John Birdsall is a two-time James Beard Award–winning author, a former food critic, and longtime restaurant cook. He is the coauthor of a cookbook, Hawker Fare, with James Syhabout. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
For the first time, Mr. Birdsall brings both scholarly research and a queer lens to Beard's life, braiding the strands of privilege and pain, performance and anxiety, into an entirely new story. -- Julia Moskin - New York Times John Birdsall is not a polite biographer, and I say this with admiration. In his new book, The Man Who Ate Too Much, he pokes and prods at Beard's most tender places, his hidden traumas, his deepest insecurities. Birdsall gets to what's often missing from the cheerful narrative of James Beard, shading in the face sketched on medals and vintage book covers - a man known chiefly as a gregarious entertainer, enormous in profile, appetite and knowledge. -- Tejal Rao - New York Times A marvel of narrative nonfiction that achieves for 20th-century gay history what Tom Wolfe did for aviation in The Right Stuff, a subjective and objective reconstruction of a neglected American subculture hiding in plain sight. -- Anne Matthews - The American Scholar Like the life of James Beard, this biography is big and beautiful, heartbreaking and true. It is the celebration that Beard deserves. -- Rien Fertel - Wall Street Journal Beard was both a victim and a perpetrator of multiple erasures, which Birdsall records in meticulous detail... The story of Beard's life invites us to recognize the violence that was done in the name of American cooking and expand our understanding of authenticity to include not only what's on the plate but everything around it: the norms, prejudices, economic wounds, environmental traumas, and other social forces that go into the production of food and culinary authority. It's a reminder that food is part of culture, and terroir not simply a matter of the soil. -- Aaron Timms - New Republic Birdsall's sentences have rhythm, too, and compress time and place so that a meal becomes a history... like the greediest of diners, I want more. -- Ligaya Mishan - New York Times Book Review Food is a haven for Beard in even his lowest moments, and Birdsall, a lovely writer, honors that with delicate reconstructions of flavor. -- Madeline Leung Coleman - The Atlantic It is fitting that John Birdsall should give this impossibly rich tribute to the gay father of modern American food culture, revealing that it's not the food but the ingredients within that make the cook a legend. Savoir faire, shade, dish, yearning, hunger, and creative fire made the great James Beard and this joy of a biography possible...Foundational. Important. Indispensable and delectable queer food history at its finest. -- Michael W. Twitty, James Beard Award-winning author of The Cooking Gene The Man Who Ate Too Much makes a fascinating and persuasive case that [James] Beard was brought to an idea of culinary Americanness by re-experiencing the American West. -- Adam Gopnik - New Yorker The food writer who, more than anyone else, inscribed the idea of an American cuisine, Beard was larger than the sum of his cookbooks and Birdsall brings him to vivid life here. -- Boston Globe John Birdsall pens what could be the definitive biography of America's best-known food personality and the national culinary landscape he shaped. -- Fortune The Man Who Ate Too Much is one of the finest biographies of recent memory and one of the best culinary biographies around. Consider it required reading for anyone seeking to understand the foundations of modern American cooking. -- Nevin Martell - Washington Independent Review of Books Packed with sensory detail, The Man Who Ate Too Much is a magnificent tribute to a titan of American life, who taught us, through the coded - or universal - language of food, our inalienable right to the pursuit of pleasure. -- Stephanie Sy-Quia - Times Literary Supplement