Eating Community

Rural and agricultural history have a lot to tell us about the meaning of symbols and identity. If we are what we eat, then agriculture defines our identity. If identity comes from the place where we grew up and that we call home, then our community defines who we are as a people. Rural history includes practicalities and metaphysics. It brings to the profession the capacity to challenge a historiography and methodology that now tends towards the study of ideas and ideologies, discourses and cultural stances. Agricultural history encourages us to see with new eyes the material foundations on which culture is constructed. People in the past spent most of their time, energy, and thought in this material world. Historians today may be blinded- as producers of paper and ideas and consumers of culture and entertainment rather than soybeans and corn- to think that this has always been so. The bottom line is this: we cannot take the material foundation for granted as self-explanatory. Rather we have to come to terms with its complexity before we can explain culture, to see the frame into which culture fits, to gauge words and thoughts within the material context from which they were generated. Orville Vernon Burton Agricultural History vol 76 no 4 (Autumn 2002) pp 634