It looks like the way the world should look all the time: It’s noontime on a shivery cold Thursday in February, but inside the community center of Woodside Village in Oak Bluffs, the immense room is awash in light. A tall Christmas tree still holds its full regalia of ornaments, and at the piano accomplished musician Michael Haydn plays a robust Mozart sonata.

Every profession seems to produce a savant who can write about it with a sensibility that few equate with workers in that field. For chefs that writer is Anthony Bourdain, and in the same field, going farther back was George Orwell as a hapless busboy in Down and Out in Paris and London, letting us in on the full horror below-stairs at swank European hotels.

HIGH ON THE HOG: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America. By Jessica B. Harris. Bloomsbury, January 2011. 304 pages, photographs. $26, hardcover.

It amazes new students of ar chaeology that the most essential insights into a bygone community may be found in the humble section of rubble called the kitchen midden. It’s here that broken plate ware is examined, along with iron pots and pans and broken ceramic jars containing trace elements of oil from which experts reassemble the daily fabric of a past society’s life.

Mrs. Baker, played by the irrepressible 10-year-old local pop diva Samantha Cassidy, wants a baby and Mr. Baker, the similarly pre-teened Oliver Carson, does not. (On alternate days last weekend these characters were performed by Danielle Hopkins and Jesse Dawson.) Mr. Baker wants a big fat, gingerbread cookie to eat. They fight/sing about it: “Food feeds all your problems unless your problems are food.”