| Kitchen Literacy begins in 1790 with a woman named Martha. Martha Ballard, a midwife married to a miller, kept a kitchen garden and knew where every morsel of her food came from. To her, planning a meal began months if not years in advance with seed saving, then determining how much of any particular vegetable she would need in the next year, and how much land and how many plants were required to supply it. She did the same with poultry, no doubt. In her day, women were responsible for kitchen gardens and slaughtering poultry, whereas men did heavier labor and butchered larger animals. Sometimes her family traded milling or midwife services in exchange for a lamb or another animal or food. Still, while they didn't produce absolutely everything themselves, they certainly knew where it came from. During this period, intimate knowledge about food was considered mundane and even too widely understood to write down. These includes things like when during the year butter is most yellow, or how you can tell the age of a slaughtered animal. But in that respect, Martha Ballard lived at the end of an era.
The story then goes to 1796 and the publication of Amelia Simmons' cookbook, American Cookery. Vileisis traces many years of advice to shoppers and cooks, beginning with this cookbook, and tracks the changing advice along the way. Just like Martha considered killing and cooking a chicken or picking and cooking a vegetable all part of the same action, Simmons' cookbook sometimes began in the garden, instructing cooks how and when to pick fruits and vegetables for her recipes. Cooking, in her day, meant removing the bugs from your food after you bring it in from the garden. And check this out:
Her recipe for a fine Syllabub from the Cow - a frothy, sweet-cream dessert topping - directed the cook to "sweeten a quart of cyder with double refined sugar, grate nutmeg into it," and then carry the bowl right to the underside of a cow's warm body and "milk your cow into your liquor."
Vileisis adds:
As we know from Martha's diary, a rural or small-town housewife would have known her cow's age, its disposition, and how often it had given birth. Milking and caring for the animal on a daily basis, she would have known what the cow ate and how that changed the consistency, flavor, and color of its milk through the seasons. - p. 31
In the first years as cities developed and outgrew their local food sources, urban cooks (who often grew up on farms) still expected to know this kind of intimate knowledge about the food they purchased at city markets. Also, rural experts and writers advised city market goers to know this sort of information. Now the details that were too common knowledge to write down were suddenly necessary to record as advice for urban shoppers. Vileisis says:
When it came to choosing meats, even if a housewife in town was no longer involved in raising animals or butchering, she still would want to know about the life of the animals that she intended to cook, serve, and eat - particularly their sex, age, diet, and work history. The transcriber [of Amelia Simmons' cookbook] advised that females of all species of animals, birds, and fishes gave meat more tender and flavorful than the males - an observation that reflects that natural tendency of female animals to accumulate body fat. The flesh of oxen, which were used for farmwork, was less tender and juicy than that of cattle, and the best mutton was from grass-fed animals. Age was especially important in the case of birds and could be easily ascertained by bill or leg color. The transcriber offered specific guidelines about the leg and bill colors of old and young pigeons, plovers, blackbirds, geese, thrashers, and larks, but as a general rule of thumb advised that "speckled rough legs denote age, while smooth legs and combs prove them young." - p. 35
The "transciber" mentioned here was someone who worked for her publisher, who felt it necessary to add these advice tidbits to the cookbook. Amelia herself was upset by this, as she felt that such obvious advice insulted the "good sense" fo her readers. But it wasn't long before such advice was considered absolutely necessary and not an insult to urban shoppers at all. Back in these days, shoppers used sight, smell, and even touch to determine all manner of details about their food. Often shoppers needed to figure out whether the seller was trying to make food seem fresher than it actually was. The trend of such advice continued through much of the 1800's.
Around the 1830's, a major shift occurred that no doubt injured our nation's knowledge of its food in a way that persists today. With urban women no longer expected to keep up kitchen gardens are Martha Ballard did, the idea of women's role in the home changed.
The new urban domestic vision construed men venturing into the competitive workplace to earn enough money to support the family while wives nurtured children and created a refined and peaceful haven at home.
The new idealized vision of home demanded a higher standard of housekeeping in middle- and upper-class households, with greater elaboration of meals, dress, and cleanliness. The higher standard meat that - even without the work of making soap, feeding fowl, and planting potatoes - the work of child care, laundry, cooking, and cleaning was still far more than one woman could handle. - p. 43-44
This is the shift that ultimately gave women what Betty Friedan called "the problem that has no name." Women's lib or not, it continues today (perhaps in a more gender neutral way). In our house, we often reflect that it's easy to have a clean kitchen if you never cook. (Our kitchen usually looks like a disaster, even though it gets cleaned from top to bottom about every other day. It's worth it. We eat real food.)
But back in the 1800's, women dealt with this new, unrealistic role in the home by hiring servants. In the middle of the century, an influx of poor immigrants and then newly freed slaves provided cheap labor that allowed a large percentage of households to hire servants to cook, clean, and even shop for foods at the market. This period of cheap labor did not last long, but it lasted long enough to have two important effects. First, a generation of girls grew up with servants doing food shopping and cooking instead of their mothers, and those girls did not inherit the body of knowledge about their food that Amelia Simmons' considered too obvious to even record. Second, food production and food prep were seen as low-class and dirty activities. Refined and upper class people were above them. This attitude also persists today as many view a return to farming by more people as turning back the clock of progress. It's both unfortunate and untrue, as farmers are some of the most highly educated and highly skilled people in our society, and modern farming is every bit as compatible with progress and 21st century life as chemical engineering or practicing medicine.
During the 1800's, increased mobility and decreased travel and shipping costs provided by advancements like the Erie Canal and the Transcontinental Railroad allowed many eaters to enjoy foods from far away for the first time. (No doubt the idea of bringing in foods out of season or foods that are unable to grow in your climate was not new, but the ability to do it for relatively cheap was quite new.) In addition to making eaters less connected to the specific places of their foods origin, this also had the effect of breaking the link between environmental conservation and our very ability to eat. If your only food source is local and you pollute your environment or hunt an animal to extinction, you've got a problem. But with cheap, national transportation, eaters could eat an animal to extinction without ever knowing it. Likewise, if the place they used to fish was polluted by industrial chemicals, they could get fresh fish from somewhere else that was not yet polluted. No big deal. Certainly a lot of public outrage over both pollution and overfishing and overhunting was avoided by the increased ignorance of the public about their foods' sources and the finite amounts of each species in nature. This also continues today, particularly among fish. Despite a waking up of the public (or at least a certain segment of them), we continue to eat some species to the brink of extinction, while polluting and ruining habitat enough to destroy others. This change marked a break in our understanding that food is perhaps our greatest link to the natural world. Also, as wild foods were commercially hunted until they were no longer abundant enough to sell on a mass scale, we ceased to think of most of the wild environment as a food source and began to assume that only animals and plants raised for consumption are food.
Vileisis cites another trend during the 1800's and even the 1900's that worked to reduce our knowledge of our food. Often a rather awkward and imperfect transitional technology separated our traditional way of sourcing food and the more advanced, industrialized way we perfected later. Due to the lapse in time between the old way, the transitional way, and the new way, eaters were unable to compare the old and new ways because a full generation had passed in between them.
For example, the old way to get beef was to slaughter your own cow or buy from a butcher who slaughtered a locally-raised cow. As New York outgrew its local cattle supply and railroads came into being, they began shipping in live cattle from as far away as Texas. The journey was traumatic for the cattle and those who survived it arrived in bad shape. Obviously, those who expected good quality beef produced locally would not touch the meat of the bruised and stressed animals arriving from other states, but those with less money bought it because they were happy to have meat at all.
Ultimately, refrigerated railcars were developed, which made sense in a number of ways. A little over half of each cow is edible, so it made little economic sense to ship entire cows in order to sell just over half of them. It was better to slaughter the cows in Chicago and ship only the meat you could sell. Likewise, by slaughtering in Chicago, animals could be slaughtered in good condition, before they made the harrowing journey East. Despite MUCH initial resistance to eating animals killed in Chicago, ultimately people became accustomed to it. Enough time had gone by that the Chicago-dressed beef was compared to bruised and battered animals arriving in railcars, not to locally-raised and slaughtered beef.
With the introduction of so much prepared foods, food safety regulation became an issue for the first time. If Martha Ballard produced unsafe food in her own kitchen, it would have been a tragedy, but not a crime. However, makers of canned foods in the late 1800's would put all manner of adulterants in their foods (even sawdust) and then sell them. Dr. Harvey Wiley led the FDA's predecessor (the Bureau of Chemistry) in crusading for food safety. This culminated in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Obviously the passage of the law coincided with the publication of The Jungle. While The Jungle deserves some credit for the Pure Food and Drug Act, as it turns out, the story is a little more complex than that. Wiley had campaigned for such a law for a long time. But read this:
Eventually, business support for the legislation gained ground as some of the largest, most reputable manufacturers began to recognize how a pure food law could work to their advantage. The expanding scope of markets meant that it was becoming a nuisance for national-scale businesses to deal with different states' particular labeling requirements and ingredient prohibitions. A federal law with a single set of regulations would make it not only easier for large firms to sell products nationally but also more difficult for small factories serving local and regional markets to compete. In addition, some business leaders recognized that widespread adulteration made shoppers skeptical of all of the cans and bottles on grocers' shelves. Only by building shippers' trust could big food firms stamp out suspicion and tap the larger market s they needed to absorb their ever growing, high-volume output. - p. 129
Wow. See any parallels to today? And as it happened, the 1906 law DID work to large corporations' advantage. Shoppers who were skeptical of the safety of prepared foods prior to the Pure Food and Drug Act now took comfort in the knowledge that the government was regulating the safety of their food.
During this time, additives came under government scrutiny, with some using nature as the ultimate standard of what was okay to eat or not eat, and others claiming that science showed additives were just fine. Sometimes controversy arose as a chemical additive added to some foods showed up naturally in others (like sodium benzoate, a preservative, that happens to occur naturally in cranberries). So is that chemical natural or not? Is it okay as an additive or not?
Another fascinating development was the Home Economics movement, around the turn of the 20th century. Scientists had discovered calories, carbs, protein, and fats (but not vitamins) and the first Home Economists advocated a new, scientific way for women to feed their families. At first they said to forget the traditional wisdom your mother taught you and instead use nutrition tables and scientific ways to kill germs to inform your cooking. But as processed foods became more common and scientific food knowledge became more complex, ultimately, they told women to learn which brands they preferred and then trust industry to make the right decisions for them. After all, how can an individual housewife compete with the scientists at food companies in knowing the best way to produce each type of food? (Brands were a new development around this time, by the way. So was food marketing, which arose alongside food branding.) No doubt these attitudes contribute to modern confusion about how to eat. Each of us feels the need to be a scientist in order to choose our foods, but few of us have full information about our foods. Those who make our foods still want us to sit back and trust them, the experts, to know what is best.
Unfortunately, these changes came about BEFORE some of the more dangerous developments in food. It might have made sense for a woman of the early 1900's to trust a brand's quality. Once the proliferation of food additives and pesticides multiplied as the century wore on, this was less and less true. In the 1930's, lead arsenate contamination in fruits and vegetables became problematic. After World War II, DDT and other "safer" chemicals replaced lead arsenate.
In 1938, Congress passed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, requiring drug manufacturers ensure their drugs were not toxic before selling them. However, no such requirement was included for pesticides or for food additives until later (1954 for pesticides, and 1958 for food additives). The passage of the food additive law established a list of "GRAS" additives - Generally Recognized as Safe - which grandfathered in a large number of additives already on the market, many of which had not been tested.
On the advertising front, marketers urged women to be smart and save time by buying convenient, processed foods. However, women were not all immediately convinced. Some women enjoyed cooking, and there was a stigma attached to women who did not cook. After all, the act of cooking was equivalent to nurturing one's family. Marketers responded by encouraging women to use canned and pre-made foods creatively by adding croutons to a canned soup, or combining multiple pre-made items to make a meal. And of course, there's the famous example of cake mixes which sold poorly until marketers realized that women wanted to feel like they were cooking but they also wanted the convenience of a mix. So the cake mixes were changed to require women to add an egg. With that change, cake mix sales took off.
The end of the book tells the part of the story I know already. With Silent Spring and Diet for a Small Planet, eaters began to question the experts and a backlash began. The counterculture backlash reached the mainstream, and nowadays it's not just the hippies that want natural, unadulterated, healthy foods. But pesticide, animal drug, and biotech companies as well as food manufacturers have fought hard to convince us that a) there's nothing wrong with their products and b) this food or that one is "natural" or "healthy." (It's a strange paradox for the same company to insist that there's nothing wrong with antibiotics and hormones to one market segment while simultaneously selling an "all-natural" antibiotic- and hormone-free product to another market segment, but that's common today. The corporation would say that it's because their customers want choice.)
Interestingly, the book quotes Earl Butz (Nixon's Ag Secretary) as saying, "Before we go back to organic agriculture in this country, somebody must decide which 50 million Americans we are going to let starve." This quip was as false then as it is now, and yet the attitude persists that we cannot feed the world on organic food (despite being disproved by scientific studies). Vileisis also looks into the birth of the USDA organic standards and says:
Nonetheless, small-scale farmers remained critical because the new standards still permitted large farms that used many industrial methods to attach the "organic" label to their products. Because the new standard focused primarily on what materials were allowed or disallowed, it tended to advance a watered-down approach to organic farming that emphasized substitution of less harmful inputs. For example, it was possible to apply Chilean nitrate - a fertilizer mined and shipped from the Southern Hemisphere - rather than to use agronomic practices, such as cover crops and mixed planting, to maintain fertility. Substitution was most common on industrial scale farms that had converted to organic to capture market demand rather than on smaller farms that had grown up frm within the idealistic grassroots movement. - p. 233-4
I'm sure that some of the agricultural inputs, food additives, or industrial practices are harmless, but the problem these days is knowing which ones. Marketers must prove only that each substance is not acutely toxic but they are unaccountable for the effects of small amounts of a substance over time, or small amounts over time combined with small amounts of the other numerous substances you consume in other industrially-grown processed foods. While I realize I am no doubt throwing out the baby with the bathwater, my own solution is to attempt to eat NO food additives, pesticides, or other contaminants as the only way of knowing that my food is truly safe and healthy. Once the work of knowing how to produce and prepare food is attained (along with the equipment required to do it), then it's really not that difficult. But an eater does not always know that before acquiring such knowledge.
Just as the reader is about to lose hope in our ability to navigate our food without going back to Martha Ballard's method of growing her own food in a kitchen garden, Vileisis brings up the growth of farmers' markets and CSA's. After reading this book, I must agree with her that buying directly from farmers you know and trust truly is the best way forward for anyone who wants to know where their food comes from and what is in it. |
