History of American Food

Bringing the people behind our food to life Ann Vileisis: My background as an environmental history and I was hearing more and more troubling news about our food system and how it affected the environment. Factory farmers are polluting rivers and estuaries, wetlands were being converting to farmlands, farmlands were being converted to suburbia. Herbicides were contaminating drinking water, mercury were showing up making unsafe to eat too much fish and yet, when I went to the supermarket to shop. It’s as if my I entered an entirely differently world. Food was plentiful and cheap. There was Tommy and the Tiger and – milk. Thousands of products as familiar as ever but I somehow started to realize that all those products, all the foods in all the shelves have real stories and I knew none of them and somehow, I was just really struck by the absurdity of that situation and I’ve been shopping of course for 20 years or something as an adult and it never really had occurred to me in that way before but when it did, it was as if everything that was familiar became cryptic and I just started to feel like this was really a mystery of everyday life, something that all of us confronted but without really paying much attention to it. Because of my background in history, I was really fascinated about, I wondered how we get to this situation where we know so little about what we eat and just think it’s normal. Well, kitchen literacy is an expression that I use to refer to what we know about our foods and how we know it and so, in my book Kitchen Literacy. I look at this through time. I go back to kitchens in pre-industrial time frame and look at what people knew about their foods, that’s how I begin the book. I found that is was really surprising, they’re expecting to know different kinds of things about their foods. For example, in pre-industrial, American people expected to know very specific things about their foods, about the places or the particulars or where their foods came from, stories about their food. In the case of meat, they’re expecting to know about the age, sex and background of animals that became meat. Of course, these are things we never even think about anymore today. As I went back and looked into the diaries, I looked at this wonderful diary of a woman named Martha Ballard who is one of few women who kept the diary in the late 18th century. As I followed through her everyday life, I really discovered that there were stories to every single one of our foods. She writes something like having baked lamb and string beans for dinner one night and then I go back through and I could see where she had planted the string bean. The date that she had planted it, the date that she had hoed or weeded in that bed and then of course, the days that she picked the string beans first. I just find it remarkable that the way that the stories of the foods and the story of her life kind of braided together because the whole work of cooking and provisioning oneself was just an all encompassing part of life. Female: One of the comments that you’ve made was about 20th century urbanization and the idea of families moving away from the farms, people moving away from the source of their food and the idea that people miss this fundamental connection with the earth. I think you referred to it as nature instincts starved. Are we starve? Ann Vileisis: That refers to actually about 100 years ago when cities grew, people were anxious about this idea of separating from nature. This is something we think of as a very modern thing whereas I think a recent book out called Nature Deficit Disorder, people are thinking about it now but people thought about it 100 years ago as the food system was industrializing and it was actually at first generation of people that were moving from farms into cities and so, I think they were really right at that turning point in American history and they were very concern about that and that particular quotation is actually from a woman who is a teacher in a school garden program about 100 years ago. People were concerned and so progressive reformers started nature study in school garden programs and in 1897, 2600 students in New York State alone participate in these kinds of gardens and the teacher said that it was a revelation and an intense joy for students, for kids whose nature instinct has been starved to grow vegetables. I think the idea of a nature instinct, I'm not sure if I would necessarily feel comfortable promoting that or if that’s true or not but I think having an awareness that we live in an ecological context is really important. If we just live in our houses and don’t realize that where our water goes, where our waste goes, where our food comes from, I think that we can dilute ourselves into thinking that somehow, the earth is ours to have and everything will continue to go just fine forever and I think we need to have a little bit more of a grounding in reality.