Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back
Ask children where food comes from, and they’ll probably answer: “the supermarket.” Ask most adults, and their replies may not be much different. Where our foods are raised and what happens to them between farm and supermarket shelf have become mysteries. How did we become so disconnected from the sources of our breads, beef, cheeses, cereal, apples, and countless other foods that nourish us every day?\ \ Ann Vileisis’s answer is a sensory-rich journey through the history of making...
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As the distance between farm and table grew, we went from knowing particular places and specific stories behind our foods’ origins to instead relying on advertisers’ claims. The woman who raised, plucked, and cooked her own chicken knew its entire life history while today most of us have no idea whether hormones were fed to our poultry. Industrialized eating is undeniably convenient, but it has also created health and environmental problems, including food-borne pathogens, toxic pesticides, and pollution from factory farms. Though the hidden costs of modern meals can be high, Vileisis shows that greater understanding can lead consumers to healthier and more sustainable choices. Revealing how knowledge of our food has been lost and how it might now be regained, Kitchen Literacy promises to make us think differently about what we eat. The Washington Post - Juliet Eilperin Kitchen Literacy chronicles how the growth of the increasingly complex food distribution system—railroads transporting animals and factories producing canned goods—eventually led consumers into a "covenant of ignorance" with supermarket chains, food manufacturers and advertising firms…Vileisis's tone can be preachy at times…Yet her book performs a valuable service in reminding readers that we were not always so clueless when it came to making food choices.
\ Juliet EilperinKitchen Literacy chronicles how the growth of the increasingly complex food distribution system—railroads transporting animals and factories producing canned goods—eventually led consumers into a "covenant of ignorance" with supermarket chains, food manufacturers and advertising firms…Vileisis's tone can be preachy at times…Yet her book performs a valuable service in reminding readers that we were not always so clueless when it came to making food choices.\ —The Washington Post\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalVileisis, author of the award-winning Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America's Wetlands, lights her own torch in the flames of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemmaand directs her attention to the forces that shaped the way Americans act today. Scarcely 200 years ago, a cook had intimate knowledge of every ingredient in his or her kitchen. In the intervening decades, seemingly independent parties-the government, the farm industry, major university health departments, advertisers, and manufacturers-worked to create a consumer who would be brand loyal, and familiar logos replaced generations of knowledge about food, agriculture, and farming. It is not that we have never read this before, but Vileisis gathers it all in one place, weaving a clear, easy-to-read tapestry whose meaning is plain by the end of the book: you are what you eat, so think about what you've been eating. Her extensive notes bring together decades of evidence regarding the unhealthy merger of something we need-food-with something we're told to want-products. This important and eye-opening book uncovers the machinery behind the modern food industry and is an essential purchase for most academic and public libraries.\ —Rosemarie Lewis\ \ \ \ American Scientist"Kitchen Literacy brings home just how essential it is for eaters to cultivate knowledge of their food."\ — Anna Lena Phillips\ \ \ \ \ \ eatingwell.org"Kitchen Literacy provides a cautionary tale of how we got so far off the eaten path in the first place."\ \ \ \ \ \ American Scientist"Kitchen Literacy brings home just how essential it is for eaters to cultivate knowledge of their food."\ \ \
