One measure of what our nation has lost – in terms of culinary variety and authenticity – can be found in a new book, The Food of a Younger Land (Riverhead Books), edited by Mark Kurlansky. Its subtitle says it all: “A portrait of American food – before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation’s food was seasonal, regional and traditional – from the lost WPA files.”

Rabbit stew, a specialty of Long Island. Photo by cwphobia, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike license.

When I read the phrase, “from the lost WPA files,” I perked up. The WPA was the Works Progress Administration, Franklin Roosevelt’s brilliant innovation for getting people back to work during the Great Depression. One WPA project, the Federal Writers’ Project, sought to help unemployed writers. As author Kurlansky explains, the WPA “was charged with conceiving books, assigning them to huge, unwieldy teams of out-of-work and want-to-be writers around the country, and editing and publishing them.” The Federal Writers’ Project produced at least 276 books and hundreds of pamphlets and brochures. Its most famous product is surely its series of guidebooks to the states, many of which are classics still consulted today.

The Federal Writers’ Project was also responsible for a major book that never quite saw the light of day. Katherine Kellock, who ran the Project, decided in 1939 that it would be worthwhile to document how America eats. The intended book, America Eats, would describe the various eating traditions and foods in various parts of the U.S. As Kurlansky tells the story:

_With the Depression waning and war looming, it was clear that America and its customs would soon be changing. By the 1930s frozen food was appearing. Industrial food from the beginning of the century, such as Jello-O, factory-made bread, and cake mixes, was making huge gains in the market from new advertising vehicles such as radio. What could better spell the beginning of the end than bottled salad dressing, the manufacture of a product that was so easy to make at home? The editors of America Eats understand that in another ten years American food would be very different._

And so the word was sent out to FWP offices instructing writers to contribute to a 75,000-word book that would focus on “American cookery and the part it has played in the national life, as exemplified in the group meals that preserve not only traditional dishes but also traditional attitudes and customs. Emphasis should be divided between food and people.” Significantly, the book was to take food seriously, and not the way that women’s magazines might write about it. The tone was to be “light but not tea shoppe, masculine not feminine.”

For the next two years, the various writers projects around the country assigned, edited and polished contributions about food traditions from Maine to New Mexico and from the Dakotas to Florida. But Pearl Harbor and the onset of World War II interrupted the book’s progress, and in February 1943, the WPA itself was shut down. The unfinished notes and contributions for America Eats, in varying degrees of publishability, were stuffed into five boxes and shunted into a Library of Congress storeroom.

Those boxes were a time-capsule into America’s past, which Kurlansky discovered and edited into his just-published book, The Food of a Younger Land. Poring through onionskin carbon copies (photocopiers had not been invented!), Kurlansky found a “chaotic pile of imperfect manuscripts” – the raw dispatches from the field awaiting an editor’s keen eye and blue pencil. Ironically, this made the materials all the more revealing because the individual voices and direct accounts have an authentic flavor, even if there are also many gaps and omissions.

To browse through The Food of a Younger Land is to be transported into a time when mothers improvised recipes because of shortages of certain ingredients and fathers brought home fresh game from the woods and mussels from the ocean. The book describes the “sugaring off” parties in Vermont, where people hosted neighborhood celebrations as they finished off the annual tapping of sap from trees for maple syrup. It describes the making of persimmon beer among Mississippi African-Americans. In and around Darlington, South Carolina, people would host outdoor gatherings and serve “chicken bog,” a distinctive chicken-and-rice dish. Nebraskans loved buffalo barbeque and Wisconsin folks enjoyed sour-dough pancakes.

I’m not enough of a foodie to go nuts with this book, but I found it endlessly fascinating to read how American food was once had the improbable variety of the Internet — a world before McDonalds and Campbells Soup and Chilis had homogenized the locally distinctive into oblivion.

To the rest of the world, it may seem strange, even ludicrous, that something as basic as food traditions could be eclipsed; Michael Pollan eloquently makes this point in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. But the rise and consolidation of national food markets over the past 75 years has assuredly achieved this amazing feat – the eclipse of the local.

To be sure, vestiges of the past remain. But their vitality is muted. The speed, convenience and (deceptive) cheapness of mass-produced and branded foods has prevailed. The riotous diversity of our food traditions and the fierce eccentricities of local identity are mostly gone.

How wonderful that one commons – the Federal Writers’ Project – has preserved the history of another – our vernacular food traditions and practices! As so many of us locavores try to resurrect a more locally rooted food system, we would do well to study the cast of mind of those who once cherished their local dishes. Browsing through The Food of a Younger Land will not only work up a powerful appetite, it will make you jealous of the gusto and pride that people once felt toward their daily food. That’s something worth recovering.

All of this was brought home clearly in a provocative lecture that I attended yesterday evening. It was called “No Time to Think,” by David M. Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington. Levy gave a chilling historical overview of how American society has become enslaved to an ethic of “more-better-faster” and is losing touch with the capacity for reflection and intuitive thinking. In an overweening commitment to constant doing and making, analyzing and thinking (which, let us note, are important human activities), we can too easily close off access to an entire realm of consciousness that is at least as important, our capacity for reflection.

Photo by alicepopkorn, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial license.

Levy’s research is focused on why the technological devices that are designed to connect us also seem to radically dis-connect us. As Levy puts it, “We now have the most remarkable tools for teaching and learning the world has ever known. How is it that we have less time to think than ever before?” Although our society supposedly prizes creative thought, it in fact gives little respect to the intuitive and the contemplative.

The “information society” has a certain frenetic mindlessness to it, one that takes Henry David Thoreau’s famous line in Walden to a new level entirely: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Twitter may be all the rage, but surely there is something pathetic about the ascendance of Twittering as our unstructured, person-to-person social time dwindles away.

This trend has only accelerated, and become more internalized, as more and more digital technologies have become incorporated into our daily routines. Email, cell phones, text-messaging, voicemail, Facebook, instant-messaging, Twitter, and of course the World Wide Web – they all serve useful roles. But I also realize at times that the digital communications apparatus has transformed our consciousness in some unwholesome ways. It privileges thinking that is rapid, productive and short-term, and crowds out deeper, more deliberative modes of thinking and relationships.

According to Thomas Eriksen of the University of Oslo, author of Tyranny of the Moment, the electronic environment systematically favors “fast time” activities that require instant, urgent responses (email, cell phone calls, etc.) Such stimuli tend to crowd out “slow time activities” such as “reflection, play and long-term love relationships,” said Levy.

Levy pointed out that this dynamic has an especially perverse effect in academia, which is supposed to be somewhat insulated from the larger society so that students and scholars can think more broadly and with longer range perspectives. But in fact, universities mirror the rest of society, and the dwindling time to think is as much a problem within the academy as anywhere else. As instrumental, short-term, applied goals take center-stage, our society has less access to the wisdom and complexity that deep, reflective thinking can provide. This is a major loss.

The ancients had a word for it: “leisure.” In the original sense of the word, leisure was not a consumer-oriented activity like golfing or movie-going, or even “relaxation.” It involved having time to ponder and reflect on the world. The words “school” and “scholar” have their etymological roots in the Greek and Latin words for these activities, Levy noted.

According to Josef Pieper, a German Catholic philosopher, “leisure is a form of stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still cannot hear.” Pieper, writing in the 1940s, worried about a world of “total work” that would make a “total claim upon the whole of human nature.”

It’s safe to say that that future has arrived. The very coinage of the term 24/7 and “real time” (usually as a virtue!) confirms the ubiquitous social reality of “total work.” Fast-time activities absolutely crowd out slow-time alternatives. The now eclipses the timeless. And we are becoming diminished creatures in the process.

By coincidence, this week’s issue of The New Yorker has a major article by Margaret Talbot on the use of “neuro-enhancing drugs” that are increasingly being taken to boost one’s cognitive performance. There is apparently a large underground culture of people – students, business executives, poker players and others seeking a competitive mental edge – who take drugs like Adderall and modafinil to stay awake, alert and mentally engaged, especially for tasks that require sustained attention. The whole idea is to prolong one’s productivity and efficiency.

Taking drugs to prolong one’s productive engagement becomes a new way adapt one’s very body and mind to modern demands for “efficiency.” Why remain a normal human being when one can use chemicals to super-charge one’s metabolism in order to meet the harsh imperatives of a college education, business negotiations, international travel and general multitasking? Defenders liken the neuro-enhancing drugs to drinking coffee. But that’s a rationalization; no one really knows how safe these productivity boosters are over the long term.

The scary things is that we are slowly “papering over” the forms of human consciousness that we regard as gratuitous….yet which history has shown are essential to a meaningful life. We are sabotaging those inner capacities of consciousness that we need to be present to others and ourselves.

Yet this is no Brave New World imposed by a totalitarian state; we are “voluntarily” doing it to ourselves. While there is certainly a voluntary aspect to using neuro-enhancing drugs, in other respects our cultural norms of efficiency and busyness are encouraging this abuse. When your everyday life is saturated by email, cell phones, voicemail and texting, it’s not a big leap to take a drug that will help you survive the “fast-time” norms of modern life.

In his lecture, David Levy called for an “information environmentalism” to help educate people about the myriad and aggressive forms of mental pollution afflicting our lives: advertising, telemarketing, junk mail, radio and TV, and various digital media. Perhaps we can begin to push back on the cognitive overload, he suggested, and recover some modicum of silence. That’s the purpose of the “Do Not Call” list to prevent unsolicited telemarketing calls, for example.

We might also begin to design physical spaces with contemplative needs in mind (think of the Library of Congress’ reading room, for example). Many businesses have discovered that they can make money by offering consumers the opportunity to “buy back” the quiet that has been taken from us. The Bose noise-canceling headphones are marketed in this fashion.

I liked how Levy put it: “We need the equivalent of old-growth forests and marshlands in our mental lives.”

For more about David Levy’s work on the topic of information overload and the need to recover contemplative mind, it’s worth chasing down a special issue of the journal Ethics and Information Technology that Levy guest-edited in December 2007 (vol. 9, no. 4). Entitled “Information, Silence and Sanctuary,” the issue contains six thoughtful essays on a topic that deserves far more awareness. Unfortunately, the journal is locked behind a paywall, so you may be university access to read it. Another person worth consulting is Ivan Illich, who wrote about silence as a commons.

Given the powerful economic forces that have a self-interest in colonizing our consciousness (marketers routinely talk about seizing “mindshare”), devising effective ways to protect our contemplative consciousness is going to be a formidable challenge indeed. But on the other hand, this is not a struggle we can avoid. The alternative is a jittery, jagged postmodern insanity.