Food and Everyday Life is the most recent book in a series of oral history publications produced by the University Press of Kentucky with several titles of interest to folklorists, including two volumes of conversations with Kentucky writers and an oral history of tobacco farming in the state compiled by the principal author of the book under review here. John van Willigen teaches anthropology at the University of Kentucky, and Anne van Willigen is identified as a consultant for the Bluegrass region for the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives.

Food and Everyday Life represents a careful sorting through more than sixty oral history interviews conducted in the early 1990s with Kentuckians possessing a first-hand familiarity with family farming in the state. Although the larger oral history study from which the data for this book have been selected focused upon farming practices rather than food habits, it is not surprising that these interviews gathered significant amounts of information on foodways. The period between the two World Wars, which represents the temporal focus for the book, was one that saw great and widespread change on Kentucky farms, which were affected by the same national and regional economic trends remaking family farms across the country--principally the shift from subsistence to market farming.

The interviews are presented in the text in fairly small bites; the voices of the "narrators" from whose interviews brief excerpts have been made have been woven into choruses of corroboration on a methodically-arranged succession of topics. Chapters proceed from the inside-out: "In the Kitchen," “Housework," "Garden Spots and Fruit Trees," "Keeping Livestock," "Country Stores and Huckster Trucks." The chapter on housework contains subsections on "Water," "Energy," "Soapmaking," "Quilting," and "Trash and Garbage." The "Farmwork" chapter elegantly organizes information on activities undertaken in each calendar month, and on agricultural implements. The result is a rare one for oral histories--a well-organized approach to a complex subject that gathers recollections and opinions in a searchable order.

Readers who bring a folklife orientation to Food and Everyday Life will consider the book to be an admirable historical study of regional foodways, almost from page 1. Oddly, the book’s final chapter, dedicated to "Kentucky Foodways," is the weakest and shortest of the twelve. The authors seem less curious about what people who live on Kentucky family farms have to eat than their interviewees, who supply fine details about everyday and special meals shared in their homes. The "Foodways" chapter re-introduces the specter, raised in the authors’ introduction, of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Cracker Barrel as forces that challenge home-grown traditions. It’s not that the authors regard change unkindly; after all, their book is really more about change than cultural continuity. But faced with the mixed bag of phenomena that the term "change" now conjures, the authors find it difficult to con-celebrate advances in food safety and the commodification of the market place.

Finally, the authors are to be praised for their ample use of photographic illustrations. Forty-three of the book’s fifty photographs derive from the files of the Federal Farm Security Administration--most of them taken by Marion Post Wolcott in 1940. The handful of remaining illustrations are from the Kentucky Historical Society--most regrettably undated. Time-wise, the pictures don’t match up particularly well with the range of the narrative, which commences well before the Great Depression and extends to 1950. But the photographs do help to connect the narrators’ comments to a specific place--an important and necessary feature of a book that is clearly the story of one state, albeit--given Kentucky’s varied geography--many places.

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[Review length: 597 words • Review posted on November 20, 2007]