Food and Everyday Life on Kentucky Family Farms, 1920-1950. By John van Willigen and Anne van Willigen. Kentucky Remembered: An Oral History Series. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2006. Pp. xx, 260. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-2387-5.)

Food and Everyday Life on Kentucky Family

Farms, 1920-1950 documents rural life in Kentucky at a critical period of transformation for the family farm. John van Willigen and Anne van Willigen draw from more than sixty oral histories with men and women who grew to adulthood on family farms in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their first chapter lays out a broad context of economic, technological, and policy changes that impinged on farming between 1920 and 1950. They also invoke Wendell Berry's concept of unsettling, "a process of social devolution caused by changes in the relationship between human communities and the land on which they live and the energy they use" (p. 4).

The focus on foodways allows the authors and oral history narrators to explain almost every farm task. Beginning with meal preparation in the kitchen, chapters survey the broad range of family members' domestic production work, the sources of their foodstuffs from orchards to huckster trucks, and food processing and preservation. They also reveal how farm families navigated between individual, family, community, and market relationships. Even commercially oriented farmers produced much of the food needed to support their own households, and less market-oriented farmers could quickly turn domestic production of such items as strawberries or cream into cash. Rural families were no less adaptable in their dealings off the farm. Well into the twentieth century, they still paid with farm products at general stores or huckster trucks. Their choices among new technologies and production methods demonstrate the uneven course of modernization, as when families hired both a sorghum maker for his traditional skill and a threshing crew for its modern equipment.

Descriptions of daily tasks and skills paint a broad picture of farm life but not the full range of farming experiences. As the authors take pains to explain, they are not attempting to analyze region, race, or class, although they do point out those issues when they arise in narrators' accounts. Gender issues receive greater attention as the authors and narrators explain the overlapping division of labor among women and men, in contrast to stereotyped associations between female indoor and male outdoor roles. Furthermore, as most of the interview subjects recall the daily life of their youths, their accounts illuminate how the division of labor by age as well as gender was integral to the social reproduction of the farm household.

Oral histories of youthful experiences often include a large dose of nostalgia, and indeed the interviewers deliberately employed nostalgia as a strategy for triggering memories. The interpretation of the unsettling of family farming, emphasizing the dispersal of a community bonded by kinship, mutual aid, and community labor strategies into atomized rural households, also invokes nostalgia for an iconic rural past. Pictures of Kentucky landscapes and farms, many taken for the Farm Security Administration by famed photographer Marion Post Wolcott, intensify the allure of the past. Yet, as the authors note, the commercialization of that past in country-themed restaurants and packaged foods demonstrates the powerful hold of these images on the popular historical imagination. A broad readership will find this book a compelling account of the human experiences that created that legacy.

MARY S. HOFFSCHWELLE

Middle Tennessee State University