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Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. By Hasia R. Diner. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xvii + 292 pp.
Drawing on a wide and rich array of sources, Hasia Diner's Hungering for America "explores how the memories of hunger and the realities of American plenty fused together to shape the ethnic identities of millions of American women and men from Italy, Ireland, and Jewish eastern Europe" (p. xvii). Sensitive to the physical and existential predicament of hungry people, Diner amplifies our understanding of the impact of American abundance on immigrants by arguing that culturally specific memories of the European past determined Italian, Irish and Jewish foodways in the U.S.
Scholars who have worked in the area of consumption, popular culture, and the history of daily life will be surprised that the book begins apologetically, with an explanation that the author's colleagues raised eyebrows about her topic, deeming it "a strange subject for an historian." Fernand Braudel put food on the historiographical map decades ago and other scholars of the quotidian, taking the anthropological turn of the 1970s and 1980s, followed in that path of social history.
Succeeding Donna Gabaccia, who wrote the first survey of American immigrant and ethnic foodways - We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (1998) - Diner avoids a pitfall of that book, which ambitiously tried to write the whole story of foodways in the world's most ethnically heterogenous society.1 In contrast Diner isolates three groups. The rationale behind the selection of Italians, Irish, and Jews is not clear,...