Food and Power

Hubry is teaching a seminar class this semester entitled Food and Power. It’s quite the hot topic these days, and I’ve even had a lot of friends ask me for a copy of the class reading list. So…. here’s a little something to wet the apetite. Yesterday Hubry opened class with this popular Portlandia video – you know the ridiculously funny episode where the couple asks for the chicken’s papers and want to know all about his little life before they can decide whether or not to eat him for dinner. If you haven’t watched it yet, you definitely should.

Anyway, one of the assigned readings from yesterday was a lovely piece – and I don’t know for sure but I got the impression that it’s not well known in the popular food movement – that I definitely think is worth a read. The article, Kitchen Literacy: How we Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and why we Need to get it Back, by Ann Vileisis opens with a description of a meal by Martha Ballard, and broadens out to describe her entire foodshed, which we learn is about a 20 mile radius or so. It’s a short article, and if you like what you read about Martha Ballard you could always move on to A Midwive’s Tale (She was also a midwife)– which I have not read yet but Hubry says is a beautifully written history based on Martha Ballard’s journals. Or, if you’re really interested, you could go straight to the source and read Martha Ballard’s journals firthand. She is common in that she was a woman raising children, doing housework, tending to her gardens, delivering babies on the side, yet unique in that she is one of the only American women from the eighteenth century to actually keep a journal – and she lived right down the road from us in Augusta, Maine!

 Happy reading. More to come…