Home economics is an interdisciplinary combination of fields including laboratory and social sciences to study the phenomena of home life and thereby improve people’s everyday lives. It emerged in the late 19th century in the United States as an academic field of study, primarily at Land Grant universities. Demographics of the field, for both faculty and students, have remained predominantly female since its beginnings. Subfields of Home Economics, some of which have developed into independent fields of study, are nutrition, dietetics, food science, textile science, child psychology, and institutional management. The federal government in the United States supported home economics teaching and research through both the Department of Education and the Department of Agriculture. In colleges and universities, the field is now primarily known as family and consumer sciences, reflecting changes in the methodologies and philosophy of the field over the course of the 20th century. A central issue in the field has been how to empower individuals to navigate the consumer economy in their own best interest.
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Home Economics, Domesticity, and Housework
Megan J. Elias
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Living Fermented Foods and Drinks
James Read
Fermentation is the process by which microbes transform ingredients into a palatable product or ferment. Its customary uses are food preservation (as in sauerkraut) and alcohol production (as in wine or beer), though it is also highly regarded for flavor enhancement and health benefits. Research into fermentation is multidisciplinary, covering fields ranging from history and anthropology to microbiology and nutrition.
Fermentation has been intentionally employed as a preparation technique through which microbes and humans have domesticated each other for at least 13,000 years, across cultures spanning from Japan (miso) to Mexico (tepache). It is central to many foods and drinks, but when referring to “ferments” in a culinary context, most people do not mean bread, beer, or olives but, rather, the likes of kimchi, kombucha, and kefir. These could broadly be termed as “living ferments,” as they have at least the potential to contain live and active microbes when they arrive on our plate. This quality of vitality is not only merely useful for classification but also for indication of how they are made (such that there is no inherent pasteurization or dehydration to create the final product).
To categorize ferments further, they can be grouped as vegetables (such as kimchi, sauerkraut, pao cai, and gundruk), no/low-alcohol drinks (such as tepache, tejuino, atole agrio, kombucha, and juniper beer), dairy (such as yogurt, kefir, dahi, amasi, and tätmjölk), and soybeans (miso, soy sauce, douchi, koji, doubanjiang, gochujang, tempeh, natto, and meju).
Ferments can be made either by inoculation with a starter culture or by spontaneous (or wild) fermentation. In either case, competition and collaboration within the microbial community results in different species occupying their own niches, some of which are crafted for them through fermentation techniques and some of which the microbes develop for themselves. This adaptation is mirrored on a coevolutionary scale, as humans and microbes have made homes for and of each other.
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Processed Foods
Garrett M. Broad
Traditional forms of food processing have deep roots in human evolutionary history and across ancient civilizations. Food-processing innovations that began in the 18th century played a key role in spurring the Industrial Revolution and shaping the development of the global food system as we know it. Starting from the mid-20th century, novel food-processing technologies led to an abundance of processed foods in the marketplace, spurred on by industry-led research applied in the service of meeting increasingly large-scale consumer demands. Processed foods are championed by some as a crowning achievement of the modern food industry, a central element in a system that provides safe, affordable, and convenient foods to diverse populations around the world. To others, processed foods are most notable for their social, environmental, and public health downsides. Specifically, advocates of the NOVA food classification system, proposed and developed in the early 21st century, have raised concerns about the uniquely pernicious impacts of what they deem “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs)—industrial food formulations designed for maximum convenience and palatability—and have called for regulations to rein in UPF production and consumption. Critics of the NOVA framework, however, call into question the scientific validity and public policy utility of the UPF category. These opposing stakeholder perspectives reflect a combination of both fact-based and value-oriented differences of opinion.
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“Wonder Foods”: Food Science and Food Industry
Clare Gordon Bettencourt
A wonder food is a packaged food product that promises extraordinary health and/or convenience benefits. These benefits are communicated on packaging, in marketing campaigns, and in media testimonials. Because of the industrial and mass market conditions necessary to package and market foods, wonder foods are unique to the industrial food marketplace.
Health wonder foods boomed in the 19th century due to advances in nutrition sciences, the intensification of industrialization, and the eugenicist, imperial, and extractivist politics of this time period. Nutritional entrepreneurship prompted the creation of unique foods that were situated at the intersection of commerce and science, including digestive biscuits, meat biscuits, digestive ferments, sodas, and grain cereals. Following World War II, a range of wonder foods promised to feed the world, as public and private Western global food aid efforts intensified to mitigate the spread of communism. Algae, fish flour, dried milk, and spun soy protein each had moments in which they were poised to solve global hunger and win the Cold War. Later, genetically modified Golden Rice promised to feed the world and solve vitamin A deficiency.
Concomitantly, the post–World War II era ushered in a food processing renaissance. Wartime technologies helped create convenience wonder foods like TV dinners that claimed to change consumers’ lives through the added value of time, longer shelf lives, and more processing to cut cooking time. In the 1990s, the Flavr Savr tomato was genetically modified to produce delicious and hardy tomatoes that would be a win–win for growers, shippers, grocers, and consumers. Finally, complete meal replacements like Soylent promised a 21st-century lifestyle imagined by Victorian futurists, yet digestive complications bring this wonder food full circle to the digestive anxieties of 19th-century wonder foods.
