Edible Memory

Each week during the growing season, farmers' markets offer up such delicious treasures as brandywine tomatoes, cosmic purple carrots, and pink pearl apples - varieties that are prized by home chefs and carefully stewarded by farmers from year to year. These are the heirlooms and the antiques of the food world, endowed with their own rich histories. But how does an apple become an antique and a tomato an heirloom? In Edible Memory, Jennifer A. Jordan examines the ways that people around the world have sought to identify and preserve old - fashioned varieties of produce and the powerful emotional and physical connections they provide to a shared past. Jordan begins with the heirloom tomato, inquiring into its botanical origins in South America and its culinary beginnings in Aztec cooking to show how the homely and homegrown tomato has since grown to be an object of wealth and taste, as well as a popular symbol of the farm-to-table and heritage foods movements.In the chapters that follow, Jordan combines lush description and thorough research as she investigates the long history of antique apples; changing tastes in turnips and related foods like kale and parsnips; the movement of vegetables and fruits around the globe in the wake of Columbus; and the poignant, perishable world of stone fruits and tropical fruit, in order to reveal the connections - the edible memories - these heirlooms offer for farmers, gardeners, chefs, diners, and home cooks. This deep culinary connection to the past influences not only the foods we grow and consume, but the ways we shape and imagine our farms, gardens, and local landscapes. From the farmers' market to the seedbank to the neighborhood bistro, these foods offer essential keys not only to our past but also to the future of agriculture, the environment, and taste. By cultivating these edible memories, Jordan reveals, we can stay connected to a delicious heritage of historic flavors and to the pleasures and possibilities for generations of feasts to come.

"Although a lot of books have appeared in recent years about food cultures and foodways, none have analyzed how personal nostalgia and food politics are intertwined, sometimes in mutual support of one another (local heirloom tomatoes) and sometimes in conflict (green Jell-O salad anyone?). Jordan is perfectly situated to examine the emotion work and emotion play we lavish on what we grow, seek, and put into our mouths. This is an important book." (Wendy Griswold, Northwestern University)

Jennifer A. Jordan is associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is also the author of Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond.