The Farm Book: Bob and Betty visit Uncle John (1910) is a children’s story with a strong pedagogical twist. The book traces the trip of two New York City children, Bob and Betty, as they visit their Uncle John on his New England farm. This depiction of farm life is rife with detail about the production and journey of milk from a farm to children’s tables. Characteristic of many of Smith’s children’s stories, The Farm Book responds to Smith’s acute awareness of technological breakthroughs and social change. The tone of the book is nostalgic for a hidden and lost life.
Though Bob and Betty come into the farm with fascinated wonder, they are born into the blinded world of New York City. Following the book’s description of milk production and distribution, the book pans out to view the consumers:
“The next morning the milk would be in the great cities and towns, for sale at the grocery stores, and delivered at the doors. The milkman, before daybreak would get it from the cars and make his rounds, –to the stores, where people through the day could come and buy, and also from house to house, leaving the bottles on the doorsteps, while inside little girls and boys were still fast asleep. When they did wake up and come to the table to have their breakfasts, they drank this nice fresh milk without ever knowing where it came from.”
In this passage, the sleeping children function as a point of identification for Smith’s child reader, who presumably has no knowledge of a farm’s operations. Though the book works to take these children behind the scenes of the farm, this moment points to them as culpably ignorant and still outside the experienced realm of Bob and Betty. The milk appears effortless and unmediated to the child, who does not know the labor and distance behind it. Like the child consuming Smith’s painstakingly-detailed pictures, which appear an unmediated image to the child, the milk consumer is alienated from the source and labor of the good.
One of the most striking details of The Farm Book is its frequent disjuncture between image and text. In one picture of a milking parlor, the picture contains a detail that is entirely overlooked in the text: a dairy calf. The image contains six dairy mothers in stanchions and a single tethered male calf looking at the milking. This detail is one of the most overlooked aspects of milk production; That is, in order to produce milk, the dairy cow must birth calves, from whom this milk is taken. This picture’s acknowledgment of the calf displays Smith’s acute awareness of the process and deliberate omission of it within the text. The book often illuminates in pictorial detail what it omits in words.
A recent New York Times article reported on the looming death of picture books, which have seen decreased sales as parents push their children to read text-heavy books at an earlier age. The article acknowledged that parents often overlook the critical thinking skills that develop when children are forced to create associations with images and bridge logical gaps from text to image. The Farm Book contains an instant of this, where the image forces a question that is unacknowledged by the text.
