- 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.
Both pieces start in colonial New England and, through
stories of real (Vileisis) and fictional (Jackson) individuals, move forward to
the author’s contemporary period. The stories Vileisis and Jackson tell serve
to illustrate the changing relationship between American settlers,
agriculturalists, and (sub)urban dwellers and the land where they lived,
worked, and ate. By embodying the abstract forces of colonization,
industrialization, and supply chain management, both writers show (in plain
language!) how foundational ideas of being-in-the-world and human/non-human
relationships are developed, expressed, and challenged through daily acts of food
production and eating.
Jackson’s development of the fictional Tinkham family from
the Puritan settler Nehemiah’s experience in the Massachusetts colony in the
1650s, to Pliny’s 1850 rebellious move to Illinois and, finally, Ray’s high
modern Texan dream in 1953, highlight three important moments in the development of
American geographic imaginaries. (Arguably these moments are also common, to an extent, to Canadian experience, albeit with slightly different
periodizations.) The relationship between each Tinkham
patriarch (and while Jackson ostensibly writes about couples, he really only talks
about the men) and their agriculture economy is indicative of the ways the see
not only themselves, but humanity’s place in the world and relationship with
non-human beings.
For example, while both Nehemiah and Ray live close to town
and some distance from their fields, their outlooks could hardly be more
different. Where Nehemiah’s meadow and woodlot were carefully cultivated
according to each parcel’s characteristics to ensure his family had enough food, Ray was
radically reshaping his range, levelling hills and filling in dips to better
support cash cropping. Pliny, on the other hand, lived in relative isolation on
a prairie farm but was nonetheless connected to a wider economies and ecologies through his reliance
on the railway for essentials such as clothing, lighting, and even some
foodstuffs.
The three Tinkhams are meant to illustrate in broad strokes
the development of modern, science-based ways of knowing and living. Indeed,
where Nehemiah learned his farming techniques from his father and community,
Pliny relied on books, and Ray attended an agricultural college. Scientific
epistemologies and technological developments slowly begin to shape daily
practices and, in turn, influence the arrangement of domestic places. This
isn’t to say that Jackson presents a Whiggish account of American ingenuity—as
his later piece, “The Stranger’s Path,” illustrates—rather,
Jackson’s account leaves me wondering what is gained and lost in these ways of living. While I would chafe under Nehemiah and Pliny’s roofs,
their ways of living are romanticised in our society and contain rich
engagements with the world that Ray’s high modern approach to life literally
demolishes in its attempts to create a level field for capitalist production.
Vileisis’s stories plot a similar trajectory through
American history, but with a focus largely in the kitchen rather than in the
fields. Starting in the diary of Martha Ballard, a Revoultionary-era farmwife,
Vileisis traces the history and geography of American foodsheds (that is, the
area from which one draws their food) up to the present day (the book closes in
Vileisis’s own kitchen) arguing that over time our food has become less storied
(or at least that the stories are muted by the tin cans that grew in popularity after the American Civil War) and we, in turn, have become less able to read what stories our food can tell
us. Avoiding the language of phenomenology (and the pessimism of Martin
Heidegger), Vileisis imbues the domestic acts of procuring, preparing, and
eating food with existential importance.
Just as Jackson’s westward-moving houses illustrate
ever-changing dynamics in agricultural settlement and economy, Vileisis’s
exploration of how we know about our food, whether from the bodily knowledge of
home grown tomatoes (one
of two things money can’t buy) or through the “covenant of ignorance”
fostered by twentieth (and twenty-first) century industrial agriculturalists
and marketers, is demonstrative of how we (sub-) consciously see ourselves, as human beings, in relation to the rest of the world. To take one example, the shift
from viewing songbirds from cheap meat for immigrants to a beautiful part of
nature to be protected parallels views of the non-human world as a cornucopia
of edible goodies to a sublime wilderness.
Taken together, Kitchen
Literacy and “The Westward-Moving House” tell important stories about the
development of the world we live in today and our relationship to what we eat.
While neither work is in itself comprehensive, both spark self-reflection that
leads to fruitful questions about our daily lives and interesting avenues for
further study. Ultimately, as Jackson seems to suggest and Vileisis explicitly
states, life is richer when we imbue our domestic places with, and interrogate
our foods for, meaningful stories.
