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Becoming What You Eat: The New England Kitchen and the Body as a Site of Social Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2019

Nicholas J.P. Williams
Nicholas J.P. Williams*
Affiliation:
The Bakken Museum
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: williams@thebakken.org
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Abstract

Reformers at the turn of the century struggled to understand why people were the way they were and whether they could really be changed. The reformers behind the New England Kitchen (NEK), a dietary reform experiment in 1890s Boston that hoped to change working-class diets, dedicated much of its efforts to answering the question at the heart of all social reform movements: Were people's behaviors determined by biological or social factors? In the course of their work, these reformers came to understand the relationship between food and bodies as central to social reform and sought to use dietary reform to change working-class bodies. Their actions and ideas disrupt the neat categories historians have come to rely upon when discussing reformist thought and push us to embrace the messiness of ideas as they are being worked out. This article explores these messy ideas, using four conceptions of the body that emerged from the NEK efforts—the caloric body, the changing body, the citizen body, and the managed body—to make sense of ideas that were later taken up by the USDA and the Children's Bureau, as well as other reform efforts in the Progressive Era.

Type
Special Issue: Food Studies and The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 441 - 460
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2019 

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References

Notes

I would like to thank Rebecca Rix, Tracey Deutsch, Malinda Lindquist, and James McElroy for being generous with their time and feedback—this article would have been greatly impoverished without their insights. Additional insights came from Vera Candiani, the University of Minnesota Modern History Graduate Workshop, and the anonymous reviewers for this journal. This research was supported by funding from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University.

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12 Andrew Carnegie and Mr. Phipps each contributed $500. Edward Atkinson to Ellen Richards, letter, January 4,1890, carton 19, volume 32, EAP; Richards also secured $300 from the Elizabeth Thompson Science Fund, which sought to benefit research efforts “which have for their object the advancement of human knowledge or the benefit of mankind in general.” Elizabeth Thompson Science Fund, June 1890, flier, carton 12, folder 61, EAP.

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21 Edward Atkinson to Ellen Richards, January 4, 1889, letter, carton 19, volume 29, EAP. Much of this science, according to Atkinson, came down to the application of heat. See Edward Atkinson, The Right Application of Heat to the Conversion of Food Material, August 1890, paper read at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ellen Swallow Richards Collection, MIT.

22 Edward Atkinson to Ellen Richards, March 18, 1891, letter, carton 20, volume 38, EAP.

23 Abel, “The Story of the New England Kitchen” (1890), 7–8.

24 Ellen Richards to Mary Hinman Abel, letter, February 26, 1892, box 42, The American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences Records, Cornell University Library Rare and Manuscript Collections, Ithaca, NY.

25 Mary Hinman Abel, “The Rumford Kitchen Leaflets, No. 9: Proteid or Albuminous Food in Our Daily Fare,” in Richards, Plain Words About Food, 68.

26 Mary Hinman Abel, “The Rumford Kitchen Leaflets, No. 18: Public Kitchens in Relation to the Workingman and the Housewife,” in Richards, Plain Words About Food, 159.

27 Abel, “Proteid or Albuminous Food in Our Daily Fare,” 68.

28 Based on correspondence between Atkinson and Richards, it seems Atkinson did eat the food he experimented with, but this was done with dinner parties, which he used to test cooking methods using his Aladdin Oven (though with different foods than at the NEK) and to impress his wealthy guests. See, for example, Edward Atkinson to Ellen Richards, letter, August 4, 1891, carton 21, folder 40, EAP. See also Edward Atkinson, “The Art of Cooking,” Popular Science Monthly 36 (November 1889).

29 Abel, “The Story of the New England Kitchen” (1890), 9–10.

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32 Abel, “The Story of the New England Kitchen, Part II,” in Richards, Plain Words About Food, 141.

33 Hamilton Cravens, “Establishing the Science of Nutrition at the USDA,” 128.

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45 Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform; Smuts, Science in the Service of Children; Nancy Pottisham Weiss, “Save the Children: A History of the Children's Bureau, 1903–1918” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1974).

46 Richards, The Cost of Living as Modified by Sanitary Science, 84–85.

47 Ellen Richards to Edward Atkinson, letter, April 10, 1896, carton 12, folder 64, EAP. Pauline Agassiz Shaw, the largest financial backer of the NEK, believed that the NEK served “as a rival to the saloon” by providing inexpensive and nourishing food. Abel, “The Story of the New England Kitchen” (1890), 5.

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55 Atkinson, “The Art of Cooking,” 8–10. The Aladdin Oven used gas lamps to heat a metal-lined wooden box containing water, maintaining a temperature between 180 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The heated water would then heat porcelain containers that contained the food. The basic oven was about 2.3 cubic feet in volume and sat on legs, with the lamp between the legs, but Atkinson made ovens of varying sizes, such as the larger, barrel-shaped ovens used in the NEK. For diagrams, see Atkinson, “The Art of Cooking,” 14–15.

56 Wilbur Olin Atwater, “Food and Diet,” 357–58.

57 Edward Atkinson to Mary Hinman Abel, letter, July 9, 1891, carton 21, volume 40, EAP. Atkinson was not opposed to paying laborers more, but only if they worked more (for the same wage rate). Edward Atkinson to Ellen Richards, letter, September 20, 1890, carton 20, volume 36, EAP.

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