Photo by Elizabeth Berger

There’s been no shortage of books about food in recent years — you’ve no doubt noticed. From Anthony Bourdain to John McPhee to Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver (not to mention everyone from Suzanne Somers to Dr. Oz), the subject has been tackled repeatedly and with gusto. Frederick Kaufman, on the other hand, isn’t so much interested in food. His interest lies in our relationship to food, or more specifically (and interestingly), in food’s role in America’s history and national identity — from the Puritans who fasted before their voyage to the New World and feasted upon arrival to modern-day raw milk smugglers, food engineers, and, yes, Rachael Ray.

You may have seen Kaufman’s 2005 article in Harper’s, famously titled Debbie Does Salad, which is actually the first chapter of his new book, A Short History of the American Stomach. While many use the term ‘gastroporn’ to describe today’s food media approach, Kaufman studied Food Network footage with a porn industry executive and crafted a point-by-point comparison. It was just part of his quest to understand the network’s rise and its popularity even among people who aren’t especially interested in cooking. And as with the rest of the book, it’s some combination of funny, informed, and educational.

Not surprisingly, Thanksgiving features prominently in the book. The quintessential American holiday, it manages to be neither especially patriotic nor materialistic in nature. It’s a holiday about food, and moreover, too much of it. What is surprising is what Kaufman has dug up, through years of research, on Early American eating disorders and even a Puritanical fixation on indigestion. Citing such sources as Cotton Mather, the Beecher sisters, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ben Franklin, Fannie Farmer, Barry Sears and even the Torah, Kaufman tells what is essentially a morality tale. As it turns out, never in the history of America has there been any shortage of books about food. Kaufman is continuing a grand tradition while taking an amusing meta look at it. He spoke with me by phone about the book.

How did this book get its start? I know ‘Debbie Does Salad’ first appeared in Harper’s. Did you get the idea to expand it to a book from there?

A lot of people noted ‘Debbie Does Salad,’ and that’s great. The fact of the matter is that I had been working along these lines for quite some time. The first time I ever published anything like this was for the Voice Literary Supplement back in early ‘90s. I did a review of a diet book by Susan Powter. Remember Susan Powter?

Sure.

Eat, breathe, move was the big mantra. And I wrote a piece about how she was in the great tradition of Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But it actually [goes back to] my doctoral dissertation — talk about really boring and horrible. I was getting a doctorate — I’m a professor of English and Journalism — and I decided I would study Federalist America, because I figured, less competition on the job market. Not that many people were studying it. So I started reading Federalist American literature and I realized, boy this is really weird stuff. Why is it so weird? And I thought I would do some body criticism on it — in the ‘90s people were starting to do this in lit crit — so I thought how can I do body criticism with this? And I thought what I’ll do is I’ll read all the medical texts I can find from the Federalist period. I started reading deeply into the medicine of the time, and I discovered that it was all based on the stomach. The stomach was the center of medicine, the stomach was the center of the nervous system, the stomach was the center of psychology. And I started getting into how the stomach had been a part of American history — how it had informed American history and, in some ways, controlled American history. And that’s how it began.

So something like ‘Debbie Does Salad’ came very late in the game. I already had a book contract, in fact, for this book, and my editor had said to me, “You know, I’d like to have a chapter about food media,” and I said, “How about the Food Network?” And at that point my editor at Harper’s wanted another article from me. So I said, “I’m working on a new chapter about the Food Network” and he said, “Great, can we have it?” And that’s how it came about.

Did the Food Network know at the time that you were literally comparing what they do to porn?

I try to be very straightforward about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, why I’m there. I try to tell people very clearly what I’m thinking about. So absolutely. And with every interview I did, I made it very explicit that the idea here was this term ‘gastroporn’ that I’d seen bandied about, mostly on academic listservs dealing with food. I don’t really believe in the sneak approach. I’m very direct and I tell people right at the outset. And if they laugh, that’s great, they’re laughing — I’m laughing, too. But if they get closed about it, that’s alright, too. Maybe they don’t want to discuss it, or they think it’s weird. But I found that when I talked to a lot of people about it, they were like Absolutely, we call it food porn all the time.

What was their reaction to the article?

I know Bob Tischman, the vice president of the Food Network, was not happy. But you can’t expect everyone to be happy. He has his own constituency to please — the brass at the Food Network — and that’s not my constituency. Sorry, Bob. But, you know, Sara Moulton? I don’t know if she was happy or not. Sara’s such a great person, and a sophisticated person, that I think she kind of understood. She certainly knew what I was up to and certainly was helping me out by talking to me. She agreed to have me over at the offices of Gourmet and agreed to have me on her set. And I think if you were to talk to her about it, I don’t think she would deny that there are certain elements of gastroporn in what she’s doing. She’s a smart woman, she understands the deal. And she certainly understands the difference between herself and a Giada De Laurentiis or a Rachael Ray, and that’s partially why I think Sara Moulton understands that she’s out.

Rachael Ray’s name seems to come up a lot. Is she of particular interest to you?

How do I find Ray-Ray? You know, it’s funny, I had never watched the Food Network before this article. Then I started watching it obsessively. And I did this article, and as soon as it was over I stopped watching. I really haven’t watched since. A lot of people ask me Who’s your favorite Food Network personality? I don’t watch the Food Network.

But Rachael Ray is great at what she does, right? She’s incredible at what she does. And I think when I was first watching, I was fascinated by her — and by all of them. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I don’t know if she’s particularly fascinating to me, but I think she’s particularly fascinating to a lot of people, simply because of her success. This is the fame game, and she’s certainly more famous than Emeril or Alton Brown or Bobby Flay. So I think she’s been a strange breakout star in our culture, and I think it says a lot about our culture, actually.

Do you consider yourself a foodie, or is this more of a sociological and historical interest for you?

I am not a foodie. I’m definitely more of a chowhound than a foodie. I’m more the type who was eating the bark off the tree four hundred years ago than the type who was making the hasty pudding or the peach gooseberry fool. But my lovely wife, Lizzie, I would have to say she is a foodie. She is a fabulous cook and I think she must have five or six hundred cookbooks in our house and was a professional caterer for awhile, and she can cook almost any type of cuisine. She and her friends are foodies. About a year ago she got into this Baked Alaska phase. She was making these incredible, huge, flaming Baked Alaskas. And so I guess I was just struck by this anyway, and any culinary sophistication I have is thanks to my wife, Lizzie.

Given that you’d been studying this stuff for years, I wonder how much of it came as a surprise to you. Do you feel like you started off with a pretty well-formed thesis, or did it morph on you as you researched and wrote and spent time with all of these various people?

I’ll lay all my cards on the table. Even before the stomach kind of jumped out at me from the medical literature, I had a theory. You know all of us academics and writers, we all have The Theory, right? My theory had to do with why America is the way it is and why we’re so messed up and why our politics are so crazy, and our economics and our celebrity culture. I was trying to put it all together as to why this strange phenomenon of Americanness is with us, and I got very involved with the autonomic nervous system as opposed to the sexual nervous system. In other words, the nervous system that governs digestion. It covers respiration and blood pressure. It covers sexual dilation, this sort of thing. It’s the involuntary as opposed to the voluntary. Because it occurred to me that Americans aren’t thinking with the brain in their head. They’re not thinking with their voluntary nervous system; they’re thinking with their involuntary nervous system. And that’s what drove it. I really started studying the history of the involuntary nervous system — when it was discovered, the different kinds of nerves in the body — and I got really into the literature of it about three hundred years ago. And that also drove toward the stomach. The stomach, of course, along with the heart, is one of the key involuntary organs. In the book I talk about the enteric brain — the brain in the gut. I think people think with the brain in the gut. We’re not a very cerebral nation. We’re not a nation that measures things a lot. We’re driven by emotions, we’re driven by our gut reactions. I think it explains a lot of the political and economic vicissitudes in the culture. And that’s what I was trying to get at in this book.

With all of the historical quotes, it really is fascinating how much of it goes back to the stomach. And particularly dyspepsia. I love that Hawthorne quote, “Why is dyspepsia not disgraceful?” I thought it would be funny to put him in front of a TV today to witness all of the ads for all of the products there are ...

I think after they got over the initial shock of it, all of these guys — Hawthorne and Cotton Mather and Ben Franklin — I think they’d immediately understand the Food Network. Because the America of their time was full of food mania. Food maniacs were in full force back then, and they were trying to understand why people were so mad about cookbooks and diet books and what to eat and what not to eat and the evil and the good and the purity and the pollution. All of these things go way back. So as I say, I think after the initial shock of seeing Rachael Ray, they would understand it immediately.

Did it come as a surprise to you that you couldn’t write a history of the stomach without including the history of the bowels?

[laughs] Well, I’m not a squeamish person. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to writing a history of the bowels, or particularly looking forward to the history of American vomit, but this is all essential to the story, sadly.

I, for one, had never thought much about the Puritan moralism around feasting and fasting, and I was interested to see you equating that with starving and binging. But then when it went one step further and actually became purging — it really is amazing that it all goes back that far.

I was really surprised. The 19th century is one thing, and the Federalist period is one thing, because the medicine is really wacky. But I was really surprised when I found it in the Puritans too, with bulimarexia emerging fully formed in the Puritan mind, and seeing the exact same ideas of personal perfectionism through puking, through vomiting. And just the unbelievable — I couldn’t believe the lists of the most fashionable pukes of the time. I was just blown away by this. I still am, I guess.

So you go through ancient Kosher dictates, Puritan practices, competitive eating, designer enzymes — it’s quite a wide-ranging study. And you spent time with everyone from Cotton Mather to raw food “cultists,” as you call them. What was the most interesting part of it for you?

I really loved my visit down to the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and seeing how oysters were created in laboratories. And I really got a kick out of going to the Grand Central Oyster Bar in New York and seeing these laboratory-created oysters on the menu there, and everybody just kind of swallowing them. I really enjoyed that. I thought that was crazy.

You seem to be a great collector of trivia. There are a lot of factoids and anecdotes. I especially liked when I got to the end and you suddenly started spewing out all of these pumpkin factoids that you didn’t think you were going to get to use. Do you have a favorite food factoid that you like to whip out at parties?

I always love the idea that groundhog is better the second day. [laughs] After it’s been slaughtered, you have to let the meat rest a day if you want the most delicious groundhog. And that skunk meat is very sweet and quite delicious. And, of course, I love the great 19th-century advice: Be careful when you’re skinning a porcupine.

That is important. I’m partial to Twain’s twelve eggs a day, unpeeled.

Mark Twain you think is just a teller of tall tales but then, in the Federalist period, in the first competitive eating contest, some guy down at the South Street Seaport — only a couple of blocks from where I’m sitting now — is put up on a platform and in fifteen minutes eats fifty hardboiled eggs, shell and all. People were eating eggshells and, in fact, eggshells are not unhealthy, as it turns out.

They sound painful to eat.

Yeah, I don’t think they’re for me. I guess the stomachs were just different back then.

Or the esophagus ...

[laughs] A Short History of the American Esophagus. Don’t tell anybody, that’s my next book.

So you do this great job of demonstrating that as it is, thus it ever was. Do you have the sense that thus it ever shall be?

Oh, yeah. Oh, definitely. I think that the American stomach is in excellent shape right now. And what I fear is the exportation of the American stomach. I think it’s becoming the globalized stomach. It’s like Rome. Clearly people are seeing that America had this great high in the mid-20th century and is clearly no longer on that high. But it’s like Rome. Rome had this great high and then had this very long, slow decline. But we’ve all inherited their great traditions. I think the world is going to inherit America and the great American traditions, and among them is the American stomach in all of its imperialist, Puritanical ... glory, shall we say?