| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America. By James E. McWilliams. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 386 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-231-12992-0.)

James E. McWilliams's goal in A Revolution in Eating is to discover not just what colonial Americans ate, but why they ate what they did. He hopes to recover a story that will inspire people who today want a food culture distinguished by "sustainability, slow food, and greater intimacy with what we eat" (p. 5). In style and substance the book is aimed at both scholars and the general public, as the dust jacket blurbs—one from the vice president of the Culinary Historians of Southern California—testify. Working mostly with secondary sources and published primary sources, McWilliams provides a synthesis of the literature on the foods people ate in the colonial and revolutionary eras. For readers familiar with the writing of such scholars as Sarah McMahon on New England's subsistence patterns and Lois Green Carr, Russell Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh on the way Robert Cole's planter family provided for itself in colonial Maryland, there is less new here than one might hope. But in bringing together what social historians have had to say about colonial food culture, McWilliams has made an important contribution.

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