| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 314 words from this article are provided below; about 603 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Donna R. Gabaccia. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Foods and the Making of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998. Pp. 278. $24.95.

Dressed in a glossy, colorful jacket showing an array of canned and bottled ethnic" foods, and tagged with a bumper-sticker title, this book by Donna R. Gabaccia is an example of how much a reputable academic press is willing to sacrifice in the desperate search for a more marketable product. The book is full of potential and good sense, but it is hard to believe that it passed through the kind of editorial review that a university press normally uses to turn potential into substance and good sense into compelling analysis. 1

The best parts of the book are its concluding generalizations and the many interesting examples of America's seemingly endless appetite for combining, recombining, mixing, and matching foods from various ethnic and regional sources. The result of this culinary activity, Gabaccia contends, is an eclectic diet that nauseates cultural critics but sustains a positive American trait: "Our food reveals that we are cosmopolitans and iconoclasts; we are tolerant adventurers who do not feel constrained by tradition" (p. 225). As far as eating is concerned, American identity is defined much more by interplay than separatism, although this fact may not justify the author's belief that "indeed we are what we eat—not a multi-ethnic nation, but a nation of multi-ethnics" (p. 232). The book offers a significant insight into the relationship of American ethnicity and commerce: American consumers push in two different but reconcilable directions, preferring both standardized, mass-produced foods and a variety of multi-ethnic dishes. As a result of the tension between national and local, "ethnic and local loyalties repeatedly generate critiques of mass consumer culture, even while the marketplace remains the arena for expressing ethnic and local identities" (p. 230). . . .

There are about 603 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.