Eating Across America

Traveling foodie and TV personality Daym Drops presents a cross-country culinary tour of America’s best bites . . . Millions have watched Travel Channel and YouTube host Daymon Patterson, aka Daym Drops, eat burgers and fab food truck finds in his car as he drives the highways and byways looking for America’s best food trucks, street foods, and cheap eats, sharing his insightful and hilarious reviews along the way. Now the food correspondent on the award-winning Rachel Ray Show details the definitive road map to truly tasting Americana. Skip the ritzy restaurants and discover the true taste treats—sometimes messy but always made with love—in this guide that takes you to fast, fun, flavorful meals from coast to coast, whether they’re served on wheels, at sidewalk stands, or in hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop operations. “If there’s another person’s taste buds that I would take into battle, it would be Daym’s. Not only does he know what tastes good, looks good, and holds together well, he knows what doesn’t! . . . If you hold food dear to your heart, then this book should be held to your gut.” —Josh Elkin, host of Cooking Channel’s Sugar Showdown

"Eat Your Way Across the U.S.A." takes the guesswork out of what and where toeat while traveling across this great nation. Regional maps.

How old is Ethiopian cuisine and the unique way of eating it? Ethiopians proudly say their cuisine goes back 3,000 to 5,000 years. Archaeologists and historians now believe it emerged in the first millennium A.D. in Aksum, an ancient kingdom that occupied whats now the northern region of Ethiopia and the southern region of neighboring Eritrea. But regardless of when Ethiopians began to eat spicy wots atop the spongy flatbread injera, or when they first drank the intoxicating honey wine called tej, their cuisine remains unique in the world. Mesob Across America: Ethiopian Food in the U.S.A. brings together what respected scholars and passionate Ethiopians know and believe about this delectable cuisine. From the ingredients of the Ethiopian kitchen the foods, the spices, and the ways of combining them to a close-up look at the cuisines history and culture, Mesob Across America is both comprehensive and anecdotal. Explore the history of how restaurant communities emerged in the U.S., and visit them as they exist today. Learn how to prepare a five-course Ethiopian meal, including homemade tej. And solve the mystery of when Ethiopian food made its debut in America which was not when most Ethiopians think it did.

Eating Right in America is a powerful critique of dietary reform in the United States from the late nineteenth-century emergence of nutritional science through the contemporary alternative food movement and campaign against obesity. Charlotte Biltekoff analyzes the discourses of dietary reform, including the writings of reformers, as well as the materials they created to bring their messages to the public. She shows that while the primary aim may be to improve health, the process of teaching people to "eat right" in the U.S. inevitably involves shaping certain kinds of subjects and citizens, and shoring up the identity and social boundaries of the ever-threatened American middle class. Without discounting the pleasures of food or the value of wellness, Biltekoff advocates a critical reappraisal of our obsession with diet as a proxy for health. Based on her understanding of the history of dietary reform, she argues that talk about "eating right" in America too often obscures structural and environmental stresses and constraints, while naturalizing the dubious redefinition of health as an individual responsibility and imperative.

"We all like different food, but everybody needs to eat! How Are We Alike and DIfferent? FInd out in My food, Your food, Our food."--Back cover.

An exploration, both personal and deeply reported, of how we learn to eat in today’s toxic food culture. Food is supposed to sustain and nourish us. Eating well, any doctor will tell you, is the best way to take care of yourself. Feeding well, any human will tell you, is the most important job a mother has. But for too many of us, food now feels dangerous. We parse every bite we eat as good or bad, and judge our own worth accordingly. When her newborn daughter stopped eating after a medical crisis, Virginia Sole-Smith spent two years teaching her how to feel safe around food again — and in the process, realized just how many of us are struggling to do the same thing. The Eating Instinct visits kitchen tables around America to tell Sole-Smith’s own story, as well as the stories of women recovering from weight loss surgery, of people who eat only nine foods, of families with unlimited grocery budgets and those on food stamps. Every struggle is unique. But Sole-Smith shows how they’re also all products of our modern food culture. And they’re all asking the same questions: How did we learn to eat this way? Why is it so hard to feel good about food? And how can we make it better?

Pat Willard takes readers on a journey into the regional nooks and crannies of American cuisine where WPA writers-including Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren, among countless others-were dispatched in 1935 to document the roots of our diverse culinary cuisine. America Eats!, as the project was entitled, was never published. With the unpublished WPA manuscript as her guide, Willard visits the sites of American foods past glory to explore whether American traditional cuisine is still as healthy and vibrant today as it was then.

A colorful, spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America. Confronted by unfamiliar animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and West Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines. From the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry and slave kitchens on southern plantations, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine. As colonial America grew, so did its palate, as interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. McWilliams considers how Indian corn, once thought by the colonists as “fit for swine,” became a fixture in the colonial diet. He also examines the ways in which African slaves influenced West Indian and American southern cuisine. While a mania for all things British was a unifying feature of eighteenth-century cuisine, the colonies discovered a national beverage in domestically brewed beer, which came to symbolize solidarity and loyalty to the patriotic cause in the Revolutionary era. The beer and alcohol industry also instigated unprecedented trade among the colonies and further integrated colonial habits and tastes. Victory in the American Revolution initiated a “culinary declaration of independence,” prompting the antimonarchical habits of simplicity, frugality, and frontier ruggedness to define the cuisine of the United States—a shift that imbued values that continue to shape the nation’s attitudes to this day. “A lively and informative read.” —TheNew Yorker