Abstract
Why do odd-looking species of tomatoes come to be seen as heirlooms, but unusual varieties of turnips do not become anything other than strange-looking vegetables? Why do we recognize so many heirloom tomatoes but not many heirloom plums? And why are some heirloom edible plants represented through rich, emotional narratives while others are presented without meaningful accounts? These are the central questions that guide Jennifer Jordan’s book Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods. Jordan’s goal is to explore the memories that are created around foods, memories that are both individual and social, old and recent. She focuses on the particular case of heirloom fruits and vegetables because, in her view, these are “a particularly charged site of the intersections of food, memory, and meaning” (p. 5).
Food has always been an heirloom, Jordan explains, in that foods’ genetic codes and techniques of cultivation, preservation, and preparation have been passed down across generations forever. Ironically, though, while the practice of treating food as heirlooms stopped with the rise of industrial agriculture in many parts of the world, this is precisely when the label “heirloom” began to be used (p. 22). What is an heirloom? The term is used for plants that can be pollen fertilized and that existed prior to the 1940s (in the United States), when industrial farming spread in North America and significantly reduced the diversity of plants grown for commercial purposes (p. 24).
Jordan is an ethnographer of the edible plant kingdom. She has amassed an impressive amount of information about all sorts of edible plants, information about the United States, the west and the rest, contemporary and historical, agricultural and cultural, quantitative and qualitative. And she uses this information to tell stories about the complex relationships among food, memory, and culture. Jordan is a lively and engaging writer, so even when she provides technical details about the origin, characteristics, uses, and threats faced by plants, the narrative never gets dry. Mostly, Jordan is moved by the stories that the plants tell us about history and ourselves, always interweaving the individual and the social. To tell these stories, she conducted observation and interviews across the United States and also travelled to Austria and Sweden. She talked to farmers, urban growers, and informants, and she did literary and archival research through academic periodicals, government reports, scientific and popular books, cookbooks and food magazines, recipe collections, and online databases.
She relies on all this information to show how heirloom edible plants are perceived and represented in public discourse, particularly in the media, and how individuals, collectives, and organizations understand and utilize them. Through the term “edible memory,” Jordan seeks to capture the experience of eating heirloom food—that is, food that is not just a genetic code but also a cultural story—and describe the emotions and habits that are created through that experience.
One of Jordan’s main points in her analysis of the uses and meanings associated with edible plants is that memory, culture, and tradition are stable and sticky but also dynamic and constantly open to contestation, adaptation, and change. Memory, culture, and tradition, she also emphasizes, are personal as much as social. While edible memory may be more personal in some cases (e.g., food her grandmother made) and more social in others (e.g., collective representations of foodstuffs), the personal is never autonomous from broader social forces, and the social loses any deep meaning if it is not adopted and adapted to personal circumstances.
These main points are highlighted throughout the chapters, which are organized around different fruits and vegetables and the material and symbolic places they occupy in our social world. The book begins the empirical exploration with heirloom tomatoes—the paradigmatic case of an heirloom plant—and then moves onto apples, a fruit that, according to Jordan, has become an antique rather than an heirloom. Jordan then examines what she calls forgotten vegetables, such as turnips, which have not gained the recognition and popularity of other plants to become heirlooms or even antiques. The following chapter, on what she calls mobile vegetables, offers an especially rich sociological account of the changing uses and meanings associated with particular edible plants, examining the role of large sociological processes such as colonization, slavery, migration, and ethnicity. Here, Jordan traces the changing meanings of vegetables over time as foods move from one region to another and from one group of people to another. The last empirical chapter is on lost plums and found mangoes (along with other fruits), and here Jordan traces the contrasting social and cultural trajectories of fruits that have become somewhat forgotten (such as plums) and those that have moved from the category of exotic to the mainstream (such as mangoes).
Jordan has written a book about memory and meaning, looking at the forces that inform them and the practices that sustain them, as well as at how memory and meaning shape practices and experience. However, the book is very much an account of particular cases of fruits and vegetables that have been lost and/or found—both in their actual forms and in their uses and meaning—with the sociological analysis kept in the background. Seeing the personal and social as deeply intertwined in the way we perceive, grow, cook and consume food, Jordan also interweaves the personal with the social in her narrative. The book sometimes reads like a memoir, filled with personal anecdotes and experiences that have shaped Jordan’s understanding of food, and never strays far from the personal, even when she delivers technical, historical, or social information. This is a book intended for a broad audience, and it will appeal to students and scholars interested in the sociology of culture, food studies, and collective memory, but also to any reader with an interest in these topics.