Chicago: A Food Biography Daniel R. Block and Howard Rosing. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Pp. xvi + 326, illustrations, bibliography, index.

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Jeffrey Kallen

Abstract

One does not need to know Chicago first-hand to know that it has a special relationship with food. Many literary works of the early 20th century depict the social and material life of Chicago in terms of its restaurants and saloons, its meatpacking industry, and the struggles of ordinary people in the buying, selling, and consumption of food: think of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), and Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916). In more recent times, the ‘Chicago Deep Dish Pizza’ can be found in the frozen food sections of supermarkets all over the world, while celebrity chef Rick Bayless (to pick just one example) operates from Chicago to entertain, to instruct, and to sell his vision of Mexican food. My own awareness of the city, having spent many family vacations in Chicago as a child, is firmly tied to the specialties of my grandmothers’ cooking and vegetable gardening, the ethnic diversity of the restaurant scene, and the visibility of large-scale food production. No doubt there are many of us who would need no persuading that a ‘food biography’ of Chicago offers rich opportunities.

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