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J Agric Environ Ethics (2009) 22:273283 DOI 10.1007/s10806-009-9149-6
ARTICLES
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 and
Why 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, authorsacademic and popular have increasingly been surveying a sea of cultural kitchens to ponder the relationships between food and culture, cultural literacy, sustainability, 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 consume 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 rst 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: [email protected]
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