Kitchen Literacy is an interesting book about the cultural anthropology of food: the average North American’s relationship to food and food preparation, what it means to “know” about food, and how those things have changed over time. It started off as a hard read for me; while I found the descriptions of homestead farms and early markets interesting, I really didn’t feel like the book was going anywhere. Maybe it was just hard to relate to a lifestyle over two centuries old. But a few chapters in, it was easy to see how things had changed, mostly for the bad, sometimes for the better, and the readability of the book really picked up. It is a really thought-provoking study of how food and food marketing has affected people’s health, lifestyle, and attitudes – and vice versa.