Cooking the jam books: home jam making, inequality, and cultural sustainability in the jam-making literature of the UK and USA

Abstract Homemade jam is commonly portrayed in the public sphere as local, sustainable, wholesome, and small-scale, much like other traditional and now generally optional domestic food practices, from bread baking to gardening. These practices are often imagined and articulated in opposition to consumer culture: the micro-scale, sustainable, environmentally situated, frugal, moral, and socially embedded homemade versus the global, resource heavy, profligate, consumerist, and store bought Bone (2009); Christensen, Southern Cultures, 31(1), 15–42 (2015); Click and Ridberg, Environmental Communication, 4(3) 301–317 (2010); Schmidt, Journal of Folklore Research, 59(2), 101–120 (2022). Looking at a century of cookbooks in the USA and Scotland, however, reveals that these oppositions are not new. Put into context through reference to historical data and literature, the cookbooks show an imagining of homemade jam that demonstrates how narratives of a thrifty or frugal home and a gendered labor model of food production have persisted over a century even as they have invoked the concerns of sustainability specific to each generation. This model makes women responsible for the sustainability of home and homelife in the face of potential familial, personal, and global catastrophe in a way that perpetuates the unsustainable division of labour. Further, it may hide the ways that sustainability reinforces other systematic inequalities in food and global agriculture systems, such as legacies of colonialism and racialized labour practices. As thinking on sustainability has shifted from individual consumption to systems (Shove & Spurling, 2019, p. 3), jam as a case study reveals how a single product within the food system can pit the pillars of sustainability against each other. Making jam at home, while now rationalized through a lens of environmental responsibility, remains haunted by the ghost of an early twentieth-century thrifty housewife.