A slogan in every pot: cookbooks as protest literature.

• Author: Lueders, Bill

As important as we may regard the choices that go into eating, we don't usually think of cookbooks as being tools for achieving political ends. A newly published essay suggests they have in fact served that function for decades.

"Through communicating a moral vision of how day-to-day life should be conducted, cookbooks contain an implicit, and sometimes explicit, politics," write the essay's authors, Laura J. Miller, an associate professor of sociology at Brandeis University, and Emilie Hardman, a librarian at Harvard. "There are times when cookbooks act as important beacons of social change, drawing far-flung readers into communities of political dissent."

The essay, titled "By the Pinch and the Pound," tracks the evolution of vegetarian and vegan cookbooks from the nineteenth century to the present. It is included in a new book called Protest on the Page, by three academics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with essays on such other atypical protest topics as the defense of comic books in the post-World War II era, when they were seen as promoting juvenile delinquency.

Miller and Hardman, in true academic fashion, catalogue the various arguments for not eating meat or using animal products, including concerns about ethics and the environment and a desire to keep one's distance...