The Free Library’s still-pretty-newish Culinary Literacy Center has a two part mission: one, teaching literacy skills through cooking, and two, exploring culinary literacy. If one were to read between the lines there, taking also into account the FLP’s 125-year history and the present-day realities of food in Philadelphia, where one man’s food desert is just a another man’s neighborhood that hasn’t been gentrified yet, you could say that the CLC’s job is to basically de-bougie culinary literacy. Anyone who’s grown up here can tell you: It’s pretty easy to be hoagie-rich and everything-else-poor. But we wonder: Has Philly always dealt with culinary illiteracy? Tonight’s program, with food historian Dr. William Woys Weaver, may shed some light. Weaver has penned more than 15 tomes on food history, and in tonight’s program, he’ll discuss Philly’s deepest (Anglo) culinary roots — the pepperpot soups, the vegetation that would have been most readily available for consumption two or three centuries ago, and so on. There’ll even be some tastings. Please, though, no hoags.

Tickets here.