How We Are Fed

James Franklin Chamberlain - 1923

This reader, employed as a textbook in Alberta schools in the 1920s (“Alberta School”), creatively approaches geography lessons through the accessible medium of food. The author, James Chamberlain, writes, “The natural connecting link between the immediate surroundings and the outside world is the present daily life of the home,” a truism in a period when new modes of transportation made for faster and less expensive global trade. The Canadian reader might learn about the structures of communities and nations and the interdependence of individuals through topics as diverse as market gardening, fishing, rice, sugar, pasta, coffee and tea plantations, coconut and banana trees, dates, oranges, and nuts. Priorities and judgements of the period are clear in the book’s celebration of the scientific division of labour, as well as its separation of the “civilized” from the “uncivilized.” The discussion of restaurants is another reminder of an urbanizing landscape. This copy may have been used by a German-speaking student: she glosses “curdle” as gerinnen and translates “whey” as molke on the following page.