Kitchen Literacy by Ann Vileisis

Author:Ann Vileisis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press

CHAPTER 8

Kitchen Countertrends

In the late 1960s, a new Stop & Shop supermarket was constructed on the site of the “town farm” where my grandfather, as a boy in the 1920s, had walked with pail in hand to buy milk for his family. The grassy expanse of pasture that had managed to persist at the edge of the small industrial city of Naugatuck, Connecticut—known best for its rubber factories and Naugahide—was paved over with a large asphalt parking lot to accommodate shoppers and twenty thousand square feet of aisles and shelves.1 This was the supermarket where my grandmother took me shopping for groceries when I was a child.

The replacement of the farm with that supermarket was emblematic of the grand transformation of the food system that had been taking place over the course of eight decades. It reflected enormous changes in how society regarded land; in the early 1960s, new suburbs overtook farms as still more people came to see land as more valuable for home-sites than for its ability to supply milk, meat, eggs, fruit, or vegetables. It reflected changes in how people spent time, with more and more—including growing numbers of women—working for wages and salaries in urban and suburban communities. It reflected myriad innovations in food and farm technology and the opening of interstate highways that made it easier and cheaper for more foods to travel by refrigerated trucks from farms in temperate latitudes, not only to the largest cities but to smaller towns as well. And the replacement of the farm with a supermarket also reflected, as we've seen, an enormous change in the very experience of how we could know our foods. On the same site where my grandfather found grazing cows and filled his pail, I ferreted out my favorite Fruit Loops cereal with the colorful Toucan Sam on its box and bought milk in an unmemorable paperboard carton.

Yet even as supermarkets flourished in the early '60s, it was becoming apparent to a small but growing number of people that leaving the matter of knowing foods solely to experts and admen was flawed. Several lines of concern emerged from different groups and for a range of reasons—all, however, derived from a brooding sense that foods were being tampered with behind the scenes, largely for the expedience and profit of businesses that supplied them.

By the mid-1950s, some epicurean critics had begun to complain about the deteriorating taste of foods. In 1954 Atlantic writer Philip Wylie lamented that “science had spoiled” his supper. In particular, he critiqued the tendency of agricultural researchers to develop “‘improved’ strains of things for every purpose but eating.” Of new peas bred to ripen all at once to expedite mechanical picking, Wylie asked, “What matter if such peas taste like boiled paper wads?”2 Even Poppy Cannon, who despite her affinity for convenience cooking aspired to the gourmet set, lamented the “dreadful” taste of tomatoes, which were picked green and then ripened with the use of ethylene gas—a by-product of oil refineries.3 Even

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