Kaufman, Frederick 1961- (Fred Kaufman, Frederick L. Kaufman)

PERSONAL:

Born February 25, 1961, in Los Angeles, CA; married Elizabeth Berger.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, editor, scriptwriter, and educator. City University of New York and Graduate School of Journalism, professor of English.

WRITINGS:

Forty-two Days and Nights on the Iberian Peninsula with Anis Ladron, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (San Diego, CA), 1987.

(Author of essay) Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photographs and Memories, Aperture Foundation (New York, NY), 1997.

A Short History of the American Stomach, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2008.

Author of script for Fastpitch, a documentary about fast-pitch softball. Also author of the blog American Stomach. Contributor to books, including About Men: Reflections on the Male Experience, edited by Don Erickson, Poseidon Press, 1987; and Everything That Lives, Eats, Aperture, 1996. Contributor to periodicals, including Harpers, New Yorker, Gastronomica, Gourmet, and New York Times Magazine. Contributing editor, Harper's.

SIDELIGHTS:

Frederick Kaufman is a writer, editor, and educator based in New York City. Kaufman teaches at the City University of New York and its Graduate School of Journalism, where he serves as a professor of English. He is a contributing editor to Harper's, and frequently writes about food, food culture, and associated topics.

Kaufman has written several provocative articles on food, and garnered particular interest for works in Harper's that compared American obsession with food and the Food Network with an equally voyeuristic interest in pornography. In the nearly fifteen years of the Food Network's existence, the cable channel has introduced numerous culinary stars to American viewers while promoting the virtues of good food prepared skillfully, quickly, and abundantly. In a radio interview with Kaufman presented on the On the Media Web site, interviewer Brooke Gladstone observed, "What accounts for The Food Network's success is not necessarily the quality of the food or the service. What keeps us tuning in to yet another choreographed confection by yet another culinary star is the vision of great-looking meals. After all, we're not actually tasting anything." Viewers are, in fact, only "watching other people, more nimble than we, make it seem easy, which can be exciting," Gladstone stated, and which, Kaufman asserts, can be equivalent to the experience of watching porn. Though cooking shows have long been a staple of television, "the difference today is that the porniness has become more pervasive," Kaufman told Gladstone. "Nobody would confuse [pioneering television chef] Julia [Child] herself with a porn star. However, that leg of lamb, that big chunk of steak, that was the star, and the fetishized focus on it was clearly a pornographic focus." Kaufman further observed: "One of the things that makes it extremely porny is the repetition" of the camera work, he remarked to Gladstone. "You'll see the peach, and the camera going over those peaches again, then [Food Network star and chef] Giada [De Laurentiis], then the peach, then Giada, then the peach. And so this is very similar to how porn works."

In a Critical Mass Web site interview with Andrew Sall, Kaufman explained his interest in food and food culture: "My fascination is with how the body controls us in ways that we're not aware of," he said. "I'm interested in how our autonomic nerve system governs our decisions. A great deal of this connects to the stomach."

Kaufman continues his explorations of the social, cultural, and personal aspects of food and eating in A Short History of the American Stomach. In this book, Kaufman presents a "series of trenchant arguments about the consistency of Americans' feelings for food, our great common denominator," observed a Kirkus Reviews critic. He "leads us, with no shortage of dry wit and sardonic reflexivity, through the interweaving strands of assorted social, moral and digestive regimes which have, he argues, formed the bedrock of American consciousness from the time of the Pilgrims to the present day," noted PopMatters Web site reviewer Olly Zanetti. Kaufman notes, for example, that the first Thanksgiving, long revered as a celebration of the bounty of the harvest in the new world, was followed by official days of fasting. He describes how prominent Puritan leader Cotton Mather was convinced of the health benefits of purging his system, and willingly induced vomiting as a curative act. He locates areas where politics, culture, and food coincide. He considers the inherent conflicts in a society that places great pride and emphasis on plentiful supplies of food, but which assigns social stigma to the overweight. The extremes of American eating, from the excesses of the glutton to the austerity of the serious dieter, have existed in this country since the Pilgrims first set foot here, Kaufman concludes.

Christian Science Monitor reviewer Peter Smith remarked, "This brief, chatty tour offers a fascinating interior view of the nation's gut-centricity." Library Journal contributor Elizabeth Rogers called the book "vastly entertaining," while a Publishers Weekly critic found it to be an "occasionally incongruous though entertaining study."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 1, 2008, Mark Knoblauch, review of A Short History of the American Stomach, p. 28.

Christian Science Monitor, March, 2008, Peter Smith, "The American Obsession with Food," review of A Short History of the American Stomach.

Internet Bookwatch, March, 2008, review of A Short History of the American Stomach.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2007, review of A Short History of the American Stomach.

Library Journal, February 15, 2008, Elizabeth Rogers, review of A Short History of the American Stomach, p. 126.

Los Angeles times, February 3, 2008, Matthew Price, "Our Eating Habits and Hang-Ups, from the Pilgrim Fathers to the Present Day," review of A Short History of the American Stomach.

Publishers Weekly, March 27, 1987, Sybil Steinberg, review of Forty-two Days and Nights on the Iberian Peninsula with Anis Ladron, p. 36; November 12, 2007, review of A Short History of the American Stomach, p. 47.

ONLINE

Critical Mass Web log,http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/ (April 9, 2008), Andrew Sall, "Stomach and Writing Questions for Frederick Kaufman," interview with Frederick Kaufman.

Frederick Kaufman Home Page,http://www.frederickkaufman.com (August 11, 2008).

Grinder,http://www.chow.com/grinder/ (September 4, 2007), Nicholas Day, "Pet Food Confidential."

Harcourt Books Web site,http://www.harcourtbooks.com/ (August 11, 2008), biography of Frederick Kaufman.

On the Media,http://www.onthemedia.org/ (October 7, 2005), Brooke Gladstone, "Pornucopia," transcript of radio interview with Frederick Kaufman.

PopMatters,http://www.popmatters.com/ (March 31, 2008), Olly Zanetti, review of A Short History of the American Stomach.

Readerville Journal,http://journal.readerville.com/ (February 18, 2008), Karen Templer, "Puritan: Look after Thy Stomach," interview with Frederick Kaufman.