Description:
Based on interviews conducted by the University of Kentucky's Family Farm Project and supplemented by archival research, photographs, and recipes, Food and Everyday Life on Kentucky Family Farms, 1920-1950 recalls a vanishing way of life in rural Kentucky. Focusing on the family farm in the first half of the twentieth century, John van Willigen and Anne van Willigen illuminate how the revolutionary change from subsistence to market-based agricultural production that was prompted by economic stress and government policy altered not only the production, preparation, and consumption of food in Kentucky, but the social relations within the state's rural communities.
Brief description: John van Willigen is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Kentucky and recipient of the Omer C. Stewart Memorial Award of the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology. He is the author of Applied Anthropology: An Introduction and Gettin' Some Age on Me: Social Organization of Older People in a Rural American Community. He is also the coauthor of Tobacco Culture: Farming Kentucky's Burley Belt and Social Aging in a Delhi Neighborhood.
Review Quotes:
"Food and Everday Life. . . gives a strong flavor of how life was for individuals on Kentucky farms before mid-century."
-- "Agricultural History"