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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“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.
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History of the American School Lunch Program
Shayne Figueroa
School lunch programs in the United States reflect over one hundred years of public debate and policy involving nutrition, welfare, and agriculture. These programs originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely driven by philanthropic organizations and municipal efforts aimed at mitigating child hunger and improving educational outcomes among urban poor populations. The transformation from a decentralized patchwork of programs to a cohesive federal initiative began in earnest with the passage of the National School Lunch Act in 1946, signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. This pivotal legislation was a response to widespread concerns about child nutrition exacerbated by the Great Depression and World War II, fears regarding the fitness of American youth for military service, and the desire to continue agricultural commodity support for American farmers. It established the National School Lunch Program as a federally funded program that supported both agricultural interests and public health mandates, administered at the state level. As the program grew and evolved over the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st century, it became one of the largest and most debated social welfare programs in the United States. Updates to the legislation, including the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, further underscored the federal commitment to nutritional standards in school meals, as well as the intensely divided public debates around government involvement in family food choices.
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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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Food and Nationalism in India
Benjamin Siegel
The imbrication of food and nationalism in India and South Asia was an implicit concern in early anthropological literature on primarily Hindu foodways. In time, this theme became more explicit in historiographic work on colonial encounters and culinary resistance and in political economy of domesticity. It was also increasingly overt in and the emergence of food and hunger as a locus for nationalist claim making. The Bengal famine, coming at the crux of the freedom struggle in India, helped move these claims to more central positions in postcolonial Indian politics. An emerging body of work has seen culinary identity as central to both diasporic politics and questions of marginalization in Indian political life.
