Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  Note carefully that, in home-cooking, there are absent these great necessities of progress — specialisation and competition, as well as the wide practical experience which is almost as essential. Go among the most backward peasantry of any country and compare the “home-cooking” of each nation in its present form, with the specialised cooking of the best hotels, clubs, or of those great official or private entertainments which employ the professional cook. It is rare, of course, to find home-cooking wholly unaffected by social cooking, for man, as an ultra-domestic character, learns something elsewhere and brings it home; but the point to be insisted on is that the development in cooking comes from outside the home, and does not originate in it. Still, in spite of all our progress, the great mass of mankind eats two meals at home; women and children, three.

  The preparation of food is still the main business of housekeeping; its labour, the one great labour of the place; its cost, the main expense. In building, the conveniences for this trade — kitchen, dining-room, pantry, cupboard, and cellar — require a large part of the outlay, and the furnishing of these with linen, china, and silver, as well as the wooden and iron articles, adds heavily to the list. The wife and mother still has, for her main duty, the management of the family food supply, even if she is not the principal worker, and the maintenance of domestic service, to keep our food system in motion, is one of the chief difficulties of modern life. Nine-tenths of our women “do their own work,” as has been before shown. Those nine-tenths of the female population — as well as the majority of servants — expend most of their labour in the preparation of food and the cleansing processes connected with it.

  With all this time, labour, and expense given to the feeding of humanity, what are the results? How are we educated in knowledge and taste as to right eating? What are our general food habits? To these questions it may be promptly answered that no other animal is so depraved in its feeding habits as man; no other animal has so many diseases of the alimentary system. The dog ranks next to us in diseases, and shares our home-cooking. The hog, which we most highly recommend, is “corn-fed,” not reared on our remnants of the table. The long and arduous labours of public-spirited men have lifted our standards of living in many ways. Public sanitation, beginning outside and slowly driven in on the reluctant home, has lowered our death rate in the great filth-diseases which used to decimate the world. But the food diseases are not lessened. Wrong eating and wrong drinking are responsible for an enormous proportion of our diseases and our crimes, to say nothing of the still larger average of unhealthiness and unhappiness in which we live. Can we get at the causes of this department of human trouble? and, when found, do they bear any relation to our beloved custom of home-cooking and home-eating? We can — and they do. The trouble springs from two main features: bad food — insufficient, oversufficient, ill-chosen, or ill-prepared; and our own ignorance and lack of self-control.

  Consider the bad food first. Food is produced all over the earth, passes through many hands, and is finally selected by the housewife. She is not a trained expert, and can never be while she confines herself to serving one house. She does not handle quantities sufficient or cater for consumers enough to gain large knowledge of her business. She is, in nine cases out of ten, limited financially in her buying power. These conditions make the food market particularly open to adulteration, and to the offering of inferior materials. The individual housewife cannot herself discriminate in all the subtleties of adulterated food, nor has she the time or the means to secure expert tests of her supplies. Moreover, her separate purchasing power is so small that it cannot intimidate the seller; he has ignorance and a small purse to deal with, and he deals with them accordingly.

  The purchase of food in quantities by trained buyers would lift the grade of our supplies at once. No man is going to waste time and money in adulteration subject to daily analysis, or in offering stale, inferior articles which will not appear saleable to the trained eye. The wholesale poisoning of babies by bad milk is an evil our city governments are seeking to combat, but the helpless anarchy of a million ignorant homes, unorganised, untrained, and obliged to get the milk at once, renders our governmental efforts almost vain. Insufficient food is owing, in part, to economic causes, and in part to ignorance of what the body needs. On the economic side comes in a most important view of the home as a food purveyer. The private purchase and preparation of food is the most expensive method. It is wonderful to see how people cling to their notion of “the economy” of home-cooking. By the simplest business laws, of world-wide application, the small purchaser has to pay the largest price. The expenses incident to the re-retailing of food, from the apples rotting on the ground in New York State to the apples we purchase at twenty cents a quart for New York City tables, form a large part of the cost of living. Thousands of middlemen thrive like leeches on the long, slow current of food material, as it pours in myriad dribbling streams from the great sources of production, far away, into our innumerable kitchen doors.

  In a city block there are, let us say, two hundred families, which, at our usual average of five individuals to a family, would number one thousand persons. The thousand persons should consume, we will say, five hundred quarts of milk a day. The purchase of five hundred quarts of milk and the proportionate cream, as well as butter, would maintain a nice little dairy — several blocks together would maintain a large one. Your bustling restaurant proudly advertises “Milk and cream fresh every day from our own dairies!” But your beloved home has no such purchasing power, but meekly absorbs pale cultures of tuberculosis and typhoid fever at eight cents a quart. The poorer people are, the more they pay for food, separately. The organised purchasing power of these same people would double their food supply, and treble it.

  Besides the expense entailed in purchasing is that of private preparation. First, the “plant” is provided. For our two hundred families there are two hundred stoves, with their utensils. The kitchen, and all that it contains, with dining-rooms, etc., have been already referred to, but should be held firmly in mind as a large item in rent and furnishing. Next, there is the labour. Two hundred women are employed for about six hours a day each, — twelve hundred working hours, — at twenty cents an hour. This means two hundred and forty dollars a day, or sixteen hundred and eighty dollars a week, that the block of families is paying to have its wastefully home-purchased food more wastefully home-cooked. Of course, if these cooks are the housewives, they do not get the money; but the point is, that this much labour is worth that amount of money, and that productive energy is being wasted. What ought it to cost? One trained cook can cook for thirty, easily; three, more easily, for a hundred. The thousand people mentioned need, in largest allowance, thirty cooks — and the thirty cooks, organised, would not need six hours a day to do the same work, either. Thirty cooks, even at ten dollars a week, would be but three hundred dollars, and that is some slight saving as against sixteen hundred and eighty!

  We have not mentioned fully another serious evil. “Insufficient food” would be easily removable from our list by a more economical method of buying and cooking it. The other element of insufficiency — ignorance, — would go also, if we had skilful and learned cooks and caterers instead of unskilled and unlearned amateurs, who know only how to cater to the demands of hungry children and injudicious men at home. Wise temperance workers know that many men drink because they are not properly fed; and women, too, consume tea and coffee to make up in stimulants for the lack of nutrition about which they know nothing. Under this same head comes the rest of that list, the over-sufficient, ill-chosen, and ill-prepared food. It is not simply that the two hundred amateur cooks (whether they be permanent wife or transient servant, they are all, in a business sense, amateurs, — ask a real cook!) waste money by their sporadic efforts, but their incapacity wastes our blood in our veins. We do not die, swift and screaming, from some sharp poison administered through malice; but our poor stomachs are slowly fretted by grease-hardened particles, and wearied ou
t by heavy doses of hot dough. Only iron vigour can survive such things.

  “It is ill-chosen,” is one charge against home-cooking. What governs our choice? Why does a German eat decaying cabbage and mite-infested cheese, an American revel in fat-soaked steak and griddle-cakes, a Frenchman disguise questionable meats with subtly-blended spices, and so on, through the tastes of all the nations and localities? It is environment and heredity that governs us — that’s all. It is not knowledge, not culture and experience, not an enlightened taste, or the real choice of a trained mind capable of choosing.

  A child is fed by his mother, who transmits remote ancestral customs, unchanged by time. Children are hungry and like to eat. The young stomach is adapted to its food supply; it grows accustomed to it and “likes” it, — and the man continues to demand the doughnuts, the sauerkraut, the saleratus biscuit, which he “likes.” One ghastly exception should be taken to this smooth statement. I have said that “the young stomach is adapted to its food supply.” Alas, alas! This is true of those who survive; but think of the buried babies, — of the dear, dead children, of the “diseases incidental to childhood,” — and question if some part of that awful death-list is not due to our criminal ignorance of what is proper food! There is no knowledge, save the filtering down of ancient customs and what the private cook can pick up from house to house; no experience, save that gained by practising on one’s own family or the family of one’s employer — and I never heard of either wife or servant gathering statistics as to who lived and who died under her cooking — no special training; and no room or time or means to learn! It would be a miracle if all should survive.

  The ignorance which keeps us so ill-fed is an essential condition of home-cooking. If we had only home-shoe-making, or home-doctoring, or home-tailoring — barbering — what you please — we should show the same wide-spread ignorance and lack of taste. What we have learned in cooking comes from the advance of that great branch of human industry in its free social field, and that advance has reacted to some degree on the immovable home.

  Next consider self-control, the lack of which is so large a factor in our food diseases. We have attained some refinement of feeling in painting, music, and other arts; why are we still so frankly barbaric in our attitude toward food? Why does modern man, civilised, educated, cultured, still keep his body in a loathsome condition, still suffer, weaken, and die, from foul food habits? It is not alone the huge evil of intemperance in drink, or simple gluttony; but the common habits of our young girls, serenely indulging in unlimited candy, with its attendant internal consequences; or of our cultured women, providing at their entertainments a gross accumulation of unwholesome delicacies, with scarcely more discrimination than was shown by Heliogabalus. We eat what we like, and our liking is most crude and low.

  The position of the woman who feeds us — the wife and mother — is responsible for this arrest of development. She is not a free cook, a trained cook, a scientific cook; she belongs to the family. She must cook for the man because he pays for it. He maintains the home — and her — largely for that very purpose. It is his home, his table, his market bill; and, if John does not like onions, or pork, or cereals, they do not appear. If Mrs. Peterkin paid for it, and John was cook, why John would cook to please her! In two ways is Mrs. Peterkin forced to cater to John’s appetite; by this plain, economic fact, that it is his food she is cooking, and by the sexuo-economic fact that “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” For profit and for love — to do her duty and to gain her ends — in all ways, the home cook is forced to do her home cooking to please John. It is no wonder John clings so ardently to the custom. Never again on earth will he have a whole live private cook to himself, to consider, before anything else, his special tastes and preferences. He will get better food, and he will have to get used to it. His tastes will be elevated by the quality of the food, instead of the quality of the food being adapted solely to his tastes. To the children, again, the mother caters under direct pressure of personal affection. It is very, very hard to resist the daily, yea, tri-daily, demands of those we love.

  It is this steady, alluring effort of subservient love which keeps us still so primitively self-indulgent in our food habits. The mother-love of a dumb animal may teach her what is right for her young to eat, but it does not teach the human mother. Ask any doctor, any trained nurse, anyone who has watched the children of the poor. If the children of the rich are more wisely fed, it is not because of any greater amount of mother-love, but of some degree of mother-education. Motherhood and wifehood do not teach cooking.

  What we need in our system of feeding the world is not instinct, affection, and duty, but knowledge, practice, and business methods. Those who are fitted by natural skill and liking to be cooks should cook, and many should profit by their improved products. Scientific training, free from the tender pressure of home habits, would soon eliminate our worst viands; and, from the wide choice offered by a general field of patronage, there would appear in time a cultivated taste. Greater freedom for personal idiosyncrasy would be given in this general field of choice, yet a simpler average would undoubtedly be formed. Great literature and great music were never developed when the bard performed for his master only.

  We, keeping our food system still on this miserable basis of private catering to appetite, are thereby prevented from studying it with a view to race improvement. The discoveries of the food specialist and scientific dietist are lost in the dark recesses of a million homes, in the futile, half-hearted efforts of unskilled labour. What the immediate family “likes” is the governing law; no matter how wise may be the purpose of the mother-cook. With most of us food is scarcely thought of in its real main use — to supply bodily waste with judiciously combined materials.

  The home-bred appetite cries out for “mother’s cooking,” with no more idea of its nutritive values than has a child. This is most remarkable among our enormous farming population, yet there most absolutely the case. The mechanic or business man has no dealings whatever with his food except to eat it. He gives over his life’s health, his daily strength, into the hands of his beloved female domestic; and asks nothing whatever of her production except that it “taste good.”

  But the farmer has a different trade. With him the whole business of his life is to feed things that they may grow. He has to replenish the soil with the elements his crops exhaust, in order to reap the best crops, the most profit. And even more directly with his live-stock; from hen to horse, with pigs, sheep, and cattle, he has constantly to consider what to put into them in order to be sure of the product, not too much grain for the horse, not too much hay; enough “green feed” in season; the value of the silo, the amount of salt necessary; the effect of beets, of wild onions, in the grass and in the butter; what to give hens in winter to make them lay; how to regulate the diet for more milk and less cream, or for less milk and more cream; how to fatten, how to strengthen, how to improve — in all ways the farmer has to realise the importance of food values in his business.

  Yet that same man, day after day, consumes his own food and sees his children fed, to say nothing of the mother of his children, without ever giving one thought to the nutritive values of that food. There must be enough to satisfy hunger, and it must “taste good,” according to his particular brand of ancestry, his race habits, and early environment; but, beyond that, nothing is required.

  The farmer has assistance in his business. He shares in the accumulated experience of many farmers, before him and about him. There are valuable experiments being made in his behalf by the Bureau of Agriculture. He has trade papers to bring him the fruits of the world’s progress in this line. Agriculture is one of the world’s great functions, and has made magnificent progress. But humaniculture has no Bureau, no Secretary, no Experiment Stations; unless we count the recent experiments in boric-acid diet. The most valuable livestock on earth are casually fed by the haphazard efforts of any and every kind of ignorant woman; hired servants or marr
ied servants, as the case may be; dull, shortsighted, overworked women, far too busy in “doing the cooking” ever to study the science of feeding humanity. No science could ever make progress in such hands. Science must rest on broad observation, on the widest generalisation and deduction, on careful experiment and reconsideration.

  This is forever impossible at home. Until the food laboratory entirely supersedes the kitchen there can be no growth. Many of us, struggling to sit fast between two stools, seeing the imperative need of scientific feeding for humanity, yet blindly clinging to the separate wife-mother-cook functionary, exhort “the woman” to study all this matter, and cheerfully to devote her life to scientifically feeding her beloved family.

  “The woman” — that is, a woman, any woman, every woman, and that means the deadly Average, the hopelessly Isolated, the handicapped Maternal, with the Lack of Specialisation, the Confusion of other Trades, and the Lack of Incentive. Not until “The woman” in “the home” can everywhere manifest a high degree of skill as a doctor, as an architect, as a barber, as anything, can she manifest that high degree as a cook.

  Cooking is an art; cooking is a science; cooking is a handicraft; cooking is a business. None of these can ever grow without following the laws of all industrial progress — specialisation, contact and exchange, legitimate competition, and the stimulus of large world-incentives. When we have these we shall be able to improve our kind of animal as much as we do other kinds. We cannot arbitrarily by breeding, but we can by nutrition and education — to an unknown extent. Nutrition, properly adjusted, nutrition for the human animal, has hardly been thought of by the home cook. The inexorable limit of our Home-cooking is the Home.