Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives

by Carolyn Steel

  Home-maker, intellectual, scientist, engineer: American housewives had been through a few paradigm shifts by the start of the First World War – as had their kitchens, from hearth to galley, laboratory and factory. By the time European architects faced the task of postwar reconstruction, the ‘engineered’ kitchen was a ready-made prototype that would fit right into their new way of thinking. The mood in Europe after the war was evangelical: designers, philosophers and politicians alike felt the need to build a new world that would liberate mankind not just from the horrors of war, but from the social iniquities that preceded it. For that, they needed not just new sorts of buildings, but a whole new approach to living in them.

  The role of women in creating this new world was recognised by one country in particular. Germany, like America, had a long-established women’s movement, whose members had since the 1880s been addressing issues of household efficiency, the teaching of domestic economy in schools and so on. The value of their work was recognised by architects such as Bruno Taut, who in 1924 summed up his view of the ideal architect–client relationship with the motto ‘Der Architekt denkt, die Hausfrau lenkt’ (the architect thinks, the housewife guides).53 When Christine Frederick’s book was translated into German after the war, it found an eager readership, among them the Austrian-born female architect Grete Lihotzky, creator of one of the most influential designs of the twentieth century, the ‘Frankfurt kitchen’. Partly inspired by a railway carriage galley, the Frankfurt kitchen was essentially a scaled-down version of its American predecessor. Designed to be cheap and compact, it had a number of space-saving devices, such as a fold-down ironing board and a series of pull-out metal hoppers (à la Frederick) for basic ingredients such as rice, sugar and flour. It was the first kitchen ever to be mass-produced – more than 10,000 were installed in Frankfurt’s social housing programme during the 1920s – and it was the prototype for the modern fitted kitchen in ubiquitous use today.

  Despite its ingenious design and commercial success, the Frankfurt kitchen was not universally loved. Designed around the body movements of a housewife performing her daily tasks, it effectively cut women off from the rest of the home – and from their own families. The kitchen was found to be inflexible: too small for two people to cook in at once; impossible for children to play in (the pull-out hoppers were temptingly within toddler range); and certainly too small to eat in. All this was deliberate on the part of Lihotzky: by the 1920s, the idea of cooking and eating in the same space was considered unhygienic. For Lihotzky, cooking was a chore, and must be separated from its object, the meal. As she herself put it, ‘What is life today actually made of? Firstly, it consists of work, secondly of relaxing, company, pleasure.’54 Liked or not, the Frankfurt kitchen’s success ensured that the no-nonsense – and no-pleasure – approach to cooking pioneered by American feminists would have a lasting impact in the West. Once again, cooking was banished to the invisible parts of the house; only this time, the mistress of the house was banished with it. Far from releasing housewives from drudgery as intended, the Frankfurt kitchen – and the millions of galley kitchens that followed in its wake – would ensure that cooking would remain the isolated, thankless task that polite society had always believed it to be.

  The Frankfurt kitchen exposed a fatal flaw within early modernist thinking that has plagued approaches to architecture ever since. With the best of intentions – the building of a better society – modernism tried to create a world so perfect it would liberate men and women from their own imperfections. Household engineering became social engineering: the creation of rational buildings that demanded rational people to live in them. Of course the whole thing was an illusion – a sleight of hand that owed most of its power to the undeniable beauty of much modernist design. Yet the image was powerful enough to stick. Even today, the idea that society’s salvation might come through design alone seems, at least to some, perfectly plausible.

  The man chiefly responsible for promulgating this vision of a brave new world was the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. For him, the cluttered interiors of fin de siècle Europe reflected the ‘crushing bourgeois values’ of ‘an intolerable period which could not last’.55 Nothing short of a complete physical and moral purge was required, and in a series of caustic essays, including his groundbreaking manifesto of 1923, Vers une Architecture, Le Corbusier showed his readers the way. ‘Demand bare walls in your bedroom, your living room and your dining room,’ he commanded. ‘Once you have put ripolin [whitewash] on your walls you will be master of yourself. And you will want to be precise, to be accurate, to think clearly.’56 As the architect Mark Wigley has observed, Le Corbusier used the colour white as a sort of architectural hygiene, much as men in the eighteenth century might have put on a white shirt instead of washing.57 Le Corbusier believed that by living in a pure environment, modern man would be purged of his imperfections both physically and morally: ‘His home is clean. There are no more dark, dirty corners. Everything is shown as it is. There comes inner cleanness …’58

  The stripped, white building was to become the leitmotif of modernism, an image fixed by the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung of 1927, an international exhibition of model housing designed by a who’s who of twentieth-century architects, including Peter Behrens, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Hans Scharoun and Bruno Taut. The Weissenhof housing – clean, pure and white to a fault – had enormous impact, as did the series of modernist tomes that followed in its wake, such as F.R.S. Yorke’s seminal survey of 1934, The Modern House. But as Yorke’s book illustrates, the socialist intentions of early modernism hid an underlying paradox. ‘We do not need large houses, for we have neither large families to fill them nor domestics to look after them,’ he wrote, yet the iconic villas in his book suggested otherwise.59 All but a few had separate kitchens linked to substantial servants’ quarters.60 Even Le Corbusier’s supposedly proletarian Maison Citrohan, the prototypical ‘machine for living in’, had a separate kitchen and service entrance with a maid’s room off it.61 Despite Le Corbusier’s pronouncement that everything was ‘shown as it is’, not quite everything was. Modernism glossed over the problem of cooking by putting all its mess behind a wall. As Reyner Banham observed in his book Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, the defining works of the modern movement focused on the pure image of the buildings, rather than on the biological needs of their inhabitants.62

  Contrary to appearances, the immaculate world of modernism involved as much denial as did the era it sought to replace; arguably, even more. At least Victorian house-builders had agonised openly about how to hide the bowels of their buildings; modernists simply edited them out of the frame. Although bodily needs were central to modernist rhetoric, the references were all of the ‘pure’ variety: the need for exercise, light and air. ‘Other’ bodily needs were suppressed. At the Villa Stein-de Monzie, structured by Le Corbusier around a series of outdoor terraces upon which the owners were invited to cavort half-naked, the kitchen was as hidden as that of any Victorian house. Yet official photographs show it to be an immaculate space full of light, its gleaming worktops barely hinting at the use to which they might be put. A carefully arranged raw fish and coffee pot are the only allusions to the room’s real purpose. Designed to be hidden from the owners of the house, the kitchen is nevertheless allowed to appeal directly to the anonymous eye of aesthetic judgement. Whiter and shinier-than-thou even in its dirty bits, the Villa Stein-de Monzie was an icon of wipe-clean architecture: fetishised, purified space that could only be spoiled by the mess of human inhabitation.

  In his 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, the Japanese author Jun’ichiro Tanizaki remarked on this growing tendency in the West to shun the ‘other’ side of human nature – the dark, the dirty, the old, the worn out – in favour of sanitised perfection. ‘Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it,’ he wrote, ‘while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealise it.’63 And in this newly polarised Western view of the human c
ondition, cooking somehow ended up on the ‘wrong’ side: that of filth rather than health, work rather than pleasure, solitude rather than sociability.

  The kitchen at Villa Stein-de Monzie in 1926.

  Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook

  Despite the best efforts of early feminists to raise the status of cooking, they failed to address one essential fact: their contemporaries had no more desire to cook than their ancestors had. Hygiene and efficiency were all very well, but they weren’t much fun – and the fact that every household guru from Catherine Beecher to Grete Lihotzky had denied there was any pleasure to be had from cooking hardly helped. To have admitted that cooking for its own sake might actually be enjoyable would have risked undermining one of the central props of feminism. Better to insist on it as a science or profession; at least that way, one could pretend that it was not the thankless drudgery that, deep down, everyone really believed it to be. With so much subterfuge surrounding their early development, it is hardly surprising that modern domestic kitchens evolved into such ambiguous spaces. By the 1920s they had become highly sophisticated machines for cooking in. The trouble was, no one wanted to cook in them.

  American women had another reason to be reluctant to cook. The Depression meant that increasing numbers were having to go out to work, and for those who remained at home, economic hardship removed any vestiges of pretension about lab-coated housewives, reviving instead the much older tradition of the hardy homesteader’s wife, with her make-do indomitable spirit. The new role was epitomised by American Gothic, a 1930 painting by Grant Wood in which a plainly dressed couple (she with gaze averted, he clutching a pitchfork) stand resolute outside their clapboard Iowan farmhouse. The portrait captured the pioneer spirit of small-town America, but increasing numbers of women no longer lived there. They lived in cities and worked for a living, and were still expected to conjure up wholesome meals for their husbands every night. The stage was set for the creation of one of the twentieth century’s greatest fictions, the domestic goddess – the product not of painterly imagination, but of something even more potent: advertising.

  To nascent American food-processing companies, a nation of overworked, guilty housewives presented the perfect market for their new convenience foods. All the industry needed to do was to press home the message that cooking delicious meals was a housewife’s sacred duty. The bakery giant General Mills was one of the first to get in on the act, creating in 1926 the first official domestic goddess, ‘Betty Crocker’, a fictional character with her own radio show, in which she interviewed celebrity guests and dispensed domestic advice and recipes. Betty’s message was simple: a happy home was one filled with the smell of fresh baking. ‘Good things baked in the kitchen,’ she said, ‘will keep romance far longer than bright lipstick.’ The programme attracted a huge following: 40 home economists had to be employed to answer all its correspondence, amounting to hundreds of thousands of letters every year.64 Rival food companies soon set up their own propaganda machines, with several starting their own women’s magazines filled with cookery tips laced with the same subliminal message. ‘Hitler threatens Europe,’ ran one advert in The American Home, ‘but Betty Haven’s boss is coming to dinner and that’s what really counts.’65

  Having set the entry level to domestic deity impossibly high, food companies offered mere mortals a short cut to achieving it – by using their products. Magazines brimmed with improbable recipes involving processed foods, such as one, cited by the historian Harvey Levenstein in his book Paradox of Plenty, that suggested mixing Campbell’s split pea soup with Ancora green turtle soup, adding sherry to the result and topping it with whipped cream.66 Extraordinary though this concoction sounds now, it was far from unique for the time. For a couple of decades at least, the novelty of processed foods seemed to have persuaded the entire American nation to simply switch off its taste buds. The public fascination with opening cans of soup was marvellous for food-processing companies while it lasted, but by the end of the Second World War, new convenience foods were needed to satisfy increasingly sophisticated customers. Betty Crocker cake mixtures, launched by General Mills in the late 1940s, were the result. The initial products only required water to be added to achieve a delicious ‘home-baked’ result, but the company soon realised that if housewives were asked to add an egg as well, they really felt they were baking. The egg was a ruse; a way of deceiving women into believing they were cooking properly.

  By encouraging housewives to cheat, food-processing companies achieved the double whammy of raising the status of cooking, while preventing people from actually doing it. Rather than getting the satisfaction of baking a cake (which, after all, takes hardly any more effort than adding an egg and some water to a mixture of flour and cocoa powder), women were lured into paying for the privilege of pretending they had. Throughout the 1940s, the amount Americans spent on food rose steadily – the opposite of the normal trend in an era of prosperity. People were spending more on food, not because they were buying better quality, but because they were paying for the ‘added value’ of convenience. Food industry profits soared, thanks mainly to middle-class women – most of whom would have been perfectly capable – being persuaded they couldn’t cook.

  By 1953, Fortune magazine was noting America’s ‘relentless pursuit of convenience’, in which one could ‘buy an entire turkey dinner: frozen, apportioned, packaged. Just heat and serve.’67 Ready meals had arrived, just as family lifestyles were relaxing, allowing food processors to move out of the ‘pretend-you-cooked-it-yourself’ strand into a new leisure market. TV dinners became the new height of sophistication, eaten, for maximum effect, off specially designed plastic lap-trays. For the first time in history, food was fun, even trendy, all of which made domestic kitchens seem suddenly very out of date. In their influential 1945 book Tomorrow’s House, the architects George Nelson and Henry Wright argued that the galley kitchen was no longer appropriate to modern life:

  Servants, as a group, are disappearing. World War One took women out of domestic occupations and put them into offices. World War Two took a vastly greater number and put them into factories. The middle-class families and the rich, thrown more and more on their own resources, have been casting a jaundiced eye on the minimum kitchen.68

  The answer, argued the authors, was to merge kitchen and living room, replacing the ‘hospital operating-room atmosphere’ of galley kitchens with a space that was ‘pleasant to live in as well as work in … thanks to the incorporation of natural wood surfaces, bright colour, and fabrics’.69 It was a radical vision. Never before had kitchens been admitted to polite society; now they were to become part of the furniture. Open-plan kitchens were the new must-have accessories of cutting-edge ‘contemporary’ homes: trophy cabinets brimming with gadgetry to show off to one’s friends. The ‘dream kitchen’ even became a weapon of the Cold War, when Richard Nixon tried to persuade Nikita Khrushchev of the merits of the West by showing off a mocked-up version at the 1959 Moscow Trade Fair.

  With the open-plan kitchen, the humblest room in the house finally had its moment in the sun; but even in this, the kitchen’s finest hour, there were rumbles of dissent among its intended users. Most American housewives already resented having to cook. Now they were expected to do so without burning the roast, dropping peelings on the floor, looking resentful, or (worst of all) being allowed to cheat. Cooking might have come out of the closet, but as far as most women were concerned, it could go straight back in there. Before long, separate kitchens were making a comeback – this time not in order to hide the fact that people were cooking in them, but in order to hide the fact that they weren’t.

  By the late 1960s, instead of burning the roast, many women had taken to burning their bras. The new politics of feminism saw cooking as the oppression of the housewife; something to ‘shackle her time, keeping her from more stimulating endeavors’.70 It was a return to the rhetoric of a century earlier, and to the women’s movement pioneers who saw cooking as a tedious chore. After
a century of rebellion and invention, women were back where they had started. In many ways, the rejection of cooking by women’s lib was more of a reaction to the fake domestic goddess invented by food companies than it was to anything real; yet their attitude opened up new opportunities for those very companies. Refusing to cook became a badge of honour among feminists. From now on, serving up frozen pizza was not only socially acceptable; it was a positive political statement.

  Postwar British housewives were just as keen as their American counterparts to cast off the shackles of culinary oppression, and the ‘relentless pursuit of convenience’ soon crossed the Atlantic. Birds Eye fish fingers and frozen peas were the first such foods to become national treasures in the 1960s, followed by Vesta curry and Cadbury’s Smash in the 1970s, M&S chilled ready meals in the 1980s, and their many imitators ever since.71 Just as they had done on the other side of the pond, convenience foods became the national panacea, first for housewives, then for householders at large: salvation from the curse of having to cook. By 2003, the British convenience-food sector was worth £17 billion; by 2011 it is predicted to reach £33.9 billion.72 As the ex-head of the M&S food division Clinton Silver put it, ‘Feminism owes an enormous amount to Marks & Spencer, and vice versa.’73

  One could argue that we Anglo-Saxons have been ill served by the food industry: cheated out of the more positive view of cooking that we might otherwise have developed. But if that is the case, how come other European countries have survived with their culinary traditions intact? A recent survey of European eating habits found that in Germany, the home of the Frankfurt kitchen, seven out of ten women ‘love to cook’.74 The same was true of Spanish and Italian women, while 41 per cent of French adults were described as ‘traditional cooks who enjoy cooking’.75 Of course there are many reasons for these cultural differences. Rural traditions have remained stronger in many parts of continental Europe than in Britain, so helping to preserve local culinary cultures: food ‘like Mother used to make’. In most parts of the Mediterranean, traditional family structures (the sine qua non of family meals) also survive relatively intact. Last but not least, the postwar ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America has ensured that, for better or worse, our culinary as well as our political fortunes have been inextricably linked.