![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The impetus for Food of a Younger Land is the author’s discovery of an archive of unpublished files from the Federal Writer’s Project toward a project around 1940 called America Eats, designed to collect regional essays into a book on “American cookery and the part it has played in the national life, as exemplified in the group meals that preserve not only traditional dishes but also traditional attitudes and customs. To reproduce the lengthy subtitle is descriptive of the book: 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. Less seems to have appeared that is as comprehensive in regards to the eating practices abandoned for this new model, which is exactly where Mark Kurlansky’s new book The Food of a Younger Land picks up. Much of what I’ve read in the last year about the history in this country of food and eating, particularly in the likes of Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food or Paul Robert’s The End of Food, traces the rise of the hegemonic, centralized industrial food production that we find ourselves in today. ![]() 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 ![]()
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