Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration

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."

Being of Irish extraction I learned for the first time, definitively, why unlike my Italian, Jewish, and Latino friends no Irish "ethnic" foods (other than soda bread) were part of my background. And, it helped me to better understand the critical, but differing, importance of food in the Jewish and Italian cultures I grew up along side.

Readers should be advised that this is a serious academic work, one which would be an appropriate college history text. Therefore, the introduction and summary chapters will seem dry and..."academic" to those seeking a purely recreational read. I advise them to walk on the edge and learn something; it's well worth the time invested.


a little overcooked   June 15, 2007
rat_taxi (Southern USA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful

I've seen the brand Contadini many times in the grocery store, but I never
knew what it meant. I also never realized that spaghetti isn't really an
Italian food. Ms. Diner included some enlightening facts about the
development of immigrant diets and why certain groups of people felt the
way they did about food coming into this country.
I found the information about Irish food culture, or the lack of it, really
interesting. Unfortunately, that section of the book is unnecessarily
lengthy and repetitive. I learned some valuable and relevant information
from Hungering, but I don't see very many people reading the entire thing
if they just pick it up out of curiosity or a passing interest in the
subject matter.


Editor, Editor...!   September 1, 2005
J Slott (New York, NY)
2 out of 7 found this review helpful

Unfortunately while this book does try to explore a fascinating and worthwhile subject, it suffers the same predicament that most non-fiction books for the past three decades have fallen under - incompetent editing. The author repeats, and repeats, and repeats, and repeats, and repeats her ideas and observations. Perhaps she was trying to meet a minimum word limit ordained by her publisher but that consideration shouldn't elicit anyone's sympathy. The constant re-iteration of points (and the author's desert-dry "voice" that exacerbates the repetition with its monotonous tone) makes for such a frustrating reading experience that I could not go past the second chapter.