Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Gardens, Kitchens, Countryside: The Connecting Power of Food
Session Abstract or Summary
In this session, Kate Black, Nyoka Hawkins and Pam Meade explore ways in which the seemingly everyday subjects of food, gardening, cooking and farming engage questions that range from the intimacies of family identity to community connection to regional, national and global politics. In the words of Kentucky home gardeners, Kate Black finds an underlying “ethics of care” that points to the complex ways raising our own food grounds us not just as individuals and families but as a social collective interdependent on each other and on the land. Pam Meade offers insight into the ways food, cooking and growing up on her family farm in eastern Kentucky nourish and give birth to her visual art and community activism. Black and Meade offer compelling stories of the connecting power of food. Through an examination of visual and narrative strategies of postwar food advertising, Nyoka Hawkins examines ways in which advertisers and industrial food producers sought to break that traditional, active, organic connection to food production and replace it with an abstracted, commercial connection that offered speed and convenience in a new culture of consumerist modernity.
Presentation #1 Title
Selling the Fast Life: New Discourses of Food in Postwar America
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Nyoka Hawkins looks at postwar food advertising to analyze the ways in which consumers were persuaded to give up traditional food practices of cooking, gardening and farming in favor of processed food and an industrialized food system. She will examine the visual and narratives strategies used in mass market portrayals of the farmer, the kitchen, and the rural countryside. Advertisements were central to new discourses of modernity that promoted the ‘fast life’ and were driven by narratives of passivity and hygienic discipline. Manufacturers and advertisers stoking postwar consumerist desire particularly sought to commodify the lived experience of raising, cooking and eating food. As observed by de Certeau, Appadurai, and other theorists, everyday life was increasingly privatized and de-realized. In the world of mass advertising, the everyday became an “ imaginary construct, a disembodied space – the world of pure consumption.” Hawkins will explore these new discourses of food and how rural regions such as Appalachia were seen as historical residue, places of retardation that were either “bothersome or picturesque.”
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Nyoka Hawkins is an editor, designer and book publisher. She owns Old Cove Press with her husband Gurney Norman. A professionally trained historian specializing in Appalachian History, she has done research on the Slow Food movement and the labor movements of the 1930s. She grew up in eastern Kentucky.
Presentation #2 Title
Building Our Garden: Words and Stories from Kentucky Gardeners
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
In his 2008 book, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Robert Pogue Harrison, explores the garden as the epitome of care--literally and figuratively. He writes, “The disproportion between giving and taking is first and foremost a principle of life—life exists where giving exceeds taking…What holds true for the soil--that you must give it more than you take away—also holds true for nations, institutions, marriage, friendship, education, in short for human culture as a whole, which comes into being and maintains itself in time only as long as its cultivators overgive of themselves.” Harrison refers to this as building our garden.
I recently completed a project based on oral histories with Kentucky home vegetable gardeners. The concepts of ours and our garden run throughout many of their narratives, taking forms that might more generally be called neighborliness, community well-being, and the common good. In this presentation I want to explore these notions by sampling the gardeners own words and stories. Many of us, including myself at times, think of the vegetable patch as a place where we work quietly, maybe even in solitude, connecting with forces greater than ourselves. We are intent on growing food for ourselves, perhaps even others. But as these gardeners explain in various ways, their gardens are also spaces where what Harrison calls the “vocation of care” and the social collective meet.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Kate Black retired in 2013 from the University of Kentucky where she was the longtime curator of the Libraries' Appalachian Collection. Her new book, Row by Row: Talking with Kentucky Gardeners (Ohio University Press, 2015) is based on oral histories with home vegetable gardeners.
Presentation #3 Title
Breaking Beans With Mother: Creating the Art of Food
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
In this session, eastern Kentucky artist Pam Meade will focus on themes of food, gardening, and the land in her creative work. Her canvases reflect her experience of growing up on her family farm in Morgan County, where she still lives and works. She hoed the garden with her parents, helped them raise strawberries, tobacco, potatoes, green beans, cucumbers, and all the crops and endeavors of a working family farm. Flowers, apple trees, homemade pickles, her mother’s kitchen, all find expression in her painting. In her mixed media art, she uses potato sacks and onion sacks that she reuses from her kitchen. The titles of her paintings tell the stories: “Irene, Woman Behind the Onion Sack,” “Breaking Beans with Mother,” “Still Life with Garlic and Basil,” “Unfried Green Tomatoes in an Unbroken Yellow Bowl,” “Still Life with Vegetables and Mom’s Tea Towel,” “Woman with a Milk Pail.” Meade will discuss her landscapes of the green fields, mountains, rivers and creeks of her native Appalachian region. The post office was one of her favorite places to hang out as a kid, a place where neighbors gossiped, traded recipes and talked about their gardens. She expresses this experience in such paintings as “Lizzie at the Post Office” and ”White Oak Post Office.” She will discuss her work as an arts organizer and the variety of ways she engages with the wider themes of food and community in her art.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Pam Oldfield Meade has been a working artist and community arts advocate for over 30 years in Morgan County, located in eastern Kentucky. Color, contrast, text and texture play an integral role in her painting and mixed media works which are informed by tradition, storytelling, and personal experience. Her work will be featured in the forthcoming book The Things We See: Paintings by Pam Oldfield Meade (Old Cove Press, Spring 2016).
Selling the Fast Life: New Discourses of Food in Postwar America
Nyoka Hawkins looks at postwar food advertising to analyze the ways in which consumers were persuaded to give up traditional food practices of cooking, gardening and farming in favor of processed food and an industrialized food system. She will examine the visual and narratives strategies used in mass market portrayals of the farmer, the kitchen, and the rural countryside. Advertisements were central to new discourses of modernity that promoted the ‘fast life’ and were driven by narratives of passivity and hygienic discipline. Manufacturers and advertisers stoking postwar consumerist desire particularly sought to commodify the lived experience of raising, cooking and eating food. As observed by de Certeau, Appadurai, and other theorists, everyday life was increasingly privatized and de-realized. In the world of mass advertising, the everyday became an “ imaginary construct, a disembodied space – the world of pure consumption.” Hawkins will explore these new discourses of food and how rural regions such as Appalachia were seen as historical residue, places of retardation that were either “bothersome or picturesque.”
