The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food--Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal,   ISBN:9781594488658

Customer Rating: 

Talked with a friend about her drives around the USA in the 50's - 80's, and how everything was regional when she was young and became homogeneous over the years. Got her this book and she loved it! Reminded her of many things she saw and many she missed. All her friends are now sharing this book and sharing stories of the foods they grew up eating and wondering what happened to all those delicious recipes etc. Well, this book does have some small problems in writing and descriptions, but Kurlansky seems to do a great job pulling out the important parts and showing the story of how things came about. I like his leaving the original articles but explaining the contexts. Am probably going to have to buy another copy of this for other people now, it's started enough interest in people's foods from the past. I probably would like more historical context for the original articles because am not a USA historian and need to learn more of that anyway. Get this book and enjoy!

Customer Rating: 

Apparently this book based on another one written before. Would suggest the original text. This book seemed written to meet deadline only. Have enjoyed authors previous books. Not us to usual standard.

Customer Rating: 

If you are buying this for your Kindle, make sure you go to the one on the bottom of the list, or you won't get the full edition. They are being sold in sections on here and it is deceiving. The first section, The South Eats, is all you will get if you order the top. Yes, the title says "The South Eats" when you open it, but the print editions are not sold in sections, only as one book, so selling it off in sections is a bit on the deceptive side I would say.

Customer Rating: 

Kudos to Mark Kurlansky for his decision to present first hand accounts instead of giving his "interpretation." His introduction is excellent and gives an essential accounting for the reason that these fascinating pieces were written and collected.

Kurlansky's idea for bringing this tastebud tantalizing material to today's reader is noteworthy. This collection of articles/essays about food is just as fascinating as a collection of painting, literature, or photography from that same period of time.

The regional divisions also made the information more interesting. Being from the South, I remember parents and grandparents talking about what they grew, cooked, and ate during the great depression. THE FOOD OF A YOUNGER LAND gives thoroughly interesting and enjoyable firsthand information about what other regions were cooking and eating during those years.

Customer Rating: 

Kurlansky has compiled a collection of FWP writings about regional food that were never finished and presented them to us in the raw form that was never meant to be seen. Having heard about "America Eats", I was always extremely interested in this concept. Unfortunatly, by trying to pay due to the FWP writers, Kurlansky has done himself a disservice, and as a result, presented a book that is almost unreadable.

There are some strange cusine habits outlined here, which is what I was really looking for, but the way it was presented was terrible. The FWP was a program to give the unemployed some way to earn money during the depression. I don't hold some of these writings against the authors, since most of them were simply there for a paycheck. However, there were several names that Kurlansky tried to hold up as semi-marque names later in their career, which is unfortunate. They should be ashamed of taking money for these "writings". Some amount to nothing more than a list of slang while others frequently reference encyclopedias and dictionaries to define what a specific food is. Really? This is what people were being paid to do? It is a disgrace. The even bigger travesty of justice is not just that many writers were being paid to basically do nothing, but that a very fascinating topic ended up not being chronicaled.

People were able to survive during the depression due to this project, which we should be grateful for. But imagine how incredible this work could have been if the WPA had taken that same funding and used it as a grant for various state colleges. Any freshman level lit or english course student would have pumped out tomes superior to this.

Kurlansky started with a mess of surviving documents. Instead of pulling them together and writing the book in a cohesive voice, we are left knowing just as little about the regional cuisine of the day as we were prior to picking the book up.