Q&A with author Ann Vileisis about Kitchen Literacy

What is Kitchen Literacy about?
The book is a history of why we know so little about what we eat. As America urbanized and our food system industrialized at the turn of the 20th century, the ways that city dwellers could know foods changed markedly.

As just one example, if you look at historic cookbooks (before urbanization), you’ll find that home cooks were advised to know quite a bit about the animals that become the meat in their kitchens. Of course, today, for most people, that expectation is virtually non-existent.

Kitchen Literacy traces consumers’ changing awareness about food production—from the firsthand and sensuous to the removed and indifferent, out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach of today.

In the end, I also explore movements toward eating local and organic foods that have been gaining ground in recent years. They are exciting because they give us new opportunities to know the stories of our foods once again and also to find healthier, better-tasting fare that will be more sustainable in the long-run.

What will readers get from the book?
I think that readers will most enjoy the stories I tell about historic characters—people who had very different ways of thinking about foods than we do today. For example, one of my favorites is the butcher Thomas DeVoe, who wrote about everything that came to New York City’s grand 19th-century markets. He described countless varieties of wild foods and what they tasted like—baby eaglets, if you are wondering, “made very good food”. In the nineteenth century, people were eating a lot of foods that, today, we consider wildlife. I found it interesting to explore the line that divides what we eat from what we don’t.

Readers will also get a look at the role of advertising in shaping what we think is important about foods. I find historic advertisements to be fascinating, and I think examining them helps us to gain useful perspective on who sets the guideposts for what we know and deem to be important about what we eat. In the 1900s, people were anxious about city life so many ads used gorgeous natural images to allay concern about factory made foods. 

By the 1920s, ads aimed to attach the reputation of cutting-edge science to manufactured foods. One of my favorites from this period shows five scientists in lab coats creating a new recipe for baked beans. The message was potent: these scientists using test tubes were better at making beans than any mother using traditional methods. Looking at ads through history helps us to understand better how they work in our own times.

Ultimately, I hope that readers will gain a better understanding of the complex reasons why we’ve lost knowledge about where our foods come from and gain some insights about the importance of finding ways to know our foods better once again.

What inspired you to start work on Kitchen Literacy?
It was my love of cooking, my fascination with history, and a growing awareness that we as a society need to change how we think about our food if we are to solve some of today’s most urgent environmental problems.

As an environmental historian, I started to see that old cookbooks and historic ads that made up popular culture could be read as documents that revealed not only the ways that we used to cook and eat, but also the ways that we used to think about our human selves in the broader context of agriculture and nature. And that’s where I saw a fascinating connection—actually a lack of connection—between how we now think about our foods and about modern environmental problems.

Others have written at length about those problems, and so I don’t in Kitchen Literacy, but here are just a few examples: agriculture is America’s leading source of water pollution and the greatest cause of habitat destruction for about 38 percent of species on the endangered species list. Though bird kills have declined since DDT and several other pesticides were banned in the 1970s, scientists estimate that 67 million birds are still killed each year as a result of pesticide exposure. Declines in amphibians—and, of course, beneficial insects such as bees, have also been linked to pesticides. Finally, with foods traveling halfway around the earth, agriculture consumes fossil fuels at an unsustainable rate—something that we need to look at more carefully in this age of peak oil and climate change.

To remedy these and other problems, we need to learn to think about ourselves—and our consumption—within the context of a larger whole. Knowing our foodsheds is one of the ways we can begin to understand the connections between what we eat and the broader environment.

Why is history relevant to modern issues?
Of course, there is the old adage that we must know history in order not to repeat past mistakes—but I think the real relevance is more subtle than that. We need to have a better grasp of how cultural and economic forces shape the choices in our lives, and history is one way of discovering that.

I wrote a lot about how advertising helped people to accept foods that were entirely new-fangled when they came out—canned foods, margarine, and commercially baked breads. In the process, our attention was shifted from thinking about our foods in the physical context of their production to thinking about our foods in contexts established by food marketers. For example, one of the ways that marketers convinced skeptical homemakers to adopt convenience foods was to sell them as foods with “built-in maid service.” This pitch gave the new factory-made foods an appealing glamour that offset reservations based on traditional values.

Looking at history doesn’t mean going back to the past, but it does give us insights that help us better understand the present. For example, through history, we can see that it became very difficult for consumers to cope with too much information about their foods and that price and brand name came to function as shorthand for other, more traditional types of information that had previously been valued. “Food experts” in popular publications advised women to simply find a brand they trusted rather than learn about the actual food they ate. If we as a society need to build a more sustainable agriculture, (which I believe we do), then we need to recognize consumers’ habits of thought and action, and proceed from there.

Finally, I think that history reminds us that change is possible—and, in fact, inevitable. This is a powerful and hopeful perspective.

What are some of the most interesting things you learned in writing Kitchen Literacy?
It’s always fun for me to delve into another time period and to try to grasp how people were thinking differently. One of the most interesting things I discovered was how troubled many people were by changes as the food system first began to industrialize. For example, consumers were very resistant to canned foods when they first came onto the market. And if you think about it, it’s no surprise.

Before cans, foods could be picked up, smelled, and touched, but cans concealed their contents in a way that seemed mysterious and guileful, especially because early canned foods did have some awful problems. In the context of home cooking, the idea of factory-made foods was not very appetizing at first—not until advertisers managed to cast the sleek silver capsules and colorful boxes as modern and hygienic. And of course, hygiene was—and still is—extremely important in a large-scale, anonymous, industrial food system.

Another thing that I found interesting was how the cultural idea of the “natural” was popular in food marketing 100 years ago when city dwellers confronted ills of enlarging cities. I was fascinated to find that images of black bears—not teddy bears, but bears with wild mountain backdrops—were used to sell Jell-O and boxed cereal, and pictures Niagara Falls were used to sell Shredded Wheat.

Ironically, though, city dwellers’ yearnings for all things “natural” compelled them to move to the suburbs, which, of course, swallowed up belts of rich farmlands that surrounded and supplied city markets. (In fact, the manure of city horses was swept up and carried out of the city to fertilize the ring of truck farms.) Suburbs began to grow at the same time that our nationalized, industrialized food system began to supply more and more foods from farther and farther away.

How has what you’ve learned changed what you do in your own kitchen?
Well, I’ve definitely added more organic and locally grown foods to our diet. At first, buying organic products that cost more jarred against a life-long frugality that I inherited from my Depression-era grandparents. But then I realized that by always buying the cheapest products, I was practicing false economy. I was getting poor food and passing along hidden costs to other people and to the environment. When I grasped that buying organic and local foods helped to support agriculture that is better for the environment, better for communities, and better for our future, I started to change my habits and economize in other ways.

And the best part is that it has been fun. I moved to a small town, started a garden, and tracked down some local people who keep me supplied with stuff that I’m not growing myself. I enjoy cooking, so it’s been delightful to be inspired to prepare meals with fresh and seasonal ingredients. I’ve also become more interested and engaged in the politics of agriculture—both locally and nationally. Seeing everyday eating and cooking as part of our relationship with land and community is an awareness that has enriched our lives.

Do you think it’s more important to buy local, or to buy organic?
I think that’s a false dichotomy. We need to do more of BOTH. It’s critically important to support farms near where we live—to protect high value farmland around cities so we can enjoy food that is fresher and healthier, rely less on petroleum for transit, and support those farmers who know what it takes to grow food in local places. These people are real assets to our communities. But we ALSO as a society need to push agriculture in the direction of using fewer pesticides. For too long, we’ve looked the other way about the impacts of pesticides in ecosystems and the unknown cumulative impacts. We’ve come to expect that a regulatory system will safeguard us, but, in fact, that disjointed and chronically under-funded system doesn’t really consider the big picture very effectively. That’s why more of us consumers need to become engaged in the current dialog about agriculture—with both our wallets and our votes.

But as a shopper, when you are weighing choices in a supermarket aisle, it certainly can be difficult—to be faced with tough questions when all you want to do is figure out what to pick up for dinner. Yet I think that with a little effort, we can make effective decisions. For example, where I live, I can’t buy locally produced olive oil or rice, but I can buy locally produced organic berries and vegetables, and fish and eggs. So I buy organic olive oil and local berries and fish. Where my mother lives in New England, it’s difficult to buy local organic apples, but we can buy fabulous local apples from orchards that are practicing integrated pest management to reduce their reliance on pesticides. There I’d choose to buy local apples rather than organic apples from someplace distant like New Zealand. The options available are different in different places, so I believe that, as consumers, we just need to learn more—and then do our best. The important thing is to think it through rather than to pretend these matters don’t exist or that we can’t do anything about them.

And the good news is that learning more can be really fun and interesting. Shopping at farmers’ markets is a great way to find more local foods. If you don’t have one nearby, the Local Harvest website is another useful way to track down people who grow food in your area.
The journey of writing this book had led me to learn so many new things about how our eating connects us to real places and real people. There are no easy answers, and change will not happen overnight, but gradually, as more of us discover new options in the supermarket and new ways to buy foods, I think we can help to push agriculture in important new directions.

As a nation of consumers, we’ve come to be extremely good at ferreting out bargains in the shopping cart. But now we need to think about bargaining in a new way. We need to factor-in the lesser-known costs of our foods in order to secure a healthier environment for the future, for us all. With more and more people beginning to grasp the critical relationships between food, health, agriculture, and the environment, I think there is good reason for hope.