The Food of a Younger Land
Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2009 1:02 am
This book is something of a meld between Mark Bittman and Clara. The cover reads:
Food of a Younger Land. A portrait of American food - before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation's food was seasonal, regional and traditional - from the lost WPA files. by Mark Kurlansky
When I checked Food of a Younger Land out of the library, I expected it to be a Michael Pollan/Mark Bittman-ish tome on how we used to eat and what was wrong with our food system now. How wrong I was.
Apparently, one of the projects of the Works Progress Administration was to document the way American ate and was going to publish a book called (not surprisingly) American Eats. The WPA hired hundreds of writers to go out into their regions and document the foods and eating customs they found. This project was intended to be a follow up to the successful guide book publication (a copy of that for my state is still in print). Alas, WWII and the demise of the WPA meant that the project never went to publication. I'm not even sure it got to the point of editing. However, the federal government, being the federal government, kept the repository of reports, recipes and stories somewhere.
Thank goodness for Mark Kurlansky who came across these trove while working on Choice Cuts an anthology of food writing. He doesn't really talk much about how or why he made it his mission to publish a selection of reports but he did. Organized according to region, you can get a peek into the some of the work produced by these first food writers. It's a fun read, and I think gives good evidence of what our (great) grandmothers would have recognized as food.
Food of a Younger Land. A portrait of American food - before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation's food was seasonal, regional and traditional - from the lost WPA files. by Mark Kurlansky
When I checked Food of a Younger Land out of the library, I expected it to be a Michael Pollan/Mark Bittman-ish tome on how we used to eat and what was wrong with our food system now. How wrong I was.
Apparently, one of the projects of the Works Progress Administration was to document the way American ate and was going to publish a book called (not surprisingly) American Eats. The WPA hired hundreds of writers to go out into their regions and document the foods and eating customs they found. This project was intended to be a follow up to the successful guide book publication (a copy of that for my state is still in print). Alas, WWII and the demise of the WPA meant that the project never went to publication. I'm not even sure it got to the point of editing. However, the federal government, being the federal government, kept the repository of reports, recipes and stories somewhere.
Thank goodness for Mark Kurlansky who came across these trove while working on Choice Cuts an anthology of food writing. He doesn't really talk much about how or why he made it his mission to publish a selection of reports but he did. Organized according to region, you can get a peek into the some of the work produced by these first food writers. It's a fun read, and I think gives good evidence of what our (great) grandmothers would have recognized as food.