, I bought a pie pumpkin at a super­market in Arlington, Texas. Its tiny label asserted no fewer than five times that the pumpkin was organic, invoking both the USDA and the Oregon Tilth, and it came with a return address in LaFarge, Wisconsin. The label also informed me that the ­pumpkin—­or perhaps its parent ­company—­was “independent & farmer owned.”

Two hundred years ago, Ann Vileisis observes, I might have grown that pumpkin myself. A hundred years ago, I might have met its grower in a farmers’ market and known enough about horticulture to discuss how it was raised. Fifty years ago, supermarkets would have taken pains to conceal the pumpkin’s provenance. Today, we know more about our food supply than at any time in the last century. We read labels to learn where our food comes from; we read books to interpret the ­labels.

Vileisis goes back to primary ­sources—­diaries, cookbooks, print advertisements, government documents, and news ­stories—­to trace American food epistemology from the early Republic to the present day. She does her best work in recovering the mid-20th century, that ­fast-­receding era when knowledge of food was lost most quickly and definitively. 

 gives us a keen sense of why big canners, dairies, meatpackers, and grocers of the post–World War II period didn't want us to know what was making its way into our ­food—­chemical preservatives and pesticides, as well as artificial extenders, conditioners, flavors, and colors—and how they kept that knowledge from us.

But food illiteracy was not foisted on an abject public. We didn’t want to know the life history of our vegetables; we were content to let the Jolly Green Giant worry about that. Vileisis acknowledges the power of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ desire for ­clean-­looking, reliable food. Grandma wasn't trying to poison us with chemical cake mixes, after all. Quite the opposite: She was aiming for safety and consistent quality. “The bride who takes advantage of canned and frozen foods, packaged mixes too, need not apologize,” assured a 1950 article in 

 aimed at novice cooks. “She’s smart.”

What Grandma didn't know, though, could have killed us. Fear of poison was finally strong enough to overcome Americans’ reluctance to worry about their victuals. Vileisis charts the growing public and legislative concern during the 1950s and ’60s about possible carcinogens in the food supply, and the accumulation of DDT in the bodies of those who ate from it. This story has been told ­before—­notably, in Rachel Carson’s book 

—­but Vileisis situates it in the larger context of a loss and recovery of food literacy. Neither as activist as 

 author Michael Pollan nor as belligerent as Barbara Kingsolver in A

, Vileisis still hails from their wing of food politics, striving to know more about her meals and to grow what ingredients she can herself. “I have no delusions about my dependence on the larger food system,” she writes. But she remains “troubled by a nagging awareness that much of my food depends on distant, unknowable farms and cheap petroleum.”

When I baked my “independent & farmer owned” pumpkin into a pie, the resulting dessert was stringy and tasteless. But I felt good about eating it. I wonder, after reading 

, if I am much different from my grandmother. She opened cans of proc­essed, ­residue-­laden pumpkin and felt good about her predictable pies because the labels promised garden freshness. I open an indie pumpkin and feel good about the parlous results because the label promises sustainable human happiness. We differ mainly in our reading tastes.

 teaches English at the University of Texas at Arlington and frequently writes about food. 

"Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back"

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Tim Morris reviews “Kitchen Literacy,” which explores what we know (and don't) about the food we eat. 

Eating Our Words

The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It

 is the first of a projected four-volume series from the Library of America, to be released annually during the war’s sesquicentennial. The series will include journalistic accounts, state papers, speeches, diaries, letters, sermons, and even poetry and songs, all of which are meant, the editors say, to offer a narrative of the war years. But if it’s narrative in conception, the first volume is largely rhetorical in content. It hovers somewhere between academic source book and the old educational TV series 

. Serious collectors of Civil War books will want to own it, and teachers of Civil War history will want to assign it. But the reader looking for a true narrative might be better off staying with one of the many excellent secondary and analytical histories, such as James M. McPherson’s 

We like to think that going back to primary sources gives us an unbiased, unmediated look at the past. Of course, Americans of 150 years ago were no strangers to editorial bias. Every opinion, even every sensory perception, recorded in the documents in 

 is filtered through a writer’s ideologies. “Most of these documents were not written for publication,” observe the editors. But these private thoughts often bear the stamp of public rhetoric, showing how conscious the writers were of the narratives they were spinning. North Carolinian Catherine Edmonston, who witnessed Union attempts to resupply Fort Sumter, wrote in her diary, “The North is sowing the wind; see that ere the next generation she does not reap the Whirlwind!”

That is not to say that the texts collected in 

 are uniform in genre or style. They are highly eclectic, ranging from public pronouncements to intimate family letters, from as-it-happened reporting to decades-later recollection, from calculating persuasive addresses to matter-of-fact life records.

Charles Haydon’s diary for May 1861 falls into this last category. Haydon was a sergeant in a Michigan volunteer unit, and the extracts from his diary reproduced here concern his initial deployment to a camp outside Detroit. In these few pages we get a spare sketch of the dull tension of life among men going off to war. “Nearly all the men have diarhea [sic] & several are in the hospital quite sick”: That was the overwhelming daily reality of Civil War armies. Yet in these pages Haydon never leaves Michigan, never bears witness to what we’ve come to regard as the great historical events of the war.

In contrast to Haydon’s unselfconsciousness, there’s former Union officer Abner Doubleday’s account of the fall of Fort Sumter. Doubleday published his memoirs in 1876, by which time the defense of Sumter had passed into legend. “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach, for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking,” he wrote. In all likelihood, the Doubleday of 1861 was more concerned about artillery technique than justifications for deadly force. But he wasn’t journaling while he was firing.

 shows us actors who knew they were onstage, some of whom had been scripting their parts for years. “The enemy carried out their programme” is Doubleday’s curious way of putting it. Theatrics are history too.

 teaches American literature at the University of Texas, Arlington, and compiles the online bibliography 

edited by Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Library of America, 814 pp, 2011.