ARTICLES

Ethnographies of Taste: Cooking, Cuisine, and CulturalLiteracy

Samuel Snyder

Accepted: 13 January 2009 / Published online: 31 January 2009� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Virginia Nazarea, Cultural Memory and Biodiversity, University of Arizona Press, Tucson,

2005 (1998), ISBN 0-8165-2547-1.

Ann Vileisis, Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from andWhy We Need to Get it Back, Shearwater Books, Washington D.C., 2008, ISBN

1-59726-144-0.

Steven Laurence Kaplan, Good Bread is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread,the Way it is Made and The People Who Make It, Duke University Press, Durham, 2006,

ISBN 0-8223-3833-5.

Laurie Thorp, The Pull of the Earth: Participatory Ethnography in the School Garden,

AltaMira Press, Lanham, 2006, ISBN 0-7591-0783-1.

Today, authors—academic and popular have increasingly been surveying a sea of cultural

kitchens to ponder the relationships between food and culture, cultural literacy, sustain-

ability, and the loss of biodiversity, lamenting not only ‘‘how odd it is that we know so

little about what we eat’’ (Vileisis 2008, p. 1), but also connecting that lack of knowledge

to social and ecological problems. In this article, I will review four seemingly disparate

books all connected by a common thread of attention toward food knowledge, cultural

politics, and ecological concern. These works range from an ethnoecological account of

sweet potato production and cultural knowledge in the Philippines, to the effects of canned

and packaged food on American kitchens, to the history of French bread, and end in school

gardens of Jonesville Elementary School. These stories say as much about how we con-

sume food as they do about the politics of its production, not to mention the role of scholars

in the investigation and dissemination of that knowledge.

Each author writes from a unique perspective and background. Nazarea and Thorp are

both ethnographers and social scientists, albeit with completely different styles. The

bookends they provide reveal the importance of getting into community to understand the

place of food and its production for those communities. Vileisis is a journalistic author

engaging food for the first time, but this newness is not evident, as she does her homework

S. Snyder (&)Department of Religion, University of Florida, P.O. Box 117410, 107 Anderson Hall, Gainesville,FL 32611-7410, USAe-mail: ssnyder@religion.ufl.edu

123

J Agric Environ Ethics (2009) 22:273–283DOI 10.1007/s10806-009-9149-6

and gets to the roots of how Americans lost kitchen literacy and why it is important to

bring it back. Finally, Kaplan takes the reader into the history of French bread with the eye

of a Marxist historian, noting the finest grains of bread history in the larger context of

French social history. His work is astounding, if not slightly overwhelming to the unini-

tiated. Nonetheless, these four diverse books provide a wonderful conversational

arrangement for engaging cultural literacy through the taste buds.

In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold mused in his formulation of the ‘‘land ethic’’

that ‘‘a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the

biotic system’’ (Leopold 1949, p. 225). For Leopold and conservation biologists, diversity

is essential for the preservation of wild lands. However, what early conversations about the

preservation of diversity missed, which anthropologists and ethnoecologists are increas-

ingly noting, is the connections between biological diversity and cultural diversity. This

conversation holds as much sway for the agricultural diversity as it does the flora and fauna

of wilderness systems, if you will. It is to the confluences of agriculture, biological

diversity, and cultural knowledge that Virginia Nazarea turns her attention in CulturalMemory and Biodiversity (2005), where she documents the Filipino cultural knowledge of

sweet potatoes. She calls this project ‘‘memory banking,’’ which, in short, is a mode of

recording cultural literacy, by charting and underscoring the cultural dimensions of bio-

diversity. ‘‘It is meant to capture ‘memories,’’’ she argues, ‘‘in a way that runs parallel to

and therefore, complements the preservation and documentation of landraces, wild rela-

tives, and other crop cultivars in germplasm conservation centers around the world’’ (xii).

Along these lines, preserving seeds, as is being done with increasing frequency, is not

enough.

The goal is to document the stories, the cultural memory. It is not enough to maintain

seed banks because gene and seed banks ‘‘run the risk’’ she claims, ‘‘of becoming libraries

without readers’’ (7). While preserving biological diversity is crucial, the diversity is

almost meaningless without the accompanying cultural knowledge. This is, in part, the

larger point of all of these books, to document cultural knowledge, history, and relations to

food, or in other words, ‘‘cultural literacy.’’ Here, Nazarea is documenting ‘‘plant literacy,’’

and in response to calls for ‘‘systematic documentation of traditional farmers’ knowledge’’

(1) In doing so, however, she fully recognizes that this knowledge cannot be extracted from

cultural production and practice. ‘‘Plant literacy’’ is carried in cultural practice and tra-

dition and such literacy is crucial for knowledge of and preservation of biodiversity;

‘‘maintaining biodiversity is the only guarantee of stabilizing the intricate web of life;

indeed, it is the key to ecological integrity’’ (3). Cultural memory is contained, she reveals,

in everything ranging from folk tales to agricultural calendars and rituals, farming meth-

ods, and daily modes of preparation.

In the Philippines, Nazarea maps locally specific varieties of sweet potato along with the

accompanying cultural knowledge. However, she believes that ‘‘the methods outlined here

have proven to be satisfactory and effective in systematically documenting food, crop and

cultural knowledge in a larger and wider scale’’ (15). In order to trace the range and

connectivity between knowledge and crop production, she not only records modes of

production, locations of production, who does the producing, seasons of production, the

life history of crops, method of collecting and harvesting crops, and the means of sorting

and classification, but she also documents local and even familial preferences for certain

varieties of crops.

Amidst her detailed ethnography, Nazarea shares stories and extended quotations from

her informants. These not only reveal such preferences or planting traditions, but illumi-

nate the negative effects of large-scale commercial agricultural on the diverse varieties of

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sweet potato and their accompanying cultural traditions. In part, her project is to reveal not

only existing knowledge, but the loss of knowledge as a result of higher demands for

increased yield crops in the global food market. She argues that local traditional agriculture

is the ‘‘most serious casualty’’ of modernization and commercialization of food production.

Among these casualties, are ‘‘confidence and pride in local farming practices and the

intergenerational transfer of age-old wisdom pertaining to the sustainable use of resources’’

(35). This, of course, also impacts the cultural and social lives of the people involved in the

production of said food products.

In short, local knowledge is losing ground to untested technologies and practices that

have yet to prove their long term ability for sustainability. All of this is in the name of large

scale productivity that is totally abstracted from the lives of the local cultures. In part, this

demise is the result of the ‘‘green revolution,’’ which in the Philippines has altered the face

of agriculture. At one point, agriculture was purely a means for subsistence, but it has in

light of modernization been pulled toward production for sale. While this might seem like

only degrees of difference, Nazarea, reminds readers that the impact and the gulf between

the two is huge.

In systematizing ideas, knowledge, and relations to biodiversity, Nazarea realizes that

the categories of interpretation for sweet potatoes by Filipinos are quite multiple and fuzzy.

However, she argues that this multiplicity is what provides the power of sustainability

within the community and for the crops. The fuzziness of knowledge is captured in idi-

osyncratic traditions and rituals, folklore, and sacred rights. ‘‘People retain,’’ she argues,

‘‘a diversity of beliefs and practices, alternately hedging—following many, even at times

conflicting, prescriptions to spread out the risks—and experimenting in an effort to find a

match among varieties and technologies that work most successfully most of the time.’’

(60). She contrasts this multiplicity and cultural fuzziness with approaches of modern, agri-

business where a one size fits all approach is chosen in the name of productivity and

expediency, which she says in the long run typically fails.

She explains that the main thesis of her book is that ‘‘preserving local knowledge

pertaining to traditional varieties of crops is complementary, and in many respects indis-

pensable, to the maintenance of the genetic diversity of these crops’’ (115). Her point is

well articulated through thorough research in a varied and multilayered cultural world,

which maintains an equally intricate and biodiverse world of plants and produce. While her

research and argument emerge from the sweet potato fields of the Philippines, her argu-

ment is as crucial for understanding cultural knowledge of food, food production, and

cultural literacy in a global context, which is why her argument provides a nice segue into

the next two books, which are written for decidedly more popular audiences. In reading

what might seem significantly different books, I found many levels of conversation

between her work and that of Ann Vileisis, who traces the decline of ‘‘kitchen literacy’’—a

concept comparable to what Nazarea calls the ‘‘memory banking’’ of food crops—in the

North American context.

Take a look around you, Vileisis demands of the reader in Kitchen Literacy: How WeLost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get it Back (2008).

What do we know about our food? If Nazarea, in part, traces how stories and culture are

used to promote diversity and food sustainability, Vileisis tells us how American food or

‘‘kitchen literacy’’ has dwindled to predominantly depend upon prepackaged and prepared

boxed and canned goods, about which we know very little other than what is contained on

the labels. Sure we encounter a wide variety of foods, but we have little to no cultural

attachment to them and they have no means of carrying our culture.

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In the colonial period, Americans knew about what they ate. They experienced it first

hand by growing or harvesting the food themselves, trading with neighbors, or selling it at

the market. Americans were, through food, rooted to the land and to culture. However, as

America grew and morphed from being a nation of rural and subsistence farmers to one of

workers in the city, new means of procuring food began to arise. This shift in procurement

led to, a general ignorance about what we eat: ‘‘over the course of only a few generations,

we went from knowing particular places and stories behind our foods’ origins to instead

knowing very little in an enormous and anonymous food system’’ (5). How did this shift

take place? This is the story she chronicles in Kitchen Literacy. In this well balanced book,

she traces the story of food in the lives of everyday people and everyday places. People

connected to their places and their food, when food traveled no distance from plant to

plate.

In doing so, she begins with the story and diaries of Martha Ballard, ‘‘one of the few

eighteenth century women who left a diary’’ (12). Vileisis closely reads Martha’s diary

noting 27 years of reflections on everything from midwifery to the details of seasonal

weeding, cooking, seed saving, and livestock; all of which gives a glimpse of how families

200 years ago might have lived, cooked, and the knowledge they had about their foods.

Martha’s diary resembles a Farmer’s Almanac, with notes on when to plant after the last

frost, or the need to ‘‘plant corn when oak leaves grow to the size of a squirrel’s ear’’ (19).

But Martha’s story is more than a story about food and food seasons. It is as much about

participating in a ‘‘foodshed’’ that includes human neighbors with whom Martha might

have shared food, swapped ingredients, or supported each other in hard times. Contained in

Martha’s diaries is awareness of nature as much as food, all intermingled, like the tales

Nazarea tells, with various cultural traditions from astrology and religious beliefs to sea-

sonal rituals and community desires.

From Martha’s garden, Vileisis takes us to the growth of the food market. In doing so,

she follows others such as Amelia Simons, an orphan who had ‘‘learned to bake pies and

roast lambs by her own wherewithal’’ (30). Through Amelia, the reader learns about food

the way Amelia learned about them, via experiencing the market in all of its visceral and

tangibly sensed realms from smells, textures, and tales. But by taking us to the market,

Vileisis also documents the growing disconnection between producer and consumer, which

would in the long run result in the decline in ‘‘traditional knowledge of the places and

particulars that provided food’’ (37).

This distancing between production and consumption, between food and culture begins

with the horse and with the growth of canals and railroads expanding as modern trans-

portation improved. Early on, knowing food origins remained essential for guaranteeing

freshness, quality, and taste. However, as America’s affluent grew, they began to relegate

the kitchen work to hired help, leaving the rising class of ‘‘ladies’’ to know little about the

most domestic of ventures: food.

Vileisis rightly demonstrates that ‘‘knowing food isn’t solely the means to a meal; it

provides a fundamental means for making sense of our place in the world’’ (52). However,

in highlighting how food can help us make sense of our place in the world, she also details

the downsides to losing that connection, an argument made by other increasingly food

writers such as Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, or Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini.

Tracing an alienation from our food and the places of its production, she notes the rise

of canned food out of world wars to its celebration, as one Del-Monte canned food

advertisement proclaimed, as ‘‘a magic container that annihilates distance and merges all

seasons into one long fruitful summer’’ (155). Originally, canning was a means of food and

self-preservation, but also a cultural event where neighbors would commune and contribute

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to the processes of preserving everything from fruits to sauces. Previously, canned

(or jarred) foods carried with them the ‘‘traditional sensibilities’’ of their eaters (75).

Today, cans are pre-fabricated and entirely disconnected from both culture and nature.

But accepting the food hidden behind tin cans and paper labels was not an immediate or

easy process for Americans. These were foods that were not only separated from nature,

but separated from the consumer in everyway possible. Early on, prior to strict standards,

opening a can of food was risky business as cans could ferment causing explosions, other

forms of fermentation, such as botulism, were deadly and impossible to detect. And sur-

prises were often contained within the cans, from sawdust filler to chicken heads, leading

food writer to call them ‘‘manufactured mysteries’’ (79). However, it would not take long

for the canning process to improve and the ignorance of food, necessary for accepting the

cans, to be cultivated by the media, the emerging supermarket industry, and even home-

economics classes—where ignorance was a virtue.

Initially, Vileisis demonstrates, women had to be coaxed out of the homemaking tra-

dition to try out the new canned and boxed goods purchased in the midst of new

supermarkets such as the Piggly Wiggly. In this new world of box lined shopping shelves,

women did not rely on neighborly knowledge or seasons of trial and error in the garden, but

were ‘‘armed with knowledge’’ gained from advertisements and magazine articles (163).

Shoppers in this new world were as likely to purchase foods based on nutritional quality or

traditional meals as they were based on advertising and culinary curiosity. The supermarket

world caused drastic shifts in society, Vileisis explains, by redefining women’s role in

society to which ‘‘modern women’s specialty was to be shopping’’ (163). The goal was

purchasing while trusting in the knowledge of advertisers and manufacturers. This con-

sumptive mentality, then, encouraged a ‘‘covenant of ignorance.’’ In this superficial

supermarket of knowledge, consumers imagined their bagged bread came from waving

grain fields, when in reality both consumer and product were alienated from those fields.

Both ignorance and alienation have had costs ranging from arsenate and DDT poisoned

fruit to mad-cow disease in contemporary cattle productions.

But this covenant of ignorance has come with a price and many food writers, envi-

ronmental ethicists, and those concerned with the relations between our food choices and

ecological sustainability have weighed in on the discussion. Where some, such as Michael

Pollan more effectively detail the effects of our choices on food and community sustain-

ability, Vileisis engages a fascinating history of the ways in which the American (and by

extension to the world) system has become dominated by boxed, canned, and global foods

on the shelves of supermarkets. In the end, she briefly highlights countertrends emerging in

American culinary and food, shopping culture, which range from shopping at local farmers

markets to growing one’s own food all in an effort to reclaim knowledge, connection, and

various communities of food in the name of cultural and culinary sustainability. I will

return to her final points in a moment, as they make for an interesting conversation with

Laurie Thorp’s The Pull of the Earth. However, before looking at these culinary count-

ertrends, the work of Vileisis as a history of food and culture demands comparison with

Steven Kaplan’s Good Bread is Back: A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Wayit is Made, and the People Who Make it (2006).

If Vileisis laments the alienation of Americans from their kitchens, Kaplan shows that in

France, ‘‘Life and bread were,’’ and continue in many ways to be, ‘‘synonymous’’ (Kaplan,

7). Even the French, he laments, have lost vital connections to their bread and its history.

However, like Vileisis, he aims to show how those connections are being stretched back

together through a French bread revolution. This is an in-depth cultural history of bread.

He gives the history of French bread while convincing the reader that bread is indeed a

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‘‘holy relic’’ that binds life and society. He shows how bread is not only dependant upon

the whims of society, but society in all its flows—social, economic, political, and even

religious—is shaped by the state of bread.

In the ‘‘old regime’’

Social life depended on cereals in myriad ways. Grain dominated the economy: in

addition to its determining role in the agricultural sector, it influenced the devel-

opment of commerce and industry, directly and indirectly; it regulated employment

and constituted a major source of revenue for the state, the church, the nobility, and a

large fraction of the third estate (3).

In this work, Kaplan follows the ups and downs of society as they correspond to or

shape the rises and falls of bread quality, professional and artisanal baking, or consumer

desires. He demonstrates how ‘‘bread is located at the crossroads between the material and

the symbolic, between economics and culture’’ (5). Bread, like religion, provides the social

glue that ‘‘crystallized collective identity’’ by forging ‘‘complex links between the sacred

and the profane, hope and anguish, whole and part, mother and child, prince and subject,

producer and consumer, seller and buyer, justice and injustice’’ (6). In other words, bread is

found in the history of French culture, and French culture is found in the history of bread.

In order to trace this complex history of French bread, Kaplan, like Vileisis, takes the

reader back in time to the bakeries of the early 1700s. This time, the reader is not taken to

Martha’s garden, but to the kitchens of bakers, Mistress Lapareille or Masters Mareax and

Barre. However, despite the picturesque garden and journals of Martha, the picture Kaplan

paints is one of ‘‘dark dungeons’’ long hours, and sleepless hours to match the ‘‘hellish rhythm

of a society that lived on bread and that could not get along without it for a moment’’ (14). This

early story truly shows how history shapes food and how food shapes history.

Bakeries were dark and humid, and flour laden air hung thickly under the low ceilings

and cramped work spaces. This was a time when the tools of modernity had yet to impact

the life and processes of bread in society. Despite vast gulfs in technology from freezers to

mixers or yeasts and delayed fermentation, Kaplan demonstrates that some tools, such as

paddles, pastry knives, and brushes, are commonly held today. More importantly, however,

he shows how definitional ideals and guidelines for bread, so common today, were birthed

in these dank baking back rooms.

Before, diving into the history of French bread, Kaplan kneads out a few definitional

parameters for quality bread, which he says was largely left to the specialists, scientists,

and even the government. Throughout this work, he details the controversies over defining

and understanding bread quality, the effects of politics on everything from access to grains

and yeast or the choices of consumers to prefer wheat bread, white bread, or even whiter

bread. At the heart of this history of quality and consumption, he reveals how fermentation

is the key because it literally and figuratively demonstrates how ‘‘bread is a living thing’’

(17). To show this, Kaplan takes the reader through the basics of fermentation. This not

only serves to give the reader a sense of what goes into bread making, but provides the

dough for detailing a history of debates over proper ways to make, ferment, and produce

bread; particularly in light of advances in fermentation techniques from sourdough and

direct fermentation to deferred fermentation thanks to the revolutionary advances in

refrigeration technology. While such advances in technology were welcomed by some as

means for escaping the painful hours and conditions of baking, they were seen by some as

sacrilege to traditional practices.

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But processes of baking and the advances in yeasts, refrigeration or other technologies

only provide one part of an intricate story of bread. In part, the rise and fall of French

bread, Kaplan explains, has to do with debates over bread quality. Markers of bread quality

have been debated, but many have noted that standards should include ‘‘nutritional qual-

ities,’’ which are often decided and debated by the medical field; ‘‘health-related qualities,’’

which are tethered to the first, and awfully amorphous; ‘‘economic qualities,’’ in terms of

price and utility of the product and in relation to the means, desires, and abilities of the

buyers. Fourth, he highlights the qualities contingent to the sensory organs—from taste,

touch, feel, and scent. While these are highly subjective, Kaplan himself attempts to

develop a rubric for defining quality bread. However, characterizing bread is only half of

his goal; his outline of standards serves to highlight the contentious debates over quality

throughout history. Debating quality, like debating processes of production, highlights

‘‘chronic tensions between past and future, tradition and innovation, social progress and

artisanal nostalgia, hands and machines, slowness and speed, quality and productivity,

fidelity and apostasy’’ (62). In these tensions, he explains, resides a social history of bread.

What is interesting about bread is its move from sacred staple of society. In the food

shortages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, bread provided the primary source of

calories for society. By the twentieth century, society was not bound by bread, but bread

became a staple of pleasure. Kaplan clearly reads this history with the eye of a Marxist

historian, where the politics and economics of bread are intimately baked in ideologies of

those in power to regulate everything from consumer choices to means of production or

work hours and access to materials. Part of this history has as much to do with the effects

of technology on the potential alienation of the baker from his or her baked goods and the

ensuing distaste consumers had for a bread that was perceived to decline in quality. Bread,

then, fell into crisis, while consumers did not depend upon bread and the medical estab-

lishment debated the nutritional merits of bread. Bread quality-control commissions tried

to maintain the positive and necessary image of bread in the hearts and mouths of con-

sumers, while bakers struggled with increasing modernization, mechanization, and the

demands of capitalism.

Negotiating the double-bind of modernization in its freeing capacities, yet alienating

potentialities, bakers and consumers both have sought, particularly in recent times, to

return to ‘‘old ways’’ or bread in the ‘‘French tradition.’’ If bread is not a caloric necessity,

bakers, millers, and consumers have all in their own ways begun to fetishize artisanal bread

as culturally necessary. Where Kaplan tells the cultural story of bread, the return to bread

in the ways of old is as much as a story of cultural invention as really returning to some

golden age of bread. The story is as much myth or ‘‘fairy-tale’’ where the old ways are

merely ‘‘doctrine of fetish’’ (95). But if bread declined in favor over the years, then

these ties to tradition have been essential for bakers and the stability of their profession,

where they have been utterly dependent upon maintaining per capita consumption of bread.

An interesting component of this history is the debate over white bread or whiter bread

as both symbols of health and wealth or questions as nutritionally defunct. For some time,

white bread ‘‘commanded the loyalty of the vast majority of consumers (and continues to

have great appeal even today)’’ (305). The appeal of white bread owes much to an image of

dark, grainy breads as symbolic and reminiscent of darker times in history, where bread

quality and taste were not privileged elements in the struggle to survive. White bread, on

the other hand, offered a symbolic and tangible taste of quality, cleanliness, and superi-

ority, at least until the medical establishment criticized white bread in the early 1900s and

again in the 1960s. It was seen as nutritionally vacuous or totally absent in taste and

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texture. The story of white bread says as much about the role of government, through the

medical establishment, in shaping the quality of bread in France.

Kaplan deftly shows not only the government regulation of bread, but the union

response to the government by both makers and millers concerned with successfully selling

their product. The unions, like the government, were as concerned as anyone about the

symbolic image or bread—white or whole grain—in the mind of the public; their liveli-

hoods depended on such symbolisms. This is, in part, what makes the story of French bread

so intricate and complex. Kaplan takes the reader into these details in ways this review can

hardly point towards. His history is one dependent upon scouring every element of French

culture from religion to market capitalism. He also, like a good ethnographer, spends time

in the bakeries of the masters of today. He truly becomes an apprentice of French bread to

tell this story. One gets the idea while reading Good Bread is Back, that Kaplan might

know more about this history than many bakers could honestly admit. Here Kaplan takes

cultural literacy into the realm of cultural expertise.

Throughout this work, Kaplan powerfully demonstrates the symbolic charge of bread as

it is ‘‘deeply bound up with the basic values of sociability and well-being, with sacred and

secular in communion’’ (304). If Nazarea details the necessity of cultural memory for the

preservation of biodiversity and Vileisis provides a broad view of kitchen literacy, then

Kaplan takes us into the cultural history of bread—a seemingly staple and innocuous

substance so ingrained with cultural, economic, and political history. What is interesting

about this book in comparison to the others in this review is that while Nazarea, Vileisis,

and Thorp all treat connections between food and ecological sustainability, environmental

sustainability is not present in this story of bread. What is present, however, is the sus-

tainability of culture, food ways, and artisanal heritage. And, as Vileisis rightly shows,

attention to these stories of artisanal craft, local culture, and kitchen literacy are always, if

only implicitly, connected to ecological and social sustainability.

In the midst of these stories, however, the question remains how to translate this

knowledge into some form of action that can work toward the preservation of society,

ecology, and economy. The literature on the relationships between knowledge and action

in the context of sustainability is robust and growing daily. However, Thorp provides an

interesting perspective through the eyes of youth education and school gardens. Kaplan’s

history details how bread is intimately an issue of cultural nourishment as much as social

justice and politics. Thorp, similarly in her ethnographic account of school gardens,

explores how food knowledge and engagements with nature can offer avenues to a better

life in both mind and health for some children in an underprivileged elementary school of

Jonesville, Michigan where literally bodily nourishment is a premium not often enjoyed.

What is fascinating about the work of Thorp is that she shows the impact of the loss of

cultural literacy when it comes to food, nature, and community. If these other texts detail

histories of this literacy, loss of literacy, and the importance of the literacy, Thorp, like

Nazarea, uses detailed and ‘‘engaged’’ ethnography to take the reader into the community

to assess the needs of children and the creativity of teachers. She uses food as the key to

this endeavor. Her ethnography speaks of food. ‘‘Why, in a country of so much plenty,’’

Thorp’s editors wonder in the preface,

…children should still go to school hungry, without the means to stroll the seasonal

riches so many of us find in local farmers’ markets each weekend, or even to get to

upscale grocery stores, and so who live on second-rate food—full of fat, salt, and

preservatives—because that is what available, and there is not even a lot of that

(Lincoln and Denzin, x).

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In this work, Thorp demonstrates that cultural and food literacy are both essential for

community literacy, for building and engaging community. Engagement is central for

Thorp’s project, as she works with and within the community she is studying. If Kaplan

traces the sacred nature of sustenance, then Thorp demonstrates how the sacred can be

produced amidst profane realms of capitalism and market consumption. She shows us how

food can create the sacred, relate to the sacred, and connect children and adults alike to the

places and communities where they live. Here food provides ‘‘resistance to the homoge-

nization of our land, our food, and our system of education’’ (2). These homogenizing

forces are the same ones resisted in the cultural memory banks of Philippines and their

varieties of sweet potatoes, as documented by Nazarea.

Just as Kaplan connects and evaluates bread via the senses, Thorp uses the senses of

engagement to build connections to move beyond the sometimes sterile realms of academic

discourse into tangible projects of gardening community. Her approach to ‘‘engaged eth-

nography’’ is where this book really shines. Nazarea, also an ethnographer, seems more

content to document, using that documentation as essential fodder for the preservation of

cultural and biological diversity. However, Thorp refuses to simply document, but works

with educators and students in the hopes of creating new avenues for the creation and

sustenance of diversity in food and family. Nazarea takes the reader to the gardens of

Bukidnon, Philippines, Vileisis works out of Martha’s garden, and Thorp works in the

schoolyard garden of Jonesville Elementary School.

Before taking us to the garden, however, Thorp sets the stage by taking us to the school

and its problems, such as noting that 58% of the Jonesville Elementary School are on

federal free or reduced lunch programs. The children face poverty at home. They also face

poverty in their diet. While they are fed, their diets are hardly sustaining. However, she

explains that the children are blessed with deep and meaningful educators, whose class-

rooms are ‘‘rich with literature, artwork, plants, animals, and posters of positive

reinforcement’’ (12). These are teachers willing to push and test the system, as much as the

system will allow. The garden is one space for testing that system, which seems to con-

strain education more than it empowers it. The garden empowers students as much as

teachers, leading them ‘‘to engage in self-reflective practice under the heavy hand of

routine standardized assessment’’ (15).

Where Vileisis begins with diary accounts from Martha and other turn of the century

gardeners, Thorp’s book is a diary, complete with field notes that reveal the curiosity of

children expressed amidst the making of salsa from vegetables from the garden; vegetables

they grew. The revelations from her field notes allow the reader to peer into her mind,

thoughts, and actions, to experience (at least in small doses) the potential power this garden

held for the kids of Jonesville School. These snippets also allow the voices of the children

and the garden to speak through her pages.

To follow the flows of nature, of gardens, of harvest times, is a mode of operation that

Veleisis laments we have drifted away from in our mechanized, modernized world of

grocery stores and boxed goods. According to Thorp, at the Jonesville School, returning to

the flows of nature is equally important for learning how to garden, as it is rethinking the

processes of ethnography and education. Her point is a valuable one and is echoed in the

works for more notable philosophers and ethicists of the environment such as Anthony

Weston or David Orr. After all, David Orr reminds his readers that ‘‘All education is

environmental education,’’ whether we realize it or not (Orr 1992, p. 90). It can either put

us in touch with nature or separate us from nature, either way it teaches us about how we

should (or shouldn’t) relate to the natural world. It seems after surveying his work; he

would applaud the dual purpose of Thorp’s work: (1) to use school gardens to encourage

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interactive and innovative forms of learning; and (2) to rethink scholarship and ethnog-

raphy as engaged and hands-on as the school garden.

In fostering an innovative approach to education, Thorp describes the garden as a place

for connection, and in doing so describes the garden as a religious sanctuary filled with

rituals of gardening community. Here she echoes the work of American pragmatists such

as John Dewey, who, along with Liberty Hyde Bailey, sought to rethink education through

the garden, not as a means for teaching about food, but for fostering democracy. ‘‘Released

from the culture of separation and individual that is transmitted in schooling,’’ Thorp notes,

‘‘the Jonesville students reveled in the freedom to work together for the common good’’

(35).1 Everything in the garden, from the preparation, to the planting, to the weeding,

harvesting, and even cooking becomes a communal ritual that can tie, bind, and overcome

those detrimental aspects lamented by all of these authors reviewed here: individualism,

capitalism, homogenization of crops, and fast food. Fast food, she laments, ‘‘is destroying

the fabric of our society’’ (36). But, ‘‘our food rituals have the ability to unite us across

time, politics, generations, gender, social class, and culture’’ (37). Her point is particularly

poignant when viewed in the handwriting of the Jonesville students who, until this garden,

knew no other way of life than fast, disconnected food.2

Central to the rituals of connection, Thorp ponders the power of wonder. As she writes,

‘‘If there is any hope for reinvigorating our system of science education, I believe it will be

found not by increased teacher accountability, not with more rigorous scientific curricula,

but rather through our sense of wonder’’ (47). Wonder emerges in the midst of experiential

learning and, she believes, is a catalyst for all sorts of change. The powerful part of Thorp’s

work, is again, that she allows the voices of other teachers, educators, or the young curious

students to shine forth. Her chapter ‘‘How our garden grows,’’ contains none of Thorp and

only excerpts from the students at Jonesville. Here, they describe what the garden looks

like, ‘‘it’s nature and wonderful. It has so many sounds and tastes’’ (58). One student

exclaims that her ‘‘heart explodes like a volcano’’ because she gets to work in the garden

(59). Others describe the tools, the work of watering, or draw pictures depicting the ways

the garden was useful in science class for understanding the water-cycle. After the chil-

dren, Thorp invites Kristen Small, a teacher at Jonesville Elementary, to write a chapter. In

this chapter, Kristen reflects on goals of using the garden as a tool for fulfilling require-

ments of the state science curriculum. The garden encourages changes in the curriculum

while fostering growth in her teaching and the children’s learning styles. She reflects on

struggles with state education requirements as though they were the same monocrops that

threaten the Philippino sweet potato diversity described by Nazarea. Thorp’s assistant,

Daniel Brooks, also gets a turn to reveal, in journalistic style, on his own thoughts

throughout the season of school and garden. He notes his attachments to the children as

much as his occasional annoyances, throughout it all, however you see him grow and

change along with the garden in the Jonesville School.

All in all, Thorpe’s story is a success. A success in ethnography, albeit some ethnog-

raphers might squirm at her unconventional approach of ‘‘engaged ethnography’’ where her

subjects’ voices really do appear on the page. If Nazarea’s work on biodiversity and

cultural memory is ethnography in the traditional sense, with formal interviews, surveys,

and flow charts, Thorp breaks all boundaries in the same way she hopes the garden will

1 For an astute review of the work of John Dewey and Liberty Hyde Bailey in the realm of educationreform, school gardens, and the development of democracy see Ben A. Minteer (2006).2 Thorp includes photocopies of notes written by students expressing their joy for the plants, seasons, andeven Laurie Thorp.

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stifle the bounds of standardized school curriculum. Her work is everything about food and

nothing about food, but most importantly reveals, as Valises laments, how growing food

has once and can once again be a catalyst for understanding and knowing about place,

people, and produce. She is, in a sense, using the garden to build new avenues for ‘‘cultural

memory,’’ in places and cultural spaces that seem more rootless than rooted.

Each of these books seems on the outset completely unconnected except by the pictures

of food on the covers. However, as I read them in the order presented here, they provided

an interesting picture of how food literacy is so important to understanding not only our

food, but our cultures. Understanding culture, then, demands knowing about ourselves and

all of our culture’s intricate, messy, cultural, political, yet tasty, elements. After all, Kaplan

reminds us through bread, that bread sums up the human experience. Building on Kaplan, I

would say that these works reveal how food of all sorts, from gardens to kitchens, from

mills to bakeries, encapsulate what it means to be human in this world. On that shelf, they

share a common message: Food literacy is cultural literacy, both, in turn, are derivative

from and producers of variety in myriad forms.

References

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the people who make it. Durham: Duke University Press.Leopold, A. (1949). A sand county Almanac and sketches from here and there. New York: Oxford

University Press.Minteer, B. A. (2006). The landscape of reform: Civic pragmatism and environmental thought in America.

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Rizzoli.Pollan, M. (2007). The omnivores dilemma: A natural history of four foods. New York: Penguin Books.Pollan, M. (2008). In defense of food: An eater’s manifesto. New York: Penguin Books.Salatin, J. (2007). Everything I want to do is illegal: War stories from the local food front. Swoope: Polyface

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