While it is true that Progressive Era and 1920s nutrition reformers, like most public activists of their generation, often paid insufficient attention to the preferences of the nation’s new immigrant working class or to the cultures of rural people, whether black or white, their diet lessons cannot be dismissed simply as one more effort to Americanize immigrants and subsume all ethnic differences under a ubiquitous white sauce.55 Nutrition science held the very real promise of improved health, stronger bodies, and longer lives. Indeed, one might argue that the work of reform through food was more complex and not as singularly biased as the either historians or the contemporary rhetoric might suggest. When it came to eating habits, nutrition reformers seemed to understand both the cultural significance of food and the limits of their own power to change people’s preferences. Their efforts to modernize diets had a larger purpose than assimilating immigrants. They believed they had in their hands the potential at once to eliminate malnutrition, the most visible symbol of poverty and inequality, and to improve the health of all Americans in the process. A closer look at the research on malnutrition as well as on immigrant diets suggests a complex interplay of science and culture.
In the search for a scientific or American diet, home economists understood as well as any sociologists of the day the deep cultural significance of food. As one research team observed, “dietary habits are remarkably fixed habits.”56 Food reformers, however, were firm believers in science, and this was the lesson their dietary advice was designed to promote. Home economist Grace Farrel, for example, believed that while it would be “impossible to graft all the American habits” onto immigrants, her profession could “give them a vision of the better, easier, and more modern way of life.”57 Two women, in particular, offer examples of the complex outlook governing food reform during the 1920s. Lucy Gillett, a home economist who worked for the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor during the 1920s and served as chair of the Social Services Section of the American Dietetic Association, conducted a major study of immigrant food habits during the early 1920s. Sophonisba Breckinridge, a pioneer social worker at the University of Chicago and a major figure in the early twentieth-century woman’s movement, conducted numerous studies of immigrant lives. One of her most im portant works, New Homes for Old, was published in 1921 as part of the Americanization Studies series sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation.58 Both women expressed a belief in scientific diet that verged on cultural arrogance and an appreciation of ethnic diversity in American democracy and a sensitivity to the particular limitations on immigrant women in the markets and kitchens of their new homeland. Breckinridge acknowledged, for example, that “the problem of how far the immigrant groups should be encouraged to modify their diet can be determined only after a careful study of their dietary practices.”59 It was unclear, she said, to what extent “racial customs” should enter into any “Americanization scheme.”60 Gillett counseled her students that, “by showing respect for and acknowledging the good that is in all diets[,] there is sure to be an interchange of food habits which will be one of the ways of amalgamating the people living in one country.”61 Indeed, Gillett concluded, “So far as I know we have very little evidence that the better class of Italians need attention more than the better class of Americans.”62
Nutrition reformers allowed that some ethnic foods could be part of a proper American diet. Nutrition science, particularly Atwater’s theory of substitutions, afforded reformers some measure of respect for immigrant diets.63 In particular, they understood Edward Atwater’s substitution theory to mean that there was more than one way to get enough of the essential vitamins, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates needed for healthy living. Lucy Gillett, for example, advised social workers and home economics teachers to learn the names of various vegetables in the languages of their students.64 The only reason to change immigrant food habits, Gillett argued, was to “make them consistent with health, and perhaps of greater convenience to the people.”65 Gillett and Breckinridge were particularly critical of young social workers or home economists who blindly criticized immigrant food habits. “The foreign born woman,” Gillett wrote, “does not see why she should change the customs of centuries to suit the whim of a youthful person who does not know what her perfectly good food habits are.”66 Breckinridge similarly took young reformers to task for not understanding the cultures of their clients. In a widely quoted report from Massachusetts, for example, a young social worker blamed the peeling wallpaper in tenement housing on the ubiquitous steam rising from pots of cabbage that immigrant housewives kept on their stoves. The social worker tried to convince the women to fry their food instead of boiling it. Breckinridge dismissed this advice as “misguided” and cautioned against trying to “give advice on diet without … knowing much about it.”67
Much nutrition knowledge may have been lost in translation. While traditional diets may have contained many elements of nutrition, immigrant housewives—often via their children—had to learn new names for familiar foods and to substitute unfamiliar items for staples not available in American cities. The immigrant housewives interviewed by Breckinridge, for example, admitted that they did not know how to ask for the foods they needed. The result, Breckinridge said, was that they ended up “eliminating various essential elements and completely upsetting the balance of the traditional diet.”68 Even when women were willing to try new foods, however, they often did not know how to prepare them. A Detroit welfare worker, for example, complained that her clients “boiled whole grapefruit for hours and still found it tough,” while others cooked the leaves of the cauliflower and “threw away the flower.”69 American diet lessons were often limited by the structure of the grocery industry as well. Breckinridge found, for example, that stores in Chicago’s Lithuanian neighborhoods rarely stocked fresh vegetables. Restricted diets, she wrote, were due less to women’s unwillingness to try new foods than to the fact that “the markets afford so little variety.”70 (It was for this reason that Breckinridge became an early advocate of standardized, chain grocery stores.)71
While home economists had long preached the gospel of eating better for less, those familiar with working-class and immigrant kitchens knew that immigrant housewives lacked more than a knowledge of vitamins. As Lucy Gillett observed, “we must make the conditions possible for good nutrition.”72 There is, Sophonisba Breckinridge acknowledged, “the question of the means with which to buy.”73 According to most estimates, the average semi- or unskilled male worker during the early 1920s earned less than $2,000 per year, often considerably less.74 Breckinridge’s own 1921 cost of living figures found that, on average, immigrant families spent more on food as a proportion of their incomes than did native-born families. In her study, immigrant families earned an average of $900 to $1200 per year and spent between 35 and 40 percent of that on food.75 The estimate that working-class families spent about one-third of their incomes on food was confirmed continually through the 1960s.
An American diet hinged on more than just the right food. Modern eating required a modern kitchen as well. The lessons of scientific eating might be difficult to apply whether in urban tenement kitchens or in tenant farm shacks. During the 1920s home economists developed classes for women in household management. They also targeted girls in school.76 Finally, many American kitchens lacked modern appliances and electricity well into the mid-twentieth century.77 Poor women often owned only a few cooking utensils and might not always have enough money to pay for gas to fuel a stove. Agricultural Extension workers in the American South, for example, found that large numbers of tenant farm houses had no stoves, so the women cooked over open hearths.78 Urban immigrant women had to learn how to use appliances (if they could afford them) and cooking utensils that were different from the ones they had grown up with. One research team commented that immigrant women were not familiar with egg beaters, tin cook ware, or double boilers. Lucy Gillett admitted that it was difficult to teach scientific cooking to women whose “entire outf
it consists of two saucepans, perhaps only one, a knife, a spoon, and a tea cup.” She worried about whether the young girls in her nutrition classes who came from tenement homes would know how to apply what they learn.79
A modern diet for Americans promised nutrition and health regardless of income or ethnicity. Yet as food reformers were acutely aware, many Americans, whether out of ignorance or poverty, did not enjoy the benefits of healthful diets. During the 1920s, at the very moment that the nutrition message was becoming part of popular culture, malnutrition loomed as an ominous threat to the nation’s progress.80 For this reason, food reformers, along with teachers, doctors, and social workers, waged an intense battle during the 1920s with malnutrition. “The improper and unscientific feeding of children,” observed Columbia University home economist Mary Swartz Rose, “is one of the most common causes of disease, disability, incapacity for work, both mental and physical, loss of energy, susceptibility to contract and inability to withstand disease.”81 Malnutrition studies documented deficiencies that, while traditionally linked to poverty, appeared now to be subject to scientific—as opposed to social—remedies. And if poverty no longer sufficed as an explanation for malnutrition, then, indeed, nutrition education and school lunches would be essential elements in modern life.
NUTRITION AND MALNUTRITION
Defining and measuring malnutrition, however, proved to be an inexact science. Like food advice in general, discussions of malnutrition revealed deeply held cultural notions about health and body type.82 Traditionally, skinny bodies, pale skin, and sunken eyes were taken to be signs of malnutrition. Physician James Kerr, for example, in his 1916 book on school hygiene, told his readers, “There is no danger of giving too much food.”83 Subjective observations of body types did not, however, suffice in the scientific age. By the 1920s, physicians and nutritionists had developed elaborate height-weight tables and calorie charts to guide assessments of malnutrition and children’s healthy development. Drawing on Wilbur Atwater’s tables, measures such as the Dunfermline Scale and later the Baldwin Wood tables used height-to-weight ratios to set standards for normal development.84 Mary Swartz Rose, who advocated for the establishment of national height and weight standards, proposed that children should be labeled malnourished if “they show disturbance of the normal weight curve.”85 Most doctors and nutritionists agreed that that “if the child weighs 10 per cent less than the average … he probably has something the matter with him.”86 Inevitably, a norm based on “Americanborn children of fortunate circumstances” labeled many others as malnourished and in need of professional intervention.87
The seemingly objective height and weight tables provided powerful tools for measuring children’s health, but they were equally powerful in establishing racial and gendered body norms. These norms reflected ideal body types that individuals rarely achieved. Most problematic was the fact that the height-weight ratios and calorie recommendations were based on studies of adult males, often soldiers or laborers, and, equally as often, of Anglo-Saxon origin.88 Needless to say, the children of immigrants, as well as African American children, frequently came up short. Thus, not surprisingly, a 1921 study of boys in public and private schools found the public school boys significantly smaller in stature. On the basis of this comparison, the study concluded that malnutrition constituted a serious problem in the nation’s public schools.89 At the time, of course, the racial, ethnic, and gendered limitations of these norms were quickly dismissed. Lucy Gillett, for example, attributed the small size of Italian immigrant children to the “high-strung atmosphere” of their households, not to mention their preference for macaroni, olive oil, and “Roman cheese,” which, she complained, left them open to “a deficiency of both iron and vitamines [sic].”90 While Mary Swartz Rose acknowledged that a standard based largely on people of “English, German, and Scandinavian stock” might not be entirely appropriate for Italian children, she believed that science did not yet know “the growth capacities of some of these short-statured peoples.” Short stature was not, she insisted, a “racial characteristic,” but rather was developed by an “unfavorable condition of diet or environment or habit.” Rose was convinced that a healthy diet would bring all children up to the norm.
Underweight school children were subjected to intense programs of behavior modification and nutrition education. Beginning during World War I and continuing through midcentury, women’s clubs, community groups, health departments, and teachers sponsored campaigns to identify underweight children. Special examinations and regular weigh-ins became common in schools throughout the country.91 Part of an extensive movement centered in the Children’s Bureau and led by women reformers and mothers’ groups, the weigh-ins reflected a growing concern with children’s welfare and maternal health. Culminating in the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act providing health education for pregnant women and mothers, this movement encompassed well-baby clinics, vaccination campaigns, and nutrition education.92 The weigh-ins were accompanied by extensive propaganda urging children to eat properly. The focus of most school nutrition campaigns was to encourage children to gain weight. In one program, those children who gained properly were placed at one end of the class, and “those who do not gain at the other end.” “The children who gain are praised for their achievement; the one who gains the most receives a gold star.”93 Another program celebrated little Anna Carado’s “graduation” when she gained the proper amount of weight by rewarding her with yellow balloons that said “good health” and a familiar tune saying, “Anna Carado keep it up, Anna you’re a dandy, Don’t forget the milk and fruit, and leave alone the candy.”94 Children’s school meals and nutrition classes, it seemed, provided the perfect laboratories in which nutritionists could explore the best means to convince people to change their eating habits. As one researcher put it, “if children are to acquire good food habits, they must be taught to like the foods that are essential for growth.”95
Figure 1.2. Schools regularly weighed and measured children to identify those who were malnourished. Children are pictured here calculating gains in weight. National League for Nursing Archives, 1894–1952, National Library of Medicine.
Not surprisingly, the campaign to weigh all schoolchildren uncovered a staggering number who were “underweight.” Armed with objective measures of malnutrition, home economists, physicians, and teachers began to see cases everywhere. Indeed, coinciding with the discovery of nutrition, malnutrition “scares” appeared with regular frequency in both the professional and the popular press.96 The Journal of Home Economics, as well as Parents Magazine, regularly published malnutrition studies. A 1917 of New York City children estimated that 21 percent were undernourished, while a study the next year estimated that as many as onequarter of all children in the nation were malnourished. In 1921 another study suggested that 10 percent of all urban children were more than 10 percent underweight, half had rickets, and 90 percent had decayed teeth.97 Yet another study found that over half of Michigan’s public school students and 60 percent of those in parochial schools were underweight.98 These shocking figures provided ready evidence that the nation’s children needed nutrition education, not to mention nutritious meals.
By the 1920s, a consensus was forming among professionals, teachers, and parents alike that lunch programs could address the most serious nutrition problems facing American children.99 Like the benefits of public schooling itself, lunch programs promised a certain leveling of class and ethnic differences and socialization into mainstream American culture. As early as 1901 home economist pioneer Caroline Hunt observed that school lunches not only “satisfied the bodily needs” but developed “the cultural side” of children as well. The question of school lunches she noted, should “properly be regarded as an educational one.”100 Studies of school lunch programs unanimously found improvements in children’s health and enhanced performance in school. In 1922, for example, a study concluded that children would “do much better in school work in the afternoon” if they ate a hot l
unch.101 Montana State College home economist Lottie Milam found that the hot school lunch “has brought about greater interest in school work improvement in the general physical condition of pupils, less need of discipline, increased interest in home work, improved attendance especially on cold days, less hurried eating, habits of cleanliness and neatness, good table manners, and proper eating habits.”102 In New York, home economists noticed “a marked improvement in physical condition and orderly ways” of children who had received milk in the morning and soup at noon.103 Mary Swartz Rose estimated that the grades of well-nourished children averaged 3 to 4 percent higher than those of their more poorly nourished peers. In Detroit, Rose documented that underweight boys earned 1.5 percent lower grades than did those whose weight was “normal.” Indeed, she observed that boys “who were ahead of their age in weight performed 2.6 percent above average.”104 In Winslow, Arizona, the school lunch manager claimed “significant weight gain among Mexican children.” The school board there was so impressed with the results of the hot lunch program “that it voted to continue the work at any cost.”105
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