Americans of the 1960s would have trouble navigating the grocery aisles and restaurant menus of today. Once-exotic ingredients—like mangoes, hot sauces, kale, kimchi, and coconut milk—have become standard in the contemporary American diet. Laresh Jayasanker explains how food choices have expanded since the 1960s: immigrants have created demand for produce and other foods from their homelands; grocers and food processors have sought to market new foods; and transportation improvements have enabled food companies to bring those foods from afar. Yet, even as choices within stores have exploded, supermarket chains have consolidated. Throughout the food industry, fewer companies manage production and distribution, controlling what American consumers can access. Mining a wealth of menus, cookbooks, trade publications, interviews, and company records, Jayasanker explores Americans’ changing eating habits to shed light on the impact of immigration and globalization on American culture.
"A refreshingly original analysis of how American eating has changed in the last half century. Delving into fruit marketing, cookbook editing, and constantly changing formulations of ethnicity, Jayasanker identifies suburbs, not coastal cities, as the places where the American diet has become increasingly diverse for the individual, even as the number of firms that deliver goods has shrunk."––Rachel Laudan, author of
Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History "Americans may perceive a diversity of foods at the grocery stores, markets, and ethnic restaurants they frequent, but Jayasanker's inventive, clear-eyed study exposes how accelerated global trade and immigration since 1960 have actually narrowed our eating choices.
Sameness in Diversity also clarifies the seemingly remote forces of globalization through a focus on the most intimate and universal cultural form: food. Finally, it offers a long-awaited sequel to Donna Gabaccia's
We Are What We Eat, revealing the continued centrality of immigrants to the production and definition of American food."––Allison Varzally, author of
Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations and
Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring outside Ethnic Lines, 1925–1955
"The book’s wide range of topics . . . affords an opportunity, especially for non-specialists, to explore many important issues related to agriculture and food in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States."
