Book Review: “Kitchen Literacy”

How we lost the knowledge of where food comes from and why we need to get it back

By Ann Vileisis (Island Press, first printing 2007)
Reviewed by Wendy Allen

Strolling through the supermarket, Ann Vileisis had a revelation: “Everything we ate had a story, but we didn’t know any of them,” and she wondered how we fell into the situation of not knowing where our food comes from. In Kitchen Literacy, Vileisis walks us through two centuries of eating and how our habits have shifted in the matter of a few generations.

The detail in just the first chapter makes you realize the lack of connection we have today. Here, Vileisis explores the journal of Martha Ballard, an 18^th century housewife. Her short but revealing entries such as “had Bakt Lamb, Green Peas & Cucums [cucumbers]” or “we Dind on a fine Legg of Cornd Pork stufft with green herbs from our Gardin” expose a much more advanced sense of where food comes from than we can fathom today in our world of 24-hour supermarkets, boxed foods containing unrecognizable ingredients, and where our children don’t know that milk comes from a cow. Martha had an intimate relationship with her food; what happened to ours?

Vileisis continues the fascinating history, weaving anecdotes about modern day shopping lists into the challenge of feeding America’s burgeoning society after the industrial revolution, walking us through school gardens, and exposing sleek ad campaigns designed to make us think we know our food. Through it all, she encourages eaters to look beyond the supermarket aisle and discover the full story of food–Where does it come from? What goes into making it? Who was involved?

“As ironic as it may sound," Vileisis writes, "expressing preferences in how we shop for food might well be a way for an urban society to practice a land ethic” (238).