During the early twentieth century, nutrition science defined a set of ideas that described what Americans needed to eat in order to maintain their personal health and the health of the nation as well. Institutionalized in schools throughout the country by the 1920s, the lunchroom became an arena in which children (and, by extension, their parents) could learn the principles of nutrition and the importance of science in daily life. School lunch programs solved two central problems raised by science and its emphasis on food as a nutrition delivery system. On the one hand, hot lunches promised to protect America’s youth from the scourge of malnutrition. Healthy children, like public education more generally, signaled America’s democratic strength. At the same time, school lunches promised to Americanize immigrant families by teaching children the values of science and health. As Jane Addams, the era’s most well-known social reformer, said, “an Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking … will help her mother to connect the entire family with American food and household habits.” Food and household habits had always been two pillars of cultural identity. In the lunchroom they became pillars of civic culture as well.
THE SEARCH FOR A SCIENTIFIC DIET
Nutrition, perhaps more than other scientific endeavors, blurred the line between science and culture. Developed in nineteenth-century European chemistry laboratories, the science of food was aimed first at improving livestock and agricultural productivity. Only toward the end of the century did scientists begin to apply their discoveries about animal feeding to human health. Unlike animal feed, however, human diet was always and intimately tied to deeply held cultural habits and beliefs. Scientific discoveries regarding the connections between food and health almost inevitably bumped up against a realm of human behavior that was governed more by emotion than reason. People rarely, then or now, eat what they “should” rather than what they want. Nutrition science thus inevitably, if inadvertently, inserted itself into social policy, particularly when it came to the relations among poverty, hunger, and food choices. Hunger and malnutrition, traditionally the central physical manifestations of poverty, appeared ideally suited to scientific remedy. If the poor could learn to eat better for less, one of modern society’s most intractable social problems might be conquered. Rich or poor, nutrition science held out the promise of improved health for all.
Between 1880 and 1930 science informed a generation of social reformers and policy makers who sought to shape American society—and American diets. Dubbed the Progressive Era by historians, this period was marked by an energetic and optimistic effort to bring efficiency, expertise, and rational organization to industry, agriculture, public policy, and the domestic sphere as well. Scientific motherhood, for example, suggested that healthy and successful child-rearing depended as much or more on the knowledge and advice of experts—physicians, teachers, and home economists—as on the accumulated wisdom of mothers and grandmothers. Elevating mundane domestic chores like cooking and cleaning, science also promised to enhance housework and make women’s sphere more efficient and productive.1 In more general terms, science promised to improve public health, eliminate disease, and lengthen life expectancy as well as improve industrial efficiency and promote social order. It was a tall order that spoke to a belief in human progress and social improvement. At the same time, of course, science could as easily reinforce social inequalities as laud democratic progress. The prevailing theories of racial hierarchy and eugenics claimed scientific bases, as did theories like Dr. Edward Clark’s about the “natural” differences between women and men. As a number of scholars have suggested, however, a scientific consciousness permeated popular beliefs at least by the time of the first world war.2
In the United States, as in Europe, the years between 1890 and World War I were marked by unprecedented social and economic transformations. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration signaled at once the tremendous potential of human endeavor and lingering legacies of inequality, including pervasive racial discrimination and a fundamental reluctance to recognize women as full-fledged citizens. On both sides of the Atlantic, industrialization produced enormous wealth for some and unmitigated poverty for others. In modern urban centers, poverty was increasingly visible and the gulf between rich and poor provided space for festering resentment along with opportunities for reform and social renewal. In the United States, social distances were exacerbated by immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe who arrived in unprecedented numbers to work in American industry. Bringing with them languages, cultures, and foodways unfamiliar to native-born white citizens, the newcomers appeared to be both intriguing and threatening. In the American South, racial segregation was solidified and legitimated in Jim Crow laws and the threat of violence by the Ku Klux Klan. Finally, a series of major industrial strikes during the 1880s and 1890s sparked the formation of a national labor movement and legitimated the demands of industrial workers for living wages and an “American standard of living.” In this mix of social tensions, the science of nutrition held out the promise of a base-line opportunity for all Americans. Indeed, a healthy, egalitarian democracy needed to provide nourishment for both the minds and the bodies of its citizens.
Key to Progressive Era reform was a generation of women who appeared on the public scene ready to assert not only their own rights to citizenship but their abilities, indeed, expertise, in social problems. Daughters of the middle class, both white and black, Progressive Era women reformers organized a vast array of organizations and institutions aimed at solving the social problems of the day. Represented most notably by Jane Addams and her settlement house cohort, women reformers across the country addressed housing, health, labor, and education. Labeled by some historians as “maternalists,” women reformers of the Progressive Era represented, as in any social movement, a range of beliefs and strategic goals. Their demands included paved streets and garbage collection in urban immigrant neighborhoods, window screens and sanitation for rural farm families, health services and day-care for children, and social insurance for widows. While women reformers concentrated particular attention on children’s welfare, they also promoted industrial health and safety, consumer protection, and municipal improvements as well. Ultimately, Progressive Era reformers, both men and women, laid the foundations for twentieth-century welfare states. In the United States, women reformers, in many ways, became the architects of public welfare and social policies that were codified into law only during the 1930s.3
Dietetic solutions to social problems had a long history. More than most laboratory scientists, nutritionists understood that their work might hold important implications for everyday life and ordinary people. Indeed, regulation of diet and body dated back to the eighteenth century or earlier. During the nineteenth century, however, bodily discipline and orderly life-styles became intimately linked to discussions about industrial efficiency and the nature of middle-class family life. As one historian put it, “diet discourse” developed into a secular science that had both a moral and a rational component.4 The dual nature of nutrition as a moral and a scientific discipline characterized its practical applications from early on. Thus the science of nutrition was taken up by a wide range of professionals, from home economists and social workers to businessmen and politicians. Dietary theories held particular significance, however, for those working with women and children. Housewives, of course, held the key to family health with every meal they served. Their market decisions, kitchen habits, and household management skills determined the family’s standard of living as much as did the husband’s wage. At the same time, children, particularly those in the captive audience of school classrooms, might be particularly open to new ideas that they would then take home to their parents.5
In the United States, nutrition science influenced social policy largely through the efforts of three individuals. Wilbur O. Atwater, a laboratory scientist, Edward Atkinson, a businessman, and Ellen Richards, founder of the home economics profession, together established the scientific basis for popu
lar ideas about food and nutrition and laid the groundwork for institutional food service. Atwater pioneered in the discovery of vitamins and the idea that it was the nutrient, not the particular food, that was important for healthy development. But even more significant was Atwater’s commitment to building an institutional base for nutrition science and, ultimately, food policy, within the USDA. Edward Atkinson directly applied nutrition science to the question of poverty and standard of living. Wading directly into the era’s fears that industrialization was resulting in increased inequality, he insisted that workers needed only to understand and apply the principles of nutrition science in order to live well on factory wages. Atkinson’s most lasting contribution to dietary reform, however, came through his financial backing for Ellen Richards and her efforts to establish a new profession devoted to bringing scientific methods to the domestic sphere. As one of the founders of home economics, Richards was perhaps the most influential of the three. Her work with diet and nutrition laid the groundwork for institutional food service and, ultimately, for a national school lunch program.
Wilbur O. Atwater translated the chemistry of food into practical, everyday terms. As a chemist at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and later as the first director of the USDA’s Office of Experiment Stations, Atwater spent his career searching for ways to improve agriculture and enhance the work of American farmers. Chemical fertilizers, improved seed strains, and selective livestock breeding all required research and resources that went far beyond the means of most American farmers of the era. In his espousal of what one historian has termed the “transcendent virtue of productivity,” emphasizing the era’s belief in efficiency and productivity, Atwater, perhaps inadvertently, laid the basis for the largescale, mechanized, highly capitalized operations that came to characterize American agriculture in the twentieth century.6 In his work, he hoped to realize the human potential of agricultural improvement for the consumer as well as for the farmer. As Director of Experiment Stations Atwater oversaw the beginning of a major expansion in public funding for agricultural research, including food and nutrition.7 His work thus prefigured what would later become an intimate connection between the Department of Agriculture and American food policy.
Human nutrition was an infant science at the turn of the twentieth century. Like most chemists of his time, Atwater believed that the human body essentially worked like an internal combustion engine. This popular mechanical metaphor suggested that nutrition was simply a matter of putting enough of the right fuel into the human—or animal—engine. During the 1880s chemists identified three distinct types of food/fuel—proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. The amount of energy each food/fuel generated was measured in something called calories.8 Atwater set the stage for future food and agriculture policy by connecting nutrition as fuel not only to animal husbandry and horticulture, but also to human productivity. The key to individual moral and intellectual progress, like The key to agricultural or industrial productivity, Atwater believed, lay in the application of scientific research to daily life, whether on the farm or in the kitchen.9
One of Atwater’s major research projects put him on the cutting edge of international nutrition research. At the end of the nineteenth century chemists in Europe began to isolate some other substances in food besides proteins, carbohydrates, and fats that seemed essential to healthy development. These substances, dubbed “vitamins,” were as necessary for growth and survival as were the traditional food/fuels. Indeed, vitamins seemed to be directly linked to the ability of the human engine to function. In his Experiment Station laboratory, Atwater became one of the first American scientists to identify what later became known as vitamin A. This discovery revolutionized nutrition science. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, vitamins B and C were also isolated. The vitamin theory, known as the “new nutrition,” quickly captured both professional and public attention.10
Atwater’s most lasting contribution to nutrition science was his theory of substitutions. He demonstrated that foods such as eggs and beans supplied the same amount of energy as meat, and fats such as lard had the same nutritional value as butter. Atwater’s theory of food substitutions revolutionized the social meaning of nutrition by suggesting that cheap foods could be perfectly healthful. He went so far as to suggest that housewives should not think about buying milk or meat for their families, but rather should look at food as “nutritive substances.” Under this theory, women could enhance their families’ living standards simply by learning to use inexpensive cuts of meat, lard, and beans. To assist women (and the public in general) in understanding these principles, Atwater published elaborate tables showing the nutrition equivalents among foods and giving the daily amounts of fat, protein, and carbohydrates that people needed to thrive and grow. These tables and equivalents formed what one historian has called the “building blocks for scientific cookery” and remained in use well into the twentieth century.11
Nutrition science moved perhaps too easily from laboratory to social policy. From the start, scientists and reformers articulated two different and not always compatible goals in their work. On the one hand, science promised to modernize and improve American diets generally. It took a while, however, to shift ideas about food away from concerns with hunger per se and into the more encompassing realm of nutrition education and modern diets. Indeed, at first, food reformers focused largely on the health and eating habits of poor people, immigrants, and industrial workers. The earliest studies of human nutrition explored the health of slaves, soldiers, and factory operatives. Pre—Civil War plantation owners in the American South, for example, used ideas about food as fuel to calculate how much to feed slaves in order to make them work most efficiently. Similarly, in England during the “cotton famine” period of industrial unemployment, physicians studied food consumption and nutrition among the thousands of mill workers who found themselves unemployed and hungry. The aim was to figure out the relation of wages to living standards in terms of nutrient requirements.
At its base, nutrition science suggested a relatively simple solution to the period’s endemic poverty. Teach the poor that cheap food was as nutritious as expensive fare and living standards would automatically rise. Intentionally or not, nutrition science fed the notion that social inequality was due to cultural habit rather than economic condition. Ultimately, nutrition science became a significant factor in the raging political debates about wages and living standards.12 Where British trade unionists and socialists, for example, claimed that low wages were at the root of hunger and poverty, conservative politicians used nutrition science to argue that workers simply were not managing their money properly. British psychologist A. V. Hill famously declared, “I should not condemn men for studying human diet, but the motive should be the discovery of scientific facts, not the demonstration that the British working class is underfed.”13
In the United States, one of the most outspoken proponents of nutrition science was an industrialist whose explicit aim was to prove that workers could live well on low wages. Edward Atkinson, capitalist, manufacturer, and free-trade advocate, turned to nutrition science after the Civil War. When the workers in his cotton mill went on strike for higher wages, Atwater determined to prove that they could live decently on the wage he paid. He was convinced that workers regularly squandered their money on unnecessarily expensive foods, and he embarked on a campaign to convince his (and all) workers that they could easily eat better food for less money than their wives were used to spending. Not incidentally, this also meant that he could reduce the pay in his factory without feeling overly guilty about the impact on the workers’ living standards. Indeed, when Atkinson cut his workers’ pay he also “extended considerable effort in instructing them how to purchase and prepare food economically.” The thankful workers, he later claimed, “told me they had been better off on the wages of four days … than they had previously been on the wages of a week.”14 Atkinson’s nutritional solution to low wages earned him the scorn of
labor leaders such as Eugene V. Debs, who dubbed him “Shinbone” and declared that “American workingmen are resolved not to be further degraded, scientifically or otherwise.”15
Undeterred by his critics, Atkinson began touring the country in his mission to bring nutrition science to American workers. His message was that workers could learn to eat better for less. In 1896 he published a book, The Science of Nutrition, in which he estimated that the average manual laborer “need not spend over 24 cents a day for food.”16 At the time, the average industrial wage for white men was around $1.50 per day.17 Atkinson’s plan was particularly attractive, of course, to employers like himself who sought to lower their labor costs. His work gained popular attention, most notably among other industrialists. According to Atwater’s biographer, Andrew Carnegie put a copy of the book in every public library in the nation.18
The social implications of nutrition science, particularly when it came to income and class, could not have been more clear. If workers (or their wives) would simply change their eating (and cooking) habits, their incomes would go farther and their standards of living would not be reduced even in the face of wage cuts. Atkinson spent much of his time and fortune trying to transform the diets of American workers. During the 1890s he promoted his own invention, the “Aladdin Slow Cooker,” as a practical means by which housewives could bring nutrition science into their homes. A forerunner of the modern “crock pot,” the Aladdin Cooker promised to “make a tough old turkey” tender overnight. Atkinson’s advertisements boasted that women could feed their families on less than twenty-five cents a day.19 Although the Aladdin Cooker failed to catch on with working-class housewives, it found a more enthusiastic reception among middle-class reformers. According to Atkinson’s biographer, the device found its way into settlement houses (including Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago) and was put into use at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskeegee Institute.20 The Aladdin Cooker was also adopted by home economics pioneer Ellen Richards. The appeal of the slow cooker, of course, was that it could make cheap food more palatable. In scientific terms, both Richards and Atkinson adopted Wilbur Atwater’s theory of nutritional substitution.
School Lunch Politics Page 3
