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Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. By Hasia R. Diner. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xvii + 292 pp. Index, notes, illustrations. Cloth, $39.95. ISBN 0-674-00605-4.
As cultural history becomes increasingly popular, scholars are paying more and more attention to Americans' eating habits. This is especially true among historians of immigration. Through a variety of works published over the last decade, we have learned that "foodways" (culinary habits and the cultural patterns those practices reflect) played a significant role in both the assimilation of immigrants and their eventual acceptance by native-born Americans. Hasia Diner considers these issues in Hungering for America, but the focus of her study, and what makes it both important and original, is her argument that food played a vital role in motivating immigrants to come to the United States in the first place. "The men and women who came to America came hungry and in part because of hunger," she writes. "Immigrants never believed that the streets of America were paved with gold," but "they expected that its tables were covered with food" (p. xvii).
Diner first considers Italian immigrants, devoting a chapter to their European eating experience and then another to their culinary response to American life. We discover that southern Italian peasants faced "the ever present danger of hunger" in their homelands, but that in America "they ate better, not just than they had, but [even better] than their social superiors had" (p. 83). The book's next two chapters treat the Irish story, again first in Europe and then in America. This method of organization represents one of...