Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get it Back

Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get it Back . By Ann Vileisis. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2007. 344 pp., $26.95, hardback, ISBN 978-1-59726-144-9.

Both current research literature and the popular press describe that our industrial food system is in a shambles. This book explains how it got that way. Vileisis writes a detailed chronicle of the many events, actions, and stories that created our food system over the past two hundred fifty years. At the heart of the matter is the fact that we do not know where our food comes from and under what conditions it is produced. This is not new. According to Vileisis, a shift occurred between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Homemakers in the 1700s grew, traded for, and bought fresh food locally....