Books about Hungering from Amazon.com

Millions of immigrants were drawn to American shores, not by the mythic streets paved with gold, but rather by its tables heaped with food. How they experienced the realities of America's abundant food--its meat and white bread, its butter and cheese, fruits and vegetables, coffee and beer--reflected their earlier deprivations and shaped their ethnic practices in the new land.

Hungering for America tells the stories of three distinctive groups and their unique culinary dramas. Italian immigrants transformed the food of their upper classes and of sacred days into a generic "Italian" food that inspired community pride and cohesion. Irish immigrants, in contrast, loath to mimic the foodways of the Protestant British elite, diminished food as a marker of ethnicity. And, East European Jews, who venerated food as the vital center around which family and religious practice gathered, found that dietary restrictions jarred with America's boundless choices.

These tales, of immigrants in their old worlds and in the new, demonstrate the role of hunger in driving migration and the significance of food in cementing ethnic identity and community. Hasia Diner confirms the well-worn adage, "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are." (20011105).
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In the first essay in this beautiful collection of reflections on biblical themes, Frederick Buechner reminds us of a famous scene in the film La Dolce Vita: a helicopter is flying overhead, and suspended below it is a statue of Jesus. It flies over a swimming pool where a group of girls lounge; the men flying above circle back, trying to get the girls' phone numbers. All of this is immensely amusing to everyone in the audience, Buechner writes, until the camera zooms in on the statue itself, "until just for a moment the screen is filled with just the bearded face of Christ. For a moment, he continues, the theater was silent, "as if the face were their face somehow, their secret face that they had never seen before but that they knew belonged to them." This, he concludes, "is much of what the Christian faith is."

We catch a glimpse of something true, Buechner tells us, and after that glimpse we are never again the same, try as we might to forget it. And the point of these essays, of course, is to remind us. --Doug Thorpe.
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