Ellen Richards and her fellow home economists became the key conduits between nutrition laboratories and the American public during the early twentieth century. Like other middle-class women of their generation, home economists sought work and professional recognition in what had traditionally been all-male arenas. The first group of women to attend college in large numbers, this generation found, on graduation, that they were singularly unwelcome in scientific laboratories, law offices, and academic disciplines. Undeterred, women founded their own institutions and professional associations, in the process exerting an extraordinary influence on social reform and public policy. In was in this era, for example, that women academics, shut out of many universities, formed the American Association of University Women, the first organization to support women in higher education and to insist on equality in curriculum and graduate requirements.21 Jane Addams similarly forged the new field of social work and established Chicago’s Hull House, the nation’s premier social settlement institution, attracting both men and women to careers in academic as well as applied social investigation. Social work, like home economics, ultimately became labeled a “female profession,” signaling the inherent tension faced by women who, blocked from full participation in the male professions, used their talents to study areas men seemed to ignore: family, community, and the household.22
Figure 1.1. Ellen Swallow Richards founded home economics after facing gender barriers in academic chemistry. Richards is pictured here with the MIT Chemistry Department faculty. Courtesy MIT Museum.
Ellen Richards wanted to be a laboratory chemist but instead became one of the most visible and vocal popularizers of nutrition reform and scientific eating. As an undergraduate at Vassar College during the 1870s, she studied chemistry with the nation’s foremost female scientist, Maria Mitchell. Despite Mitchell’s enthusiastic recommendations, Richards, to her life-long disappointment, found no graduate chemistry program either in the United States or in Germany that would accept women. Mitchell finally convinced MIT to accept Richards as a “special student,” but the university refused to allow her to work in any of their established laboratories.23 Instead, with the support of her husband (an MIT professor and mining engineer) and financial backing from Edward Atkinson (whom she had met while working on a study of water quality for Boston), Richards opened her own “women’s laboratory.”24 It was there that Richards developed what became known as the domestic sciences, including studies of human nutrition and food preparation.25
Like Edward Atkinson, Richards and the early home economists believed American’s living standards would significantly improve if only people understood the principles of nutrition. Excited about the new discoveries in food science, including Wilbur Atwater’s substitution theory, home economists turned their attention first to the eating habits of workers and immigrants. While they were convinced that everyone might benefit from a knowledge of nutrition, the problem of poverty presented the most immediate and dramatic challenge. Early home economics research specifically sought to demonstrate that nutritious diets did not need to be expensive. As Richards put it bluntly, “if once the public can disabuse its mind of any idea of close connection between ‘food value’ and cost—namely that a cheap food is a poor food, that a dear food is a good food—then a beginning in scientific dietaries can be made.”26 Home economists became enthusiastic proponents of the “low-budget meal” and menus directed at housewives with a limited food budget. In 1877, for example, in the midst of serious economic depression and the nation’s first major railroad strike, Juliet Corson, founder of one of the first American cooking schools, published Fifteen Cent Dinners for Working-men’s Families.2 In this pamphlet Corson suggested that a worker’s family of six could easily have three nutritious meals a day for less than $3 per week if they ate cheese pudding and stewed tripe.28 Like Edward Atkinson, Corson believed that a change in diet would improve workers’ living standards even in the face of low wages. By showing housewives “how to make the best of what they have,” she said, “I am proving myself a better friend to them than those who try to make them still more discontented with the lot that is already almost too hard to bear.”29 A decade later Mary Hinman Abel, an aspiring chemist who, like Richards, ended up in home economics, made her name by publishing “five food principles” for low-budget meals.30 Abel’s advice applied Atwater’s substitutions to practical recipes designed for working-class housewives. Insisting that while workers’ families might not be able to afford “many good tasting things,” they could nonetheless eat healthy meals by following her recipes for bread soup and by serving dinners of “flour soup, fried bread, cheese, and toast” for supper. Abel’s work found a national audience when she received first prize in the American Public Health Association’s essay contest, and Richards invited her to Boston to help start a model public kitchen.31
Richards tirelessly devoted her professional career to introducing the public to the principles of scientific nutrition. Her singular contribution was the development of institutional kitchens, the first large-scale food service operations. Institutional cooking brought modern, industrial principles to what had been a private, highly individualized domain. In the institutional kitchen, science most directly informed the era’s belief in standardization, efficiency, and rational management. Richards’s first experiment in institutional feeding was the New England Kitchen (NEK), which opened in a working-class Boston neighborhood in 1890. With the financial backing of Edward Atkinson (the NEK became a key demonstration site for the Aladdin Cooker) and recipes based on Wilbur Atwater’s nutrition science, Ellen Richards operated what might be called the nation’s first “take out” restaurant. Located in a Boston storefront, the NEK offered model workingmen’s lunches as well as tins of food to take home for dinner. With each meal the patron received a card listing the calorie and nutrient content on one side and Atwater’s daily nutrition recommendations on the other. Every dish was scientifically developed and carefully measured so that it was easily standardized and could be reproduced at home. Unfortunately, the scientific diet of Indian pudding, oatmeal cakes, pea soup, and cornmeal mush turned out to have little popular appeal. One customer reportedly told Richards, “I’ll eat what I want to eat.” Another, objecting to the decidedly Anglo-Saxon tone of the menus, warned Richards not to “try to make a New Englander out of me.”32 After three years the NEK was forced to close due to a lack of customers. Although in operation only for a short time, the NEK nevertheless became a model for institutional meal service and standardized menus.
Despite the failure of the NEK, Richards’s experiment established significant principles in institutional feeding and nutrition education. Her standardized recipes and menu cards became models for large-scale food service operations. Richards proudly declared her beef broth, for example, to be as “as unvarying in its constituents as the medicine compounded to meet a physician’s prescription.”33 Thus the recipe could be replicated at home on a small scale or in a school, hospital, or factory for large numbers of people. In either case, the nutrition content and the taste would be consistent. In 1898, again backed by funds from Edward Atkinson, Richards opened another model kitchen at the Chicago World’s Fair. Here she distributed menu cards that included the weight and nutrition components of each dish. The World’s Fair venue, known as the Rumford Kitchen, fed thousands of fairgoers and opened nutrition science to a whole new audience: the middle-class consumer.34 Standardization combined with education to produce the first modern institutional food service model. Home economists added to their agenda studies of food processing and preservation, food service management, and, increasingly, lunchroom administration.35
Richards’s World’s Fair project signaled an important shift in home economics and nutrition research. While the early studies took as their task improving the health and diet of the nation’s poorest groups, the World’s Fair kitchen attracted workers and middle-class people.36 Here was an opportunity to influence people who might be able to
afford plenty to eat but who might not understand the principles of nutrition. Indeed, Richards expressed the central tension in food reform when she suggested that anyone, “working man, student, or millionaire,” could suffer from poor nutrition. The challenge, she wrote, was not “how to get enough food, but how to choose from the bewildering variety offered that which will best develop the power of the human being.” Nutrition, in her view, promised not only an efficient, healthy life, but intellectual and moral development as well. Poor diets, she insisted—and the inability to avoid the temptation of “bad” foods—“weakens the moral fiber and lessens mental as well as physical efficiency.”37 Richards thus committed herself to modernizing the American diet and bringing the gospel of science to a middle-class audience. Whether rich or poor, she concluded, everyone needed nutrition education.
Shortly after the end of the 1898 World’s Fair, Richards hit upon the perfect system for bringing nutrition science to a wide public: the school lunchroom. Here she could teach children the value of nutrition, and, what is more, the children would take those lessons home and influence mothers as well. Richards could reach children who came to school hungry, but also those who were well fed but potentially nutrient deficient. She opened her first lunchroom almost by accident. While conducting a study of the sanitary conditions in Boston public schools, she discovered that the high school janitors were selling food to the students. The janitors, of course, were in business for profit and did not care about the nutrition content of the food. Richards convinced the Boston School Committee to let her open a scientific lunch program. Her effort got off to a rocky start when the janitors refused to help, and local restaurants posted signs announcing, “Here you can get what you want to eat, and not what the School Committee says you must.”38 Richards’s scientific message, however, won the allegiance of the School Committee, and within a year five thousand students were eating lunch at school every day.
Richards’s experiment proved a triumph for nutrition science. Indeed, despite their zeal, home economists and nutritionists had been relatively unsuccessful in changing popular eating habits. While scientific advances surely held the potential to improve everyone’s health, most people regularly eschewed expert advice. As a result, experts themselves often adopted a judgmental tone that only alienated their audiences even more. Home economists, largely native-born, white, middle-class, educated women, easily adopted a moralistic, if not proselytizing tone in their food advice. As one historian has observed, “like the schoolteachers, social workers, librarians, and settlement house workers, the women home economists could act as missionaries trying to save society and its victims through better nutrition and home life.”39 Poor food habits were regularly labeled “sins,” and women who served inadequate meals were often dismissed as poor or neglectful mothers. Home economist Lucy Gillett, for example, considered coffee and tea “the worst food sins of children.”40 > Indeed, the new nutrition discoveries, particularly vitamins, lent themselves to a missionary purpose. Home economists as educators particularly took as their duty the effort to convert the American public to a belief in nutrition and to convince ordinary people to behave (i.e., eat) according to the new gospel. Richards herself set the tone when she observed that “the parent who neglects this part of his child’s upbringing is culpable and his sin will surely be visited upon the third and fourth generations.”41 Richards and her followers, however, did not limit their missionary activities to immigrants or the poor. Echoing the eugenicists’ theory that Anglo-Saxon Americans were in danger of committing “race suicide,” Richards warned that the “well-to-do” classes “are being eliminated by their diet.” It was the rich, even more than the poor, she believed, who were “most in need of missionary work” when it came to nutrition.42 To this day, Richards’s professional and intellectual descendants equate proper eating with virtue. The reward for scientific eating would go beyond healthy individuals by invigorating American democracy itself.43 And what better way to promote the virtues of a nutritious diet than to begin with the young, in the school lunchroom?
A DIET FOR AMERICANS
By the 1920s, a science and a culture of nutrition permeated discussions about food in the United States. World War I had revealed a shocking level of malnutrition in America. By most estimates, almost one-third of all young men called up for military service had been rejected either because they were underweight or because they suffered from some nutrition-related condition, such as rickets or poor teeth.44 Traumatized by the specter of a weak defense and malnourished citizenry, army officials, public health physicians, and home economists spent the next decade preaching the science of nutrition and trying to get the American public to adopt scientific eating. Schools, hospitals, and even some factories began to run meal programs on a scale never imagined by Ellen Richards. Nutrition was becoming public policy.
In the post—World War I climate of relative prosperity (at least in certain sectors of the economy and certain sections of the country), nutritionists as well as the rapidly expanding food industry promoted a more generalized concern with well-being, health, and nutrition—and malnutrition as well. Pioneering a new consumer age, food advertisements touted the vitamin content of foods and provided testimonials to their product’s contribution to individual vigor and energy. Well-baby clinics and pure milk movements sprang up throughout the country. As one home economist in the Bureau of Home Economics observed, “it is high time that every mother should know as much about feeding her family as the thousands of successful farmers now know about feeding livestock.”45 The discovery of the nutrition age was that anyone—rich or poor—could suffer from malnutrition. Where discussions about food had for centuries connected hunger and poverty, the modern nutrition message combined compensatory nutrition for the poor with a general mission to improve the health of all Americans. Nutrition science had, in essence, dramatically altered the relationship between food and poverty. As New York home economist Lucy Gillett observed, one could find “underweight and malnourished children in all types of families, in the families of those who have plenty of money as well as in families of limited means.”46 Poor people might suffer from insufficient quantities of food, but it was the quality of what they ate that really mattered. At the same time, even people with plenty to eat might face malnutrition if they did not make informed food choices.
The search for an American diet during the 1920s thus focused on two goals. First, food reformers, usually women who were native-born and middle-class, hoped to translate nutrition science into practical, everyday menus that all housewives could prepare. This meant teaching immigrant women to eat “American” food, but it also meant teaching middle-class housewives about vitamins, proteins, and calories. At the same time, food reformers, along with teachers, doctors, and social workers, faced the continuing problem of poverty—people who had limited food choices and, by definition, poor diets. In either case, however, reformers believed that the key lay in teaching children how to eat right. Although food reformers struggled to teach women to prepare what they considered to be balanced, healthy meals, housewives were notoriously stubborn in their food habits and reluctant to adopt new foods or new recipes. Reformers thus turned to the children. Instilling the values of nutrition and good food habits at an early age, reformers were certain, would reap rewards far into the future.47 Not only would the children develop into healthy adults, but they would take nutrition lessons home to their mothers, who would learn to serve healthy meals to the entire family. As a captive audience, schoolchildren appeared to be the perfect candidates for nutrition education and the school lunch the perfect vehicle through which to introduce new foods.48
Yet what exactly was the purpose of school lunch programs? Nutrition scientists, home economists, child welfare advocates, and school administrators rarely had a clear answer to this question. In some schools mothers, teachers, or civic groups simply provided free meals to poor children. In other schools, home economics teachers used the lunchroom to train g
irls in domestic skills. These home economics classes would often sell lunch to other students, albeit at relatively low prices. Many schools used lunchrooms as revenue-generating operations, hiring managers and selling meals to children who could pay. While home economists insisted that lunchroom operations should always be paired with nutrition education, in most cases the education consisted of a poster or an occasional assembly. During the 1920s, however, home economists and child welfare advocates began to envision school lunches as part of a comprehensive public health and nutrition program. While the desire to feed poor children continued to underlay school meal plans, an expanded notion of universal child health gradually began to inform nutrition education and school cafeterias. Throughout the 1920s, food reformers engaged in an ongoing battle with school administrators and welfare workers over the purpose of lunch and what should be served.
The question of what to serve for lunch was no simple matter. Indeed, battles over what constituted “proper” food went far beyond ideas about the science of nutrition. Although food reformers aimed to modernize American diets generally, their message carried different meanings for different ethnic and racial groups. Recent historians have interpreted the early twentieth-century reform impulse, particularly in its Americanization efforts, as an exercise in social control if not cultural imperialism. Historians regularly point to lessons in Americanization through housework to suggest that reformers held only scorn for their clients’ cultures and traditions. Gwendolyn Mink, for example, observes that the “centerpiece of cultural reform was the cooking class.”49 Laura Shapiro argues that the ubiquitous white sauce found in American recipes symbolized the desire to transform ethnic differences into a homogeneous “perfection salad.” George Sanchez describes the efforts of home economists to convince Mexican-American women to forsake chilis and tomatoes as elements in “a system of social control intended to construct a well-behaved citizenry.”50 Harvey Levenstein suggests that “the acrid smells of garlic and onions wafting through the immigrant quarter seemed to provide unpleasant evidence that their inhabitants found American ways unappealing; that they continued to find foreign (and dangerous) ideas as palatable as their foreign food.”51 Indeed, one need not look far to find examples of “food imperialism” in the writings of home economists. Descriptions of workers who “reek of food and strong breath” were the common stuff of scientific as well as popular reporting.52 There were plenty of descriptions like Dorothy Dickins’s in the September 1926 Journal of Home Economics complaining that “the ordinary country Negro woman is a poor cook, and only years of careful training from some white woman can justify her reputation for good cooking.”53 Columbia Teachers College nutritionist Mary Swartz Rose regularly peppered her reports with ethnic stereotypes and racial characterizations, noting, for example, that it “is no easy task to feed little Jews, and Italians … when they have never had regular meals nor acquired a taste for the right kind of food.”54
School Lunch Politics Page 4
