Fed, White, and Blue

Book excerpt: Food writer and Food Network personality Simon Majumdar sets out across the United States to discover what it means to be American, one bite at a time. Before deciding whether to trade in his green card for a U.S. citizenship, Simon Majumdar knew he needed to find out what it really means to be an American. So he set out on a journey to discover America through the thing he knows best: food. Over the course of a year, Simon crisscrossed the United States, stopping in locales such as Plymouth, Massachusetts, to learn about what the pilgrims ate; Kansas, for a Shabbat dinner; Wisconsin, to make cheese; Alaska, to fish for salmon alongside a grizzly bear; and Los Angeles, to cook at a Filipino restaurant in the hopes of making his in-laws proud. Along the way he makes some friends and digs in to the food cultures that make up America—brewing beer, farming, working at a food bank, and even tailgating. Full of heart, humor, history, and, of course, food, Fed, White, and Blue is a warm, funny, and inspiring portrait of becoming an American in the twenty-first century.