Why study food? (Kitchen Literacy)

Anyone who's curious what I'm up to, locked away in my office, giving myself carpal tunnel this summer, have a look. I'm finally able to get my ideas more organized and write my dissertation research proposal (in the works). Here's one of my favorite authors ideas, that parallel some of my core background ideas for my research

Excerpts from Kitchen Literacy by Ann Vileisis

Where we are right now

When we consider “connecting with nature,” we are more inclined to imagine gazing at a spectacular waterfall than to consider rows of crops on a farm, let alone the frozen-foods aisle. In one of those great modern ironies, food is rarely regarded as “natural” unless it has been so labeled.

Yet each time we eat a turkey sandwich or a bowl of cereal, we are dependent on land and water - we are fixed in food chains that link us to places that are surely embedded in ecological systems. Author Michael Pollan has recently described eating as “our most profound engagement with the natural world.” Indeed, through food, we are irrevocably attached to the natural environment. The odd thing is that, by habit, we rarely realize this, and collectively, our lack of awareness has given us a distorted view of our place as humans within the larger world. With the supermarket nearby, we live with a detached assurance that our stomachs will always be full, even as industrial farms severely degrade soils, consumer enormous amounts of fossil fuels, pollute waters with excess nitrogen and toxins, and inadvertently spur pests and microbes to alarming potencies.

How we got here

Ostensibly, city shoppers never actually chose to know less about where foods came from and how they were raised, but the importance of knowing stories about food’s origins had been overshadowed by other, more pressing matters a American urbanized industrialized and grew. In the face of urban squalor and increased understanding of germs at the turn of the century, shoppers had chosen hygienic and prepackaged foods. As the supply of servants shrank, homemakers more openly considered laborsaving methods, products, and appliances that eliminated unseemly work. In the wake of World War I induced scarcity, city dwellers yearning for the security promises by a modern food system.

Where we came from

Cooks and eaters had long chosen foods based on sight, smell, taste, and tough – senses that could discern a full spectrum of qualities from ripeness to rot and all sorts of distinctions in between. Now a panoply of made-foods confounded those senses. What had always been a direct, natural, sensuous relationship between eaters and food seemed to be at stake.

Where we are going? My research! How does the experience of being an urban gardener reconnect people with their food and with nature in a way that leads to sustainable consumption?