The Food of a Younger Land, Mark Kurlansky
The Food of a Younger Land, Mark Kurlansky
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The Food of a Younger Land
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

Author: Mark Kurlansky

Narrator: Stephen Hoye

Unabridged: 11 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/28/2009

Categories: Cooking, Nonfiction


Synopsis

Mark Kurlansky's new book takes us back to the food of a younger America. Before the national highway system brought the country closer together, before chain restaurants brought uniformity, and before the Frigidaire meant that frozen food could be stored for longer, the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional. It helped to form the distinct character, attitudes, and customs of those who ate it.

While Kurlansky was researching The Big Oyster in the Library of Congress, he stumbled across the archives for the America Eats project and discovered this wonderful window into our national past. In the 1930s, with the country gripped by the Great Depression and millions of Americans struggling to get by, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Federal Writers' Project under the New Deal to give work to artists and writers, such as John Cheever and Richard Wright. A number of writers—including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren—were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project was abandoned in the early 1940s and never completed.

The Food of a Younger Nation unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure. Mark Kurlansky's brilliant compilation of these historic pieces, combined with authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and his own musings and analysis, evokes a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery store was a thing of the future.

About Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling and James A. Beard Award–winning author of 1968: The Year That Rocked the World; Salt: A World History; The Basque History of the World; Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; The White Man in the Tree (a collection of short stories); and several other books. Boogaloo on Second Avenue is his first novel. He lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Hester on May 07, 2011

Hot dog, this book was fun! It uses documents from the Federal Writer's Program(part of the WPA) to document regional American cooking after canning was introduced, but before fast food and frozen tv dinners became a way of life. I wish this book has been published before my father died. The first s......more

Goodreads review by Melody on May 25, 2021

Spotty is the kindest word I can use to describe this patchwork quilt of a book, drawn from source material gathered by FDR's Federal Writer's Project during the heyday of the Great Depression. It's great fun for the most part. Kurlansky's section and piece introductions are wonderful, of course. Eu......more

Goodreads review by Debbie on June 13, 2011

This book is a pretty neat idea - publishing long forgotten works from the Federal Writers project . But, alas,, much of that work deserves to remain in the dust bin of history. I did enjoy parts of the book quite a bit. A few of the vignettes, such as the Italian feed, are quite charming. Some of t......more

Goodreads review by Teri on August 28, 2016

The Food of a Younger Land is a look at pre-WWII regional food in the United States. Kurlansky took a series of articles and recipes written under the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) and compiled them into this gem of a book. These were articles and recipes inten......more

Goodreads review by Amy on October 18, 2018

Another analysis of the essays that were meant to be compiled into one project for the WPA. Compared to America Eats, this one goes into a bit more detail about the writers and the events and food they were writing about. There is no attempt to find things going on currently, as in AE. This just pre......more