I went to the Grand Central Oyster Bar with "Crazy Legs" Conti to see if he could tell the difference between natural and genetically modified oysters. "Crazy Legs" is a competitive eater and an oyster lover.
MY LATEST BOOK
Pre-order your copy of Bet the Farm now. Out October 2012. “This story should have been on the front page of the New York Times.”
– Jami Floyd, Political Analyst, MSNBC “It’s on the reading list for my NYU classes.”
– Marion Nestle, author of Why Calories Count and Food Politics “'Eating is an agricultural act,’ as Wendell Berry said, but Frederick Kaufman shows, undeniably, that it is an economic act as well.”
– Dan Barber, chef, author, activist “Kaufman makes a convincing and terrifying case that the same merchant bankers who destroyed our housing market–and economy–five years ago are at it again. This time their target is the world’s food supply.”
– Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland
Now available in paperback.
Winner of the Gourmand World Cookbook Award, "Best Culinary History Book, 2008."
A Short History of the American Stomach
The extremes of American eating—our urge to stuff and to starve ourselves—are easy to blame on the excesses of modern living. But, we’ve been this way all along. From the secret history of Puritan purges to interviews with Amish black-market raw-milk dealers, this is the story of America told by way of the American stomach. "Kaufman’s witty historical analysis will be a treat for anyone interested in food."
- Time Out New York "For the foodie on your gift list."
- Zagat.com "A hip, journalistic approach to America's all-consuming relationship to the gut, from Puritan rituals of fasting to the creation of the Food Network."
- Publisher's Weekly "Brilliant. Original. Inspirational."
- NPR's Kitchen Sisters “Gourmets and gourmands alike will savor Kaufman’s keen, caustic anatomy of the American palate.”
—Kirkus Reviews “Who knew that Cotton Mather was America’s first food faddist or Benjamin Franklin our founding foodie? I loved every chapter of Kaufman’s book. American history has never been so much fun.”
—Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat “A Short History of the American Stomach gives us something fresh, mixing erudition and passion with a tempered, lean, accurate prose that never misses its beats and never compromises a witty economy of style. Petronius would be proud.”
—Lawrence Osborne, author of The Accidental Connoisseur “Kaufman makes brilliant use of humor and history to expose American's bipolar relationship with food. This is the book to read if you want to understand why, generation after generation, we doggedly persist in dividing edibles into good and bad, healthy and deadly, alternately stuffing then depriving ourselves, worshiping processed foods one year and organic the next, ad nauseam.”
—Barry Glassner, author of The Gospel of Food
OTHER BOOKS
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009
Includes "Wasteland"Slice of Life: Contemporary Writers on Food
Includes "The Triumph of American Gastrosophy," a piece I wrote about the history of American diet book mania.- Everything That Lives, Eats
I wrote the lead essay for this collection of food photography. - About Men: Reflections on the Male Experience
I'm in this anthology - Frederick Kaufman: Forty-Two Days and Nights on the Iberian Peninsula With Anis Ladron
Frederick Kaufman: Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photographs and Memories
Food and Drink
February 02, 2008
October 09, 2007
Modern Gastrosophy
In the age-old American fat wars, it's now Gary Taubes versus C. Everett Koop. Ice cream good? Carrots bad? Why must we be obsessed with that which passes through our gullets? Of course, today's The New York Times is on board with the myth that the argument has just begun: "The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data," reports John Tierney. "The evidence against Haagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros." Until, of course, Hagen-Dazs returns to the status of verboten.
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October 05, 2007
Marketing the Goji Berries
Bret Thorn, Food Editor of Nation’s Restaurant News writes:
“I've been getting lots of press releases and product samples lately of sodas and other soft drinks that are supposed to be good for me because they contain some sort of goji berry extract or other antioxidant (if I see one more product with blueberry or pomegranate in it...). And they're free of high-fructose corn syrup . . . Actually, if I wanted to split hairs, doesn't fructose actually have one more bond than sucrose, making it marginally harder to break down and thus ever-so-slightly less of a shock on one's endocrine system than sucrose, but not enough less for even a diabetic to worry about?”
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Foodster Academics
Word on the academic street is pu pu platter. A scholarly paper from an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Brown University is in the works. Shall we soon see the world's first pu pu dissertation?
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October 04, 2007
Adam's Apple
Quite a search has been going on for that originary apple, but only through DNA analysis can we now with any certainty trace the paternity of the apple to the primal source -- the great apple forests of Kazkhstan (where the trees grow thirty feet high and bear one-pound fruit). Turns out there are apple prospectors out there who travel the continents in search of ancient apple germplasm -- which, when discovered, goes into frozen vaults like those kept at Cornell. If I pursue this one any further, may end up taking a bite out of a Decio variety, which the ancient Romans ate.
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Frederick Kaufman
- The food journalist who went looking for a slice of pizza and ended up on Wall Street.
I have written about American food culture and other subjects for Harper's Magazine, the New Yorker, Gourmet, Gastronomica, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. I've been a freelancer for years, and published something like one-hundred magazine articles, along with four books. I'm a contributing editor at Harper's, and teach at the City University of New York and CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism. Born in LA, I live in New York.
Follow Me
ARTICLES
- The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It
Harper's, June 2010 - Let Them Eat Cash
Let Them Eat Cash: Can Bill Gates Turn Hunger Into Profit? (Harper's cover story, June 2009) - THE NUCLEOTIDAL WAVE: The Front Line of Mutant Food
GMO gone gonzo. (VICE, The Technology Issue 2009) - Wasteland: A journey through the American cloaca
Selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2008. (Harper's, Feb. 2008, .pdf) - They Eat What We Are
New York Times Magazine article on the nearly $15 billion pet food industry. - Debbie Does Salad: The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography by Frederick Kaufman
The unadulterated Harper's Magazine article. - The Secret Ingredient
Harper's article on kosher food (.pdf). - Fat of the Land
Harper's profile of Dale Boone (.pdf). - Our Daily Bread
Harper's article on the triumph of American gastrosophy (.pdf).
MEDIA
- TEDxManhattan - The Measure of All Things
TEDxManhattan April 26, 2011 - Soaring Food Prices
My appearance on MSNBC's The Dylan Ratigan Show. - The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It
Video from my appearance on Democracy Now July 16, 2010. - Did Wall Street Cause a Food Bubble?
Audio from NPR's Here & Now. - CUNY TV
Kaufman discusses fat parades, artificial oysters, gastroporn and his beginnings as a food writer. - WREG-TV Memphis
Appearance on "Live at 9" morning show. - The Commonwealth Club
Video from my California reading on Feb. 22. - Seattle NPR
- The Leonard Lopate Show
2/1/08: On WNYC. - On Point
WBUR's Tom Ashbrook and I talk about "the most fashionable pukes" of American history and other subjects.
SCHOLARLY
- The Enteric Terrors of Washington Irving
This article first appeared in Gastronomica
DOCUMENTARY FILMS
Fastpitch
I wrote the script for this documentary on fast-pitch softball.