/Kitchen Literacy/ in "The Westward-Moving House": A Joint Review

 

• Ann Vileisis, Kitchen Literacy: How we lost knowledge of where food comes from and why we need to get it back. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008.) Book Website. 
•  John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Westward-Moving House: Three American Houses and the People Who Lived in Them.” Places Journal, July 2011: Online. [Originally printed in Landscapes (2.3), Spring 1953.]

Food is essential to life. These two works, Ann Vileisis’s Kitchen Literacy and John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s “The Westward-Moving House,” focus on the social histories and cultural geographies of people and places at seemingly opposite poles of eating: the cooks and the farmers. This observation obscures the deep similarities in the important stories Vileisis and Jackson tell about how we have come to rely on distributed supply chains for our daily sustenance.

Bureaucratic Ruins: Images from the Last Days of the Sir John Carling Building

I hope to flesh this post out with more images (and words) but for now here are a few shots of the late Sir John Carling Building. Named after the federal Minister of Agriculture who oversaw the establishment of the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa and the wider Experimental Farm system across the country in 1886 (Carling was also one of those responsible for the founding of the Ontario Agricultural College in the 1870s), the Sir John Carling Building was one of the first attempts to consolidate a federal department in a single building.