Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef

Publishers Information

About Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef

Publisher Web Link: http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/

In Raising Steaks, Betty Fussell saddles up for a spirited ride across America on the trail of our most iconic food. When we bite into a steak’s charred crust and pink interior, Fussell finds that we bite into contradictions that have branded our national identity from the start. We taste the colliding fantasies of British pastoralists and Spanish ranchers that erupted in land wars between a wet-weather East and a desert West. We savor the ideas of wilderness and progress that clashed when we replaced buffalo with cattle, and then cowboys with industrial machines. We take in the contradictions of rugged individualism and the corporate technology that we use to breed, feed, slaughter, package, and distribute the animals we turn into meat. And we participate--as do the cattlemen and chefs, feedlot operators and rodeo stars, boot makers and scientists Fussell talks with--in the mythology that inspires cowboys to become technocrats and presidents to play cowboy. Raising Steaks is a celebration of, and an elegy for, a uniquely American Dream.

Author Information

About Betty Fussell

Author Web Link: http://bettyfussell.com/

For the past fifty years, Betty Fussell has been writing articles and books on the subject of what it is to be an American, first looking at movies and theater and then at food.

Her most recent, and eleventh, book is Raising Steaks: The Life & Times of American Beef (2008). In this she takes up the historical epic she began in The Story of Corn (1992), which won the IACP’s Jane Grigson Award for Scholarship. In between she wrote a food memoir, My Kitchen Wars (1999), which was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. In 2007 she won a James Beard Foundation Award for Journalism for “American Prime” in Saveur’s Steak Issue of July. She was recently celebrated, along with other winners of the Silver Spoon Award, by Food Arts Magazine, for which she has long been a Contributing Authority.

Over the decades, her essays on food, travel, movies, theater and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular national magazines and major newspapers. Critical and scholarly essays have appeared in such literary publications as Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Ontario Review, New York Literary Forum, Culture Front. Food and travel articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Holiday, Travel and Leisure, Connoisseur, Journal of Gastronomy, Gastronomica, Country Journal, Wine and Food, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Saveur, Cooking Light, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, More, Kitchen Gardener, Metropolitan Home, Edible Manhattan. She’s also written on a variety of subjects more or less related to women for Lear’s, Cosmopolitan, Vogue.

Her work has appeared in many anthologies, including Antaeus: Not for Bread Alone (1992), where her essay “On Murdering Eels and Laundering Swine” was listed in Best American Essays 1992 and reprinted in both A Literary Feast (1993) and Women on Hunting (1994). She has contributed articles to The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (1999), Scribner’s Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (2003), Living with a Writer (2004), Culinary Biographies (2006). Her introductions grace Jane Grigson’s The Mushroom Feast (1998), Bonnie Marranca’s A Slice of Life: Contemporary Writers on Food (2003), Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s A History of Food (2009).

She has lectured at museums, universities, cooking schools, food & wine associations, state fairs, corn festivals and steak workshops all over the country, at such disparate places as the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, New York Historical Society, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, New University for Social Research, New York University, Friends of Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Boston University, French Culinary Institute, Culinary Institute of America, Century Association, Cosmopolitan Club, National Arts Club, 98th Street YMHA, Institute of Culinary Education.

Born in Southern California in 1927, Fussell grew up in Riverside, took her BA at Pomona College, married her college sweetheart Paul Fussell, took an MA at Radcliffe College while he finished his PhD at Harvard University. After teaching English at Connecticut College and Douglass College, she finished her PhD at Rutgers University and taught there before moving to New York City, where she taught literature and film at the New School for Social Research and writing at Columbia University. In the 1980s she left teaching to write full time. Her first book was a biography of Mabel Norman, the silent movie comedienne, Mabel: Hollywood’s First I-Don’t-Care-Girl (1982). Since then, she has won fellowships to MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony for the Arts, Yaddo, Villa Montalvo, Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers and Djerassi Resident Artists Program.

Cookbooks by Betty Fussell

0

Your rating: None

My Cookbook

Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef

by Betty Fussell