But no real analysis of any of this. She cites Kellogg and the "Food Science" movement of the early 1900s as a reason for the public acceptance of poor tasting food, but there's no real analysis, nor is there anything other than sketchy hearsay about a rise in the quality and variety of the rest of the food Americans eat. Also would have been nice to objectively compare us to other countries a bit: maybe the French are eating better today too?

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Summary: Keyhole on America - A New Classic
Review: Why is there not more buzz being generated about this new American classic? I was lucky to stumble on it...and what a revelation! "American Appetite" is destined to take its place alongside Mark Twain's "Roughing It" and Ring Lardner Jr's "Drinking in America" as a brilliant, satiric illumination of our national character...a very wise overview that chronicles the collective personality of our huge, quirky nation through the history of its oddball eating habits, which include the fall and rise of its cuisine. This book is by turns fascinating, hilarious and ultimately, strangely revealing. It's a keyhole on our ingenious, obsessive culture. What we eat, it turns out, tells us who we are. And the voice of the narrator is both as light and serious as a great souffle. People who love to eat, love to read, love history, love the USA, and especially those who thrill to truth on the page, should all rush out and buy this book.