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

Drawing on a wide and rich array of sources, Hasia Diner's Hungering for America "explores how the memories of hunger and the realities of American plenty fused together to shape the ethnic identities of millions of American women and men from Italy, Ireland, and Jewish eastern Europe" (p. xvii). Sensitive to the physical and existential predicament of hungry people, Diner amplifies our understanding of the impact of American abundance on immigrants by arguing that culturally specific memories of the European past determined Italian, Irish and Jewish foodways in the U.S.

Scholars who have worked in the area of consumption, popular culture, and the history of daily life will be surprised that the book begins apologetically, with an explanation that the author's colleagues raised eyebrows about her topic, deeming it "a strange subject for an historian." Fernand Braudel put food on the historiographical map decades ago and other scholars of the quotidian, taking the anthropological turn of the 1970s and 1980s, followed in that path of social history.

Succeeding Donna Gabaccia, who wrote the first survey of American immigrant and ethnic foodways—We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (1998)—Diner avoids a pitfall of that book, which ambitiously tried to write the whole story of foodways in the world's most ethnically heterogenous society.¹ In contrast Diner isolates three groups. The rationale behind the selection of Italians, Irish, and Jews is not clear, but that narrowing of the lens allows for a pointed comparison. Also, where Gabaccia wanted to compass the chronological entirety of American history, Diner focuses on the era of immigration between the mid-1800s and the 1920s.

Diner explains that Italian immigrants created a symbolically lush Italo-American food culture based on their memories of crushing poverty and class exploitation in Italy, while the Irish, whose ethnic memory linked colonialist starvation to collective identity, did nearly the opposite, eating because they must but refusing to elevate food to any sort of iconic status (such symbolization was reserved for hunger). Emphasizing (over-emphasizing?) class as the key factor in the social psychology of immigrant eating, the book also identifies two other factors that shaped the encounter with American food: 1) family and gender relationships, and 2) the intention of the immigrant group either to settle in America or to repatriate.

While sharing with other immigrants the deep impress of American material abundance, a conspicuous feature of which was a variety of protein-rich meals, eastern European Jews differed on account of the dense religious significance that centuries of halakic existence had imparted to their foodways. Diner depicts the sanctification of food in the shtetl, based on scriptural and rabbinic sanctions for eating well [but, note the incorrect biblical exegesis on p. 151—God did chide the Israelites for their concern with food, sending the quails and saying, "ye shall eat . . . until it be loathsome unto you" (Numbers 11:18-20)]. More importantly for her analysis, Diner emphasizes the severe class distinctions that distinguished Jewish eaters one from the other: the "constant contrast between rich and poor and the deeply held belief about food as an entitlement of all Jews emerged as a powerful theme in east European Jewish texts" (p. 173).

In America standards of kashruth divided rather than united Jewish families, beginning what would become a virtual tradition of American Jewish navigations through the minefields of each other's increasingly individuated yet piously maintained dietary practices. In one sense, that arena of conflict replaced the class tensions of Jewish eastern Europe.

Unlike Italians, Jews did not develop a culture of culinary nostalgia. Because they came to stay, they adapted fairly quickly to new ways of eating rather than worship the old in absentia. According to Diner, immigrant mothers kept to the old ways of cooking, but...