We Are What We Eat or Good Housekeeping Easy Skillet Meals

We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans

Author: Donna R Gabaccia

Ghulam Bombaywala sells bagels in Houston. Demetrios dishes up pizza in Connecticut. The Wangs serve tacos in Los Angeles. How ethnicity has influenced American eating habits—and thus, the make-up and direction of the American cultural mainstream—is the story told in We Are What We Eat. It is a complex tale of ethnic mingling and borrowing, of entrepreneurship and connoisseurship, of food as a social and political symbol and weapon—and a thoroughly entertaining history of our culinary tradition of multiculturalism.

The story of successive generations of Americans experimenting with their new neighbors' foods highlights the marketplace as an important arena for defining and expressing ethnic identities and relationships. We Are What We Eat follows the fortunes of dozens of enterprising immigrant cooks and grocers, street hawkers and restaurateurs who have cultivated and changed the tastes of native-born Americans from the seventeenth century to the present. It also tells of the mass corporate production of foods like spaghetti, bagels, corn chips, and salsa, obliterating their ethnic identities. The book draws a surprisingly peaceful picture of American ethnic relations, in which "Americanized" foods like Spaghetti-Os happily coexist with painstakingly pure ethnic dishes and creative hybrids.

Donna Gabaccia invites us to consider: If we are what we eat, who are we? Americans' multi-ethnic eating is a constant reminder of how widespread, and mutually enjoyable, ethnic interaction has sometimes been in the United States. Amid our wrangling over immigration and tribal differences, it reveals that on a basic level, in the way wesustain life and seek pleasure, we are all multicultural.

Forward

In this academic, yet readable--even entertaining--work, Ms. Gabaccia explores how ethnicity has influenced American eating habits...She answers why every town in America ended up with a Chinese restaurant, how sacred Italian pasta morphed into Spaghetti-Os and why burritos are filled with everything from beans to bok choy...We Are What We Eat is a unique approach to this country's melting pot, and demonstrates the multicultural side of all Americans.

Nature - Anne Murcott

Plenty of thought-provoking and probably little-known details are presented along the way [in We Are What We Eat]...Gabaccia has a lightness of style, but this should not beguile readers into thinking that this is just a pleasing story-book with vivid illustrations. It is a skillfully written professional history imbued with a social anthropological sensibility. I wish that more British social anthropologists (and sociologists) in this field would trouble themselves to return the compliment by paying such diligent attention to social history. Gabaccia not only embraces the anthropological insight that human beings bestow meaning on food, making it not just good to eat but also good to communicate with, but goes on to grasp the other side of the anthropological debate, which requires detailed analysis of the material and economic circumstances that bring people and food together to allow communicative meanings to be created. But more than this, Gabaccia recognizes that understanding eating habits requires not just one but several histories: of recurring human migrations, of agriculture, of (big) business and of consumption. This intellectual attitude and methodological grip on the study of food and eating is the book's great strength.

USA Today - Linda Temple

Today's multiethnic American diet offers intriguing insight into the character of the nation, the subject of Donna Gabaccia's We Are What We Eat...Rigorously annotated and dense with detail, Gabaccia's writing nevertheless evokes knee-buckled puritans and buckskin-clad settlers, sunbonnets and babushkas, and the clamor of street markets at the turn of the century. Drawing from early American cookbooks and immigrant journals, Gabaccia unravels the nation's earliest 'regional creoles,' dishes combining cultivated ingredients with indigenous plants, game and seafood, enriched by the foodstuffs of Native American traders...Gabaccia explores the journey of these ethnic foods from pushcarts to the national marketplace and how--despite the homogenizing effects of industrialized canning, milling and meatpacking--ethnic cuisines have retained their essential and often ritualized role in American life.

Associated Press - Ted Anthony

Donna Gabaccia...has assembled an impressive piece of research and writing about [eating]. We Are What We Eat...takes the immigrant metaphor of America--whether it be a melting pot or a tossed salad--and brings it to the dinner table...It's a fascinating trip through everything from the history of Fritos corn chips to the wild rice traditions of American Indians in Minnesota to the rise of ethnic grocery chains in New York City...She sees the popularity of ethnic food as nothing less than a chance to bring together disparate folk--and create a nation of eaters who, through their dining experiences, manage to get along.

Independent [UK] - Christopher Hirst

[A] fascinating guided tour of American foodstuffs...Gabaccia pursues the oscillations of 20th-century taste from the bland mass-market fare of Middle America to the revived interest in ethnic cuisine, particularly in phosphorically powerful pepper sauces. Stressing the 'extraordinary diversity' which runs in tandem with 'homogeneous, processed, mass-produced foods,' she insists that America is 'not a multi-ethnic nation, but a nation of multi-ethnics.

KLIATT

It has long been debated whether the preferred metaphor for American society should be a melting pot in which immigrant and racial minorities cast aside their differences to blend together as unhyphenated Americans or, rather, a mosaic in which discrete racial and ethnic groups practice mutual tolerance to achieve harmonious coexistence in a multicultural nation. A professor of American history, the author of this intriguing treatise examines the evolution of our national identity through the foods Americans have chosen to eat from colonial times to the present. Beginning with the first confluence of diverse European, Native American, and African cuisines in the New World, the author proceeds to show how ethnic foods gradually transformed American eating habits even as the food itself was altered to meet the demands of an ever-changing nation. The hard, chewy bagels favored by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, for example, were largely stripped of their ethnic identity by the time they showed up across the country in a much softer and sweeter conformation. Similarly, traditional Italian, Latin American, and Asian cuisines were radically reinterpreted for the general American public by the likes of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Chun-King—the latter, incidentally, founded by an Italian-American in a Scandinavian section of Duluth before eventually being sold to a food manufacturer in Singapore. The author employs many fascinating examples to show how closely our sense of what it means to be an American has been linked over the centuries to our dietary habits and preferences. Along the way, she reveals the fascinating history of many familiar food products and name brands that playedsurprisingly large roles in shaping our national identity. While younger readers may be bored by parts of this well-documented story, sophisticated YAs are sure to be intrigued by the fresh perspective on American history offered in this well-written and informative volume. KLIATT Codes: JSA—Recommended for junior and senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1998, Harvard Univ. Press, 278p, 23cm, 97-52712, $16.95. Ages 13 to adult. Reviewer: Jeffrey Cooper; Writer/Editor, Long Island, NY, July 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 4)

Library Journal

How did enclaves of immigrants obtain the foods to which they were accustomed in their new homes in America? How did pasta, tacos, and bagels move from ethnic fare to popular American foods? These are the types of questions Gabaccia (American history, Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte) addresses in this well-researched and thoroughly documented volume. Through case studies and anecdotal records she traces the way immigrant groups, from Colonial times to the present, maintained their culinary identity in spite of efforts to Americanize them. Concurrently, entrepreneurs succeeded in mainstreaming many of these same ethnic foods into American households and culture. Gabaccia concludes that we are "not a multi-ethnic nation, but a nation of multi-ethnics." For culinary history and social history collections. Sherry Feintuch, East Shore Lib., Harrisburg, PA

Table of Contents:

	Introduction: What Do We Eat?	1
1	Colonial Creoles	10
2	Immigration, Isolation, and Industry	36
3	Ethnic Entrepreneurs	64
4	Crossing the Boundaries of Taste	93
5	Food Fights and American Values	122
6	The Big Business of Eating	149
7	Of Cookbooks and Culinary Roots	175
8	Nouvelle Creole	202
	Conclusion: Who Are We?	225
	Sources	235
	Notes	243
	Acknowledgments	269
	Index	273

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Good Housekeeping Easy Skillet Meals: Simple to Make, Easy to Clean Up, and Very Delicious (Good Housekeeping Favorite Recipes Series)

Author: The Editors of Good Housekeeping

What could be simpler than tossing fresh ingredients in the skillet to make a mouthwatering meal? On a busy weeknight, nothing beats it for ease of preparation and quick clean-up. Good Housekeeping presents more than 115 tantalizing and varied one-dish recipes for meat, poultry, vegetables, seafood, eggs, and cheese. And there's something for every occasion. Do the kids want comfort food? No problem: try Lasagna tossed with Spinach and Ricotta. Unexpected company dropping by? Impress them with Couscous Paella or Tuscan Steak and Beans. And to help you choose just the right equipment, Susan Westmoreland, Good Housekeeping's Food Director and a trained chef, offers advice on her favorite skillets.