YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT - EDUCATING THE CITIZEN AS CONSUMER
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| A Demonstration Kitchen at the Electrical Women’s Association USA |
These positions (as represented by Newman on the one hand and Le Gros Clark on the other) could be characterized as the competing liberal and social views of the problem of hunger. The one group believed that the family and the market remained the best mechanisms for governing hunger and that housewives had to be made to take responsibility for using their limited resources more efficiently; the second group thought that the state had to take responsibility for ensuring that the poor had sufficient income that they did not go hungry. Clearly, however, these were never mutually exclusive positions. Securing the collective welfare of the hungry continued to include the attempt to educate them as individual consumers in the principles of nutritional health and the efficient use of resources. Very often, as we shall see, it was the beleaguered figure of the mother and housewife who became the target for all these endeavors and interventions. As women were always the last to eat around the family table, they were the first to garner responsibility for managing hunger. The history of the social is deeply gendered.3
Poverty, Ignorance, and the Problem of Consumption
The social and nutritional sciences were deeply implicated when the discourse of national efficiency reenergized a moral critique of the hungry as the ignorant and inefficient agents of their own hunger. Nutritionists subjected the budgets and dietaries of the laboring poor to scientific scrutiny, singling out their inadequacies and inefficiencies as a question of poor consumer choices as much as of poverty. Rowntree was the first to distinguish necessary from unnecessary expenditures by identifying basic physiological needs. The degree of efficiency with which the poor made what he assumed to be rational choices as consumers to maximize their physical efficiency largely determined whether he classified them as deserving or undeserving of their poverty. Yet this seemingly scientific distinction between necessary and unnecessary forms of consumption remained based on highly moralizing criteria. His 1901 survey of poverty in York was notoriously stringent in its translation of minimum nutritional requirements into necessary dietaries, which excluded two of the foods most treasured by the poor — beer and meat. Rowntree justified the choice on the grounds of efficiency and economy, the cost of these items not being relative to their nutritional value; but their exclusion also betrayed his Quaker sensibilities and antipathy to drink. Even though he recognized that his minimum dietary set impossible standards, given the diets and lack of nutritional knowledge customary among the poor, and although he acknowledged that those living in real poverty lacked the income to consume irrationally, he nonetheless believed that much secondary poverty was caused by “ignorant or careless housekeeping, and other improvident expenditure,” not least of all on the twin evils of drink and gambling. The alleviation of poverty required “mental and moral training” as much as better wages, he felt.4 Subsequently, when he calculated “the human needs of labour” in his eponymous publications in 1918 and 1937, he included meat and allowed expenditure on beer and tobacco (under the category of household sundries) in his definition of necessities but insisted that the poor would pay dearly for such irrational human pleasures when it came to health and fitness.5 In using these revised standards for his second survey of York in 1942, he still insisted that although 40 percent were living below the poverty line, for 9 percent it was as a consequence of their own irrational expenditures.6
Rowntree was not alone in his agonized calculations of the boundaries of legitimate and rational forms of consumption. The determination of the poor to put pleasure before survival in matters of consumption became a familiar lament of social and nutritional surveys throughout the first half of the twentieth century, as they meticulously recorded “irrational” expenditures and used them as evidence of poor and ignorant housekeeping.7 Social investigators appeared never to tire of alluding to “what can be done by a really clever housewife who takes pains to select a suitable diet,” comparing her to what the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration dubbed the “large proportion of British housewives...tainted with incurable laziness and distaste for the obligations of domestic life.”8 The catalogue of incompetence was long and remained largely unchanged with regard to the poor housewife: she could not budget; her funds were routinely exhausted by Wednesday, when she was forced to make her weekly trip to the pawnshop; she preferred to buy foods in small and uneconomical quantities; she knew nothing of nutrition and invariably, preferring processed foods over fresh and traditional ones, chose the wrong kind; she had lost the art of cooking and found making meals a chore, not a pleasure — one subcontracted as often as possible to the fish and chip shop; her kitchen was devoid of proper cooking utensils, let alone suitably hygienic spaces for storage, preparation, and consumption; she, and her malnourished children with “slum stomachs,” were always the last to eat, for the appetite of the breadwinning male had first to be satisfied. In short, social and nutritional scientists rarely had a good word to say about the women who ran poor households — their ignorance and inefficiency at best unnecessarily aggravated, and at worst actually caused, hunger. And it is worth emphasizing that this obsession with maternal inefficiency was shared by those who recognized the structural causes of poverty: even these experts still preached the necessity of sound household management and nutritional education for housewives.9
The poor much-maligned housewife was used to such criticism. Since at least the mid-nineteenth century, lady philanthropists had visited her home and offered unsolicited advice on hygiene and household management; and from the 1870s on they were joined by a proliferating number of officials and inspectors.10 As we have seen, this veritable army of the well-to-do, familiar with the mysterious rhythms of the working-class home and experienced in gaining access to it, became key researchers for social and nutritional investigators. Yet the social and nutritional surveys of the early twentieth century presented household management less as a didactic pretext for moral exhortation than as a set of scientific procedures that required mastery. Just as the social and nutritional sciences had identified the new social responsibilities working-class housewives would need to assume to manage their household budgets more efficiently, so they provided techniques of calculation and planning for that end. In place of moral exhortation, they offered techniques for proper accounting in household budgets, rational consumption of nutritious foods, new recipes and “modern” cooking techniques, catering to the varying needs of individual family members, the scientific organization of kitchens, and generally the efficient and hygienic running of the household. Indeed, the investigations into the intricate details of working-class budgets necessarily subjected housewives to these new pedagogies. The discipline of the weekly ledgers housewives had to complete for inspection trained them in the practices of accounting and rational consumption. As we have already seen, the weekly ledgers of the inquiry card required housewives to provide increasingly detailed records of their income and expenditure: what was served at each meal, precisely how much of different ingredients and stored foods were used, how each meal was cooked, who ate them, what was left uneaten, and who ate what outside the house. Social and nutritional scientists attempted to transform housewives into subjects equipped to reflect upon and navigate the freshly quantified tasks of household management.11
Clearly this was not easy. During his initial survey of York, Rowntree found that only eighteen of his chosen thirty-five working-class families were capable, under careful supervision, of producing reliable records of their budgeting and food consumption.12 Similarly, when Pember Reeves and the Fabian Women’s Group studied families who were living in Lambeth on about a pound a week, the researchers found that they must first teach each woman how to keep weekly accounts.13 After the Great War, as sample sizes of social and nutritional surveys grew larger, and techniques of measurement more sophisticated, ever-larger numbers of people were exposed to them, culminating in the Wartime Social Survey tracking of 31,733 people across 9,141 household budgets by 1943. In addition, the expansion of means-tested state benefits during the 1920s and 1930s also required that their recipients provided regular accounts of their budgets. In the words of Max Cohen, if you were unemployed, you were made to feel that you should ideally become “a calculating machine” who “would leave the Exchange devoutly determined that you would spend your money only on that small portion of extreme necessities that you could afford.”14 As social responsibility became progressively associated with rendering oneself and one’s household calculable, it appears that greater numbers of people embraced, or at least reconciled themselves to, new accounting regimes. By the late 1930s Crawford and Broadley found in their survey that many of their five thousand subjects were already maintaining “housekeeping books for groceries, milk, meat, etc.”15
In addressing household budgets, social and nutritional scientists not only created a model of and a standard for rational and efficient consumption but helped make it a new social responsibility. Housewives were expected to internalize a set of social prescriptions, which by no means simply emanated from the state, and to apply them in the marketplace and the home in ways that enhanced the family unit, rather than challenging its autonomy and independence.
Household Management and Food Economy
It is commonly held that household management came of age with Mrs. Beeton and her Book of Household Management in 1861, not because she was the first to address the subject, but because she codified the Victorian cult of middle-class domesticity.16 Yet within a decade household management ceased to be seen as solely the concern of middle-class women; both renewed philanthropic interest in educating the mothers of the poor and the introduction of compulsory education put the domestic education of girls on the agenda. Domestic economy was first added to the Department of Education’s Code of Regulations in 1870. Four years later grants became available to teach the subject, and by 1878 it was made compulsory for girls.17 As cooking was deemed a vital component of domestic economy, the National Training School of Cookery was established in 1874 to produce cooking instructors who could pioneer practical instruction in elementary schools.18 Within three years, similar cooking schools had been established in Liverpool, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, and Leicester, and by the time the Association of Teachers of Domestic Science was formed in 1897, with its own professional journal Housecraft, the Board of Education accredited no fewer than twenty-seven institutions as training culinary instructors for elementary schools.19 Cooking became increasingly prominent in elementary curricula for girls. In London, classes in cooking had been taught since 1878, but they grew rapidly after it became a grant-earning subject in 1882: by 1893 more than a hundred home economy teachers had instructed twenty-five thousand girls in ninety-nine culinary centers all over London. Similarly, although only 457 schools in all of England and Wales had begun teaching cooking in 1882, the figure had risen to 2,729 by 1897.20 Domestic subjects, but especially cooking, began to be seen as central to education for girls, and not just because it prepared them for domestic service. According to the founder of the Liverpool School of Cookery, Fanny Calder, by cultivating “health, thrift, comfort and saving,” cooking would “have a more direct effect on the welfare of the people than any other subject in the timetable of our girls’ schools.”21
The Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration concurred. They recommended the extension of elementary classes in cooking, hygiene, and domestic economy, as well as compulsory cooking classes for girls over twelve who had left school, and called for the creation of special colleges that could produce women teachers trained in what was becoming known as the new domestic science. 22 The following year the Board of Education appointed five women, all of whom had attended the training schools, as inspectors of domestic subjects. Their first job was to conduct an inquiry into the teaching of cooking at elementary schools. Their report was published in 1907, the year George Newman, the board’s new chief medical officer, was insisting on the necessity of training “girls in domestic hygiene, food values, and infant management.” Its dismal findings prompted the creation of a new set of Regulations for the Training of Teachers of Domestic Subjects (1907), which emphasized the application of the scientific method to the different branches of housecraft, with particular emphasis on food values, economical cooking, and household accounting.23 By 1914, nineteen of the board’s forty-five inspectors monitored the teaching of domestic subjects to over half a million girls.24 The launch of classes in “Home Science and Economics” at London’s King’s College for Women in 1908 to teach its students “the scientific facts and principles which lie at the root of the ordinary action of daily life, as well as the actual manipulation required in household and institutional management,” reflected an increasingly professional ethos.25 By 1915 the discipline was awarded institutional status as the tellingly titled Department of Household and Social Sciences. Yet despite the professionalization of domestic education and advice—also reflected in numbers of professional women incorporated into state agencies during these decades as teachers, sanitary inspectors, medical officers, health visitors, district nurses, and education inspectors — it by no means displaced the voluntary endeavor of Lady Bountifuls prepared to patronize the poor with advice on household economies.26 The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of new voluntary groups — including, in London alone, the Westminster Health Society (1904), St. Marylebone Health Society (1905), and St. Pancras Mothers and Infants Society (1907) — concerned with educating mothers in their new social responsibility of efficient household management.27 In an increasingly congested field of endeavor, these volunteers took their place alongside the growing ranks of women, invariably graduates of the new culinary schools, who had been working as culinary demonstrators in the elaborate showrooms of the gas and electricity industries since the late 1880s.28
During the First World War both the issue of food economy and the new professional networks of culinary instructors and domestic scientists gained greater prominence in the urgent quest for economies in food consumption. Once again the war helped change the terms of discussion: food economy shifted attention away from making hungry housewives better household managers, and toward making all consumers more nutritionally efficient. The impetus for this transformation came not from the state but from the voluntary sector, in the form of the National Food Fund (NFF) and the National Food Economy League (NFEL).29 Established at the outbreak of the war, the National Food Fund initially focused on the philanthropic provision of food for Belgian refugees and the “necessitous,” but by March 1915 it had begun teaching the “principles of economy in buying, cooking, and using food,” and the following October the National Food Economy League was formed as a separate but affiliated “education branch.” Over the next three years, despite the “indifference if not actual hostility” of the government, the National Food and Economy League distributed 750,000 copies of its pamphlets and organized more than two thousand demonstration lectures and exhibitions at local and national fairs.30 Meanwhile, the Board of Education, deploying the expertise of domestic subject inspectors and teachers, issued various memorandums, regulations, and pamphlets on food economy that anticipated the later food economy campaigns of the Women’s Auxiliary War Savings Committee and the Board of Trade, as well as the eventual work of the Ministry of Food after its formation in December 1916.31 The ministry’s Cookery Section, responsible for the creation of National Kitchens, was also detailed to focus on the issues of food economy and nutritional education. Their growing importance was apparent from the high-profile appointment of Kennedy Jones as director general of Food Economy in March 1917, a post held from October 1917 by Arthur Yapp, the national secretary of the YMCA. When rationing was finally introduced in February 1918, the ministry’s new Consumer Council continued to advise women on how to make the most of their rations. The creation of the Consumer Council was a watershed not just in the formal politics of consumption, but in the official recognition that the consumer had a vital role to play in the control of hunger.32
The logic of food economy for the NFF and NFEL was simple: running individual households more efficiently would reduce unnecessary waste of the nation’s limited food resources. Small household economies — a little meat saved here and a little sugar there, careful husbandry of scraps to make meals, more economical forms of cooking, like stewing, that required less fuel—would amount to large and
significant savings on a national level. If much of this endeavor was driven by the old but apparently timeless philanthropic tenets of thrift preached by socially elevated trustees, such as Lady Chance, the “highly qualified instructors” commissioned to lecture, demonstrate, and write on their behalf also lent it an increasingly professional air.33 This may explain why its campaign against waste gradually shifted away from a singular focus on working-class homes, to include those of the wealthier classes.34 Materials for working-class housewives, in recognition of the constraints on budgets and facilities, emphasized the economies that could spring from “a greater knowledge of nutritive values of food,” so that “it is possible to spend 10d or 9d instead of a shilling, and yet be better fed.”35 By contrast, the “well-to-do” were chastised for “extreme incompetence” in household management, which led them to “eat more than they require.” Armed with a better appreciation of the “science of food values,” which the NFEL had “shorn of its difficulties and terrors and rendered perfectly easy of comprehension by even the least scientifically minded housemistress,” the privileged should consume only that which was essential for “health and efficiency,” and only foods that were not vital staples for the munitions-making classes.36 The social and nutritional sciences thus not only gave sharper definitions to waste and economy, but lent the NFEL a new authority that was not dependent upon the assumed moral superiority of social position.
In hiring Pember Reeves, Peel, and Manley, the Ministry of Food also ensured that the social and nutritional sciences would play a central role in framing and conducting the food economy campaign.37 As we saw in the previous chapter, all three were, in different ways, experts on household management as a social science, as Peel’s recollections of her reading material nicely demonstrates: “Amongst the many books I studied were Mr. Beveridge’s Unemployment, Miss Proud’s Welfare Work, The Principles of Scientific Management by F. W. Taylor, Meredith’s Economic History of England, Mr. Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty, and Booth’s Life and Labour in London, The Town and Country Labourer, by the Hammonds, while Mr. Hutchison’s Food and Dietetics became one of my most treasured possessions ... I [also] made constant applications to the scientific staff of the Ministry, and especially to Sir Henry Thompson... for information with regard to food.”38 Nowhere do we get a clearer sense of either how the Edwardian social sciences spanned history, social investigation, scientific management, social policy, and nutritional science. Armed with this expertise, women like Pember Reeves, Peel, and Manley were instrumental in transferring issues of food economy and household management from the voluntary sector to the heart of the state in Whitehall.
Like the NFEL, as the ministry’s food economy campaign drew on the social and nutritional sciences to identify targets of waste, it also concentrated its efforts on the wealthier classes.39 Recognizing that it was “in the homes of the rich who have fuel, apparatus, and money with which to pay skilled persons to cook for them that the most glaring waste takes place,” Peel organized lectures and demonstrations for “mistresses of well-to-do households” and their domestic servants, who frequently complained of their employers refusal to economize or experiment with new foods. Distancing herself from those “who preached economy to the poor, knowing nothing of their lives and the difficulties which beset them on every side,” she echoed Pember Reeves’s praise of the “very clever conjuring trick” by which they were able to keep “house and bring up their children on minute and fluctuating weekly incomes.” When she lectured to working mothers, she invariably left feeling that she had “learned from them far more than they [had] ever learned from” her. Yet Peel also recognized that even the poor could consume more efficiently if they paid more attention to the nutritional values of food and the principles of scientific cooking.40 It was these areas of nutritional education and culinary instruction that became the focus of her food economy work at the Ministry of Food.
The ministry’s food economy campaigns were the first major intervention by the state affecting consumer choices. The scale of the campaign was impressive. As an ex–Fleet Street man, Kennedy Jones was skilled at grabbing headlines, most famously by updating George III’s proclamation during the Napoleonic Wars on the reduction of bread and flour consumption and ordering it to be read at all religious services in May 1917, posted in every post office, and published in no fewer than sixteen hundred newspapers. Pledge cards and purple ribbons were distributed to those who adhered to the voluntary rationing schemes, short films were produced on the food crisis and shown at cinemas across the country, seventeen million leaflets containing nutritional advice and recipes were printed, 150 Food Economy Exhibitions were staged, and sixty demonstration shops or food bureaus were opened. Many teachers of domestic subjects toured the country distributing advice on food economy and giving cooking demonstrations.41
There is, however, ample evidence that consumers did not take kindly to this barrage of advice. Although some of the food economy measures met with limited success, notably the reduction in cereal consumption by 10 percent between February and June of 1917, they were not enough to prevent the introduction of compulsory rationing early in 1918. The ministry’s own surveys of the effectiveness of the pledge campaign for voluntary rations in spring 1917 uncovered widespread ambivalence. Whereas 92 percent of households approached in Worthing signed the pledge, 43 percent refused in King’s Lynn, and in Glasgow only two in ten families on one street in a working-class area had ever heard of voluntary rationing (and neither thought it concerned them). According to Barnett: “Those in King’s Lynn who knew what the economy drive was about but refused to sign anyway gave a variety of reasons. Some thought it unnecessary to eat less, that there was plenty of food in the country. Others said they were earning good money for the first time in their lives and were going to spend it on more food, not less. Also cited was the waste of food by the army, the feeding of steak and milk to pets, the ‘pampering’ of German prisoners-of-war, food hoarding by the rich and delay in starting food controls by the government.”42 Many of these sentiments were echoed in letters to the press and to the ministry itself, which monitored public opinion through them.43 Such was the hostility in Glasgow at the end of 1917 that Sir Arthur Yapp and Lord Rhondda were advised not to travel there to talk on food economy.44
Clearly, many resented the idea of the well-heeled and well-to-do preaching to the poor on domestic efficiency: “It is something like impertinence on the part of the people from a higher stratum of society to lecture them on food economy when perforce the most rigid economy is practised in their own families”. 45 Despite frequent use of the new cadres of professional culinary instructors, an alarming degree of tactlessness appears to have been par for the course among the ministry lecturers; even Peel recalled how at one event an audience of agricultural laborers was told by “the lady who took the chair...that meat was unnecessary—she advised a diet of pulses, cereals and cream!” Peel herself did not escape the opprobrium of her audiences and quickly learned “to take personal chaff with good temper” and to weather the biting wit of hecklers. In Yorkshire “a man from the back of the hall called out to my chairman, ‘Sither, laad — T’Government sends the peel—happen we raather they’d send the potatoes!’ While it was at a South-country town that a large man arose, and in a sleepy good-humoured voice remarked: ‘But what I say is, they shouldn’t send such a well-fed looking lady as you talking Food Economy!’”46 Talks were often followed by cooking demonstrations that tried to put some practical meat on the bones of the lofty ideals and abstract theories of food economy: they were seen as the most effective way of introducing the population to new foods like tapioca, nutritionally sound recipes, and fuel-efficient cooking techniques. Peel provides some admittedly rather scant anecdotal evidence that demonstrations were more warmly received, despite the marked reluctance to accept new foods.47 Here too, however, it appears the quality of advice was uneven at best. When the ministry’s own survey revealed that in spite of having recruited thousands of domestic subject teachers from the Board of Education, many of the demonstrations taught “pre-war methods,” Manley quickly recruited London County Council’s culinary expert to retrain eighteen of the teachers in three week, before sending them out as missionaries to spread the gospel of scientific cooking methods among their colleagues around the country.48
Indeed, students of domestic science educated at the National and the various provincial training centers, as well as King’s College, were in high demand during the war to fill posts as supervisors, inspectors, and managers of industrial and school canteens, National Kitchens, the Navy and Army Canteen, and the Red Cross, as well as hospitals.49 The war had highlighted the importance of household management and the urgent need to expand the new professional corps of domestic scientists who could educate all social classes in the necessities of sound nutrition and the advantages of running an efficient kitchen. The numbers of students at King’s College rose from 20 in 1914 to 104 by 1917, and the Education Act of 1918 finally placed domestic subjects and teachers — and technical, practical education more broadly — on an equal footing with their academic counterparts. By 1930, many of the training colleges in domestic subjects were formally affiliated with the Universities of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Leeds, Durham, and Cardiff and could offer degrees, as well as diplomas, while some three thousand specialists were now teaching domestic subjects to over five hundred thousand girls in elementary schools. By the end of the decade, the Colonial Office, recognizing that the teaching of domestic science was an increasingly critical component of colonial education that would allow the linking of development and welfare, sought to increase demand for and awareness of the colonial opportunities of domestic scientists who had been professionally trained in the metropolis.50
Domestic Science and the Efficient Kitchen
Between the wars, domestic science, as it was now conceived, became seen as a vital mechanism for ensuring socially responsible families — that is, families whose homes were hygienic and efficient and where the women were nutritionally informed consumers who could ensure the health and productivity of their family.51 The model family and the new materials to bring it about (the housewife could not be entirely trusted to reform herself) were on endless display, as modern, efficient kitchens and menu planners appeared in films, exhibitions, newspapers, women’s magazines, and, of course, a host of domestic manuals. It was hoped that the lessons of domestic science and its new material forms would effect a silent revolution in mundane domestic practices and ensure that housewives at least knew enough about nutrition to buy and cook the right foods in the most efficient and healthy ways. Critically, social responsibility for the welfare of families was not simply ceded to the figure of the housewife; rather, it was to come about as a result of their activities as consumers in the market. If few could afford to be the model family in the ideal home with an efficient kitchen, the ceaseless modeling of domestic life encouraged all to reflect upon, and aspire to improve, their techniques of household management.
Elementary cooking classes at school and the food economy campaigns of the First World War may have introduced many women to the principles of nutrition, but it was only after the war that the vogue for domestic science allowed nutritional knowledge to be more broadly disseminated in a plethora of manuals, cookbooks, advertisements, and women’s magazines and newspapers. No longer the arcane preserve of social scientists and public health workers, who continued to focus myopically on the dietary regimes of the poor, nutritional knowledge was popularized by domestic scientists determined to extend its insights socially by making all housewives aware of the importance of a balanced diet, even if they did not always understand the precise nutritional value of each foodstuff.
The two nutritionists most closely connected with domestic science programs, V. H. Mottram and R. H. A. Plimmer (with the considerable help of his wife Violet), were the most energetic popularizers of nutrition between the wars. Shortly after Mottram became professor of physiology at King’s College of Household and Social Science in 1920 (where he remained until 1944), he began to publish popular nutritional manuals for housewives and domestic science teachers that drew heavily on his lectures.52 Plimmer, who had helped found the Biochemical Society and had worked at the Rowett Institute, moved back to London in 1924 as professor of medical chemistry at St. Thomas’s Medical School in London (where he too remained at the post until 1944). There he promptly began lecturing on nutrition and health for the People’s League of Health, and the lectures were then published, with his wife’s collaboration, in Food,Health and Vitamins the following year.53 Such was its popularity that it had gone through nine editions by 1942. Contending that “knowledge of the scientific discoveries about food is essential to the modern householder,” Mottram and the Plimmers endeavored to render it intelligible to “the lay reader,” to translate it into “ordinary terms for the ordinary householder.”54 Explaining the connections between diet, health, and economy lay at the heart of their project. They believed that housewives, once educated in the broad principles of nutritional science, would spend less and yet provide healthier meals for their families. In short, if every kitchen could become a nutritional laboratory and every cookbook a laboratory manual, Every woman could be transformed into a domestic scientist.
Streams of formulas, tables, charts, and appendixes followed, designed to enable Everywoman to transform the family meal and weekly diet into a well-planned series of detailed nutritional calculations. 55 The first step was to calculate the family’s total calorific requirements, the second to work out how to meet them by supplying the right proportions of fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamins, and the third to translate this information into actual dietaries after referring to tables on the cost and nutritional values of specific foodstuffs. Violet Plimmer, aware of the complexity of these calculations, provided no fewer than twenty-five colored charts to illustrate how to achieve a properly balanced “square meal.” The charts showed “the various constituents of a food ... distinctively coloured like the layers of a Neapolitan ice and branded with their vitamin content... [so that] the nature of each foodstuff could be seen at a glance” .56 The key, she emphasized, was not necessarily to learn the technical terms, but to be aware of the general principles, rather as one had done for the car or the wireless—principles that could then guide one in planning meals.57 Menu planning was the crucial tool for training the housewife to become a domestic scientist; the emphasis on scheduling, structure, and routinization overlapped with the new imperative of scientific motherhood.58 It is hard to grasp the novelty of all this nutritional calculation in our nutrition-conscious age, but just as nutritionists had given hunger a new technical form that had allowed government to address it, so they had given housewives a radically different way of thinking about feeding their families.
That it began to register and take hold is evident from the way in which food manufacturers increasingly used nutritional science to develop and sell their products. Sally Horrocks has charted how quickly the food industry enlisted the help of nutritional scientists (Mottram had, for instance, worked for Lever Brothers before moving to King’s College) to develop new production techniques for nutritionally enhanced foods that were then disseminated in technical journals such as the Analyst, Industrial Chemist, and Food Manufacture. By the late 1920s they were increasingly selling products by advertising their health-enhancing properties: Lever Brothers launched a vitamin enriched Viking margarine in 1927, and Glaxo Sunshine Vitamin D – fortified baby milk in 1928. Colmans went a step further in 1930, when it hired nutritionists to develop an infant milk called Almata. Leaflets explaining the nutritional content of the product were distributed to nurses and health visitors, who were invited to inspect the factory laboratories and apply for free samples. The “Almata Book,” which “a scientist in collaboration with a doctor and nurse” had ostensibly prepared for the public, covered a variety of topics relating to infant welfare and included the AlmataWeight Chart, according to which babies’ growth could be charted, and an indecent number of images of healthy babies, devoted mothers, and testimonials from delighted parents.59 Nutritional health had become a commodity.
Much to the chagrin of nutritionists and public health workers, consumers, who had proved particularly unreceptive to nutritional instruction, appeared beguiled by the nutritional terminology of these products. Mottram and the Plimmers were vociferous critics of the commercialization of nutritional health, and George Newman at the Ministry of Health supported them. There were two chief complaints. First, as the Plimmers succinctly summarized it, the modern industrial life they called “civilisation has made it too easy to get the wrong foods of all kinds and difficult to get the foods we ought to eat.” Industrially produced and processed convenience foods had displaced nature’s perishable larder, in the process destroying people’s taste and generating the new “diseases of civilization” like constipation, indigestion, gastric and duodenal ulcers, gallstones, and diabetes. It was these concerns that animated a new fashion of male slimming. The corrupting pleasures and diseased bodies produced by the modern food industry were compared unfavorably to the “splendid physique and health” of the world’s primitive races who still ate natural foods.60 By the early 1930s, as George Newman was worrying that the “indiscriminate dosing of foods with vitamins” would have disturbing and unanticipated consequences for “the balance of nutrition,” the organic farming and food movement began to make significant headway, not least of all at the Peckham Health Centre.61 Second, in a reflection of the critique of commercial mass culture generally, it was argued that advertisers were simultaneously manipulating the gullible masses and debasing nutritional science.62 Mottram hoped that the domestic scientists he was teaching would train consumers to see through the spurious nutritional claims of food ads, but he also pressed for greater regulation, so that patent foods would have to “pass the gauntlet of expert medical opinion and not be foisted off on a credulous public by ignorant and commercially minded manufacturers.”63 He had plenty of allies: PEP supported his call for regulation to protect consumers in 1934, and it was followed by the Committee against Malnutrition, who warned that it was futile “to carry out correct education in food values while commercial advertising is, as at present, permitted to abuse the scientific knowledge gained.”64 Despite these complaints, there was a grudging recognition that the market had raised nutritional awareness, albeit in disingenuous and misleading ways, and that it had made consumers’ make the rational choice to consume foods that claimed to deliver nutritional health.
As we saw William Crawford, the managing director of Britain’s leading advertising agency, advanced an altogether more positive view of the role of advertising in promoting the nutritional health of the population, in The People’s Food. As advertising, he argued, was just another technique of social education, one better suited to bringing the “abstractions of science” down to the practical level of ordinary people’s everyday lives, it would form a vital “weapon which students of nutrition will undoubtedly use in striving to achieve their ideal of a healthy nation.” It was a point he drove home by showing how many women—ranging from 65.9 percent of respondents in the first and wealthiest occupational group to 89.5 percent in the fifth and poorest group—remained unaffected by the proliferating dietary advice they received. Those who were interested focused on practical suggestions about recipes, dieting, and feeding children; “scientific subjects such as ‘vitamins,’ ‘food values,’ ‘proper nutrition,’ were seldom mentioned.”65 Few nutritionists endorsed Crawford’s argument, but by the late 1930s there was a growing interest among social nutritionists in using advertising techniques for the dissemination of nutritional knowledge. Even the BMA’s Committee on Nutrition had successfully made “full use of modern advertising to bring to the notice of the public” their manuals Family Meals and Cookery and Doctors Cookery Book, which had sold 127,566 and 170,654 copies, respectively.66 This was, as we shall shortly see, to anticipate the government work of nutritionists during the Second World War, which combined sophisticated advertising campaigns on nutritional education with a framework for regulating the advertising industry’s use of nutritional science.
The scientific reform of domestic life proceeded vigorously between the wars, in part because its model of the healthy and hygienic household became a commercial, as much as a civic, aspiration. At its heart lay Everywoman’s dream of an efficient, labor-saving kitchen, for it was there that 60 percent of her domestic work was performed. A whole host of domestic scientists, architects, housing reformers, and commercial companies drew on theories of scientific management to design efficient kitchens that promised not only to reduce the labor of the housewife, but to improve her family’s health and hygiene. 67 Not only did these kitchens make the social responsibility for producing domestic health and hygiene a commercial aspiration, but they imposed efficiency even upon those who failed to aspire, by engineering spaces that unwittingly transformed the practices of the people who worked in them.
This was evident at the Daily Mail’s Ideal Home Exhibition.68 Established in 1908, the paper tried from the outset to transform household management, and its middle-class women readers whose job it was to manage domestic life, through the application of modern science and technology. The early focus on health issues of concern to women, such as health, hygiene, and child-rearing, soon merged with an interest in efficiency and saving labor. At the last exhibition before the Great War, labor-saving technologies, complete with practical lectures and demonstrations, were presented in their own section. When the Ideal Home Exhibition reopened its doors in 1920, it was with the familiar emphasis on scientific management as a way of reducing the labor it took for the housewife to provide a healthy and hygienic home. The Daily Mail’s publication in August 1919 of a model efficient - kitchen plan that reduced the number of steps required to make afternoon tea from 350 to 50 was followed by competitions for readers’ best ideas on labor-saving devices and designs, as well as for the complete “ideal labour-saving home.”69 The winning design, built for display at the 1920 Exhibition, “contained intrinsic labour-saving design features — not just domestic appliances — to reduce both housework and maintenance. Labour-saving features were focused on the kitchen, with the various appliances being grouped to minimize work in the preparation, cooking and serving of food and in washing and house-cleaning. The heights of the cooker, table, sinks and other worktops were scientifically determined at the most suitable level for a woman of average height.”70 Given this focus on the science of domestic efficiency, it should come as no surprise that in 1919 Dorothy Peel became editor of the Daily Mail’s Women’s Page.71 She was the ideal candidate in the eyes of the Mail’s proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, not just because he engaged in antiwaste campaigns against successive governments during the early 1920s, but because she typified the women of middle England that the Daily Mail imagined as its readers.72 Peel’s emphasis on the new scientific ways of managing the home helped make housework a respectable activity for the salaried middle classes (coming to terms with their straitened circumstance as “the New Poor” in inflationary times, when even servants had to be let go), as well as the mobile, anxious to establish their new social credentials by running an efficient and hygienic household. This is the story of my beloved maternal grandmother, Beryl, whose copy of Labor Saving Hints and Ideas for the Home, published and purchased shortly after she was married in the mid-1920s, now sits on my desk.
In showcasing new designs and techniques for a scientifically managed home, the Ideal Home Exhibition associated the domestic sciences with an aspiration for modernity and a future graced by health, hygiene, and happiness. Of course, few could afford to purchase the ideal labor-saving homes on display in the Daily Mail’s annual exhibition, but all who went could temporarily inhabit those spaces and “fantasise that they lived the lives projected in them.”73 The catalogue for the 1924 exhibition described it as “everybody’s exhibition,” because in “dealing with the art of home-making, the exhibition teaches the art of living.” The exhibition encouraged all to reflect on their own domestic practices, their own poorly organized kitchens and unhygienic spaces. And just to drive home the point, displays of inefficient and unhygienic “Chamber of Horrors” were often included, ranging from poorly designed utensils and appliances (1920) to a traditional Lanarkshire miner’s cottage with stone floors and open range (1922) to a selection of kitchen designs from other countries (1926), showcasing an American design that was a “model of scientific arrangement,” with its hygienic surfaces and labor-saving designs and devices. This heady cocktail of attractions drew ever larger numbers of visitors, growing from the 200,000 who had come to the initial exhibition of 1908 to just under half a million in 1926, 620,000 in 1937, and a peak of over a million in the postwar period.74 The Ideal Homes Exhibition may have been the largest purveyor of model homes with efficient kitchens, but it was by no means the only one. Many others—like the Brighter Homes Exhibition or the Ideal and Happy Homes — toured the country and enabled people in even the poorest areas to envisage and momentarily inhabit the kitchen of their dreams.75 As one historian has recently remarked, by the 1930s the planning and display of “the dream kitchen became almost a national pastime.”76
It was one fueled by the remarkable proliferation in women’s magazines between the wars as well as by competition between the gas and electric industries to provide designs and equipment for the most hygienic and labor-saving kitchen. Women’s magazines went a long way toward both democratizing the ideal home, with its efficient kitchen, and popularizing scientific techniques for managing a home. Good Housekeeping, established in 1922, was quickly followed by a rash of similar magazines—Women and Home (1926), Woman’s Journal (1927), Women’s Own (1932), Women’s Illustrated (1936), and Woman (1937) — all devoted to the new science of good housekeeping.77 Good Housekeeping made labor-saving devices, modern cooking, and efficient consumption a central concern. It tested new equipment and recipes in its specially created institute on the Strand (1924) and Oxford Street Restaurant (1927), each of which boasted “a modern and properly equipped kitchen,” and guided readers to the best products through the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The practical advice on budgeting, nutrition, and meal planning that suffused its pages, often written by the staff members or graduates of King’s College Department of Household and Social Science, were backed up cooking demonstrations at the institute, marketing of products like the Good Housekeeping Diary and Account Book, as well as competitions for labor-saving and economizing hints. The now familiar obsession with efficiency and economy encapsulated the magazine’s vision of good housekeeping, from labor-saving equipment to the planning and cooking of nutritionally healthy but affordable family meals.
Although the gas industry had modeled kitchens and provided culinary demonstrations in its showrooms since the late nineteenth century, it redoubled its efforts between the wars in the face of mounting competition from electricity. Gas showrooms were redesigned to ensure that customers who came to pay their bills had to walk through a model home fully equipped with modern gas conveniences, and some companies even developed special lecture theaters, capable of seating two hundred, for their cooking demonstrations — by 1937 the Gas, Light and Coke Company had twenty-three such showrooms and had provided seventeen hundred cooking demonstrations to an estimated hundred thousand women.78 Despite these efforts, the ideal home and kitchen were increasingly associated during the 1920s with electricity.79 The first all-electric home was on display at the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1925, the year after Electrical Association of Women (EAW) was established to advise manufacturers on the design and use of electrical goods in the home, with the aim of providing a more efficient domestic environment.80 Its director, Caroline Haslett, was a disciple of American apostles of the scientific management of the home Lillian Gilbreth and Christine Frederick.81 Haslett invited Frederick to present a series of lectures to EAW in 1927, subsequently published in the EAWjournal the Electrical Age for Women, which offered a paean to the electrical transformation of the house into an efficient space in which the housewife could work as a domestic scientist. Electrification, she argued, would elevate the kitchen to “its proper modern place as a cheerful sanitary food laboratory,” where it would now be possible for the housewife “to remain neat and tidy while she does her work with step-saving and convenience.” 82 The publication of her manual The Kitchen Practical in 1932 was followed, four years later, by the short film Motion Study in the Home, which showcased an electrically equipped kitchen. The film contrasted conventional preparation of a breakfast with one that followed a scientifically managed plan to maximize efficiency.83 And to cement her reputation as the new doyenne of domestic efficiency, she took on the position of chair of the National Council of Women’s newly established Council for Scientific Management in the Home in 1932. It drew upon the experience of housewives and experts of household management to set up model kitchens for the guidance of builders and consumers. As we saw in the last chapter, there was a specifically British inflection to scientific management of the home. The Council for Scientific Management in the Home, like the EAW and the Women’s Gas Council, defined efficiency broadly, to include social questions of health and welfare, such as standards of nutrition, child welfare, housing, and smoke abatement.84 It is worth recalling that during the 1930s the British Council of Gas Associations sponsored several documentary films on these issues—Housing Problems, Enough to Eat, and Children at School. The first especially had no difficulty combining uncompromising social realism with promotion of the gas industries as a technological solution to slum housing.
Clearly, most had to be content with inhabiting their ideal kitchen in imagination, at an exhibition, or in a magazine. Few efficient kitchens materialized in actual homes, despite the tremendous expansion of Britain’s public and private housing stock between the wars. By 1939 over 750,000 public council houses, 10 percent of the housing stock, had been built, and further construction that took place after the Second World War almost doubled that figure, to 17 percent by 1951. As the construction of public housing contracted in the fiscal retrenchment of the early 1920s, private developers took up the slack, building 4,000,000 new homes and raising the percentage of owner-occupiers from 10 percent in 1914 to 32 percent by 1938. An increasing number of these new homes became part of the expanding national electrical grid, which having supplied only 730,000 households in 1920, included 9,000,000 households by 1938 and was growing at a rate of 750,000 households each year.
Yet for all this expansion, the efficient kitchen made only fitful appearances in public housing. In 1918 the Ministry of Reconstruction established the Women’s Housing Subcommittee, to solicit women’s opinions on postwar housing design “with special reference to the convenience of the housewife”: its members, inevitably, included the ubiquitous Dorothy Peel.85 Focusing specifically upon the needs of working-class women, they concluded that a modern house required not just a bathroom and a living room (where food could be eaten, where children could play, and where adults could relax), but a room dedicated to labor-saving food preparation and economical cooking, with hot and cold running water, work spaces that were easy to clean, and a conveniently situated range. Yet the rival Tudor Walters Committee, charged with imagining plans for the homes fit for heroes that Lloyd George had promised, ignored these recommendations. It did, however, carry on an elaborate discussion of how to separate the kitchens from sculleries, and thus cooking and eating from dishwashing.86 It was not until the 1930s that separate labor-saving kitchens began to be incorporated into public housing. Both the St. Pancras Housing Improvement Society and the London County Council implemented EAW designs in their construction of new flats. It was private developers like Wimpey, Costain, and Ideal Homestead, however, whose cheap three-bedroom semidetached houses, complete with separate bathrooms and kitchens, “dressed up with...ideas from American home economics and household efficiency experts,” that did the most to popularize the models of efficient kitchens on display at the Ideal Home Exhibition.87
By the time the 1944 Dudley Report on postwar reconstruction contemplated the design of dwellings, it was clear that women placed even greater emphasis than ever before on labor-saving design features, especially in the kitchen, for preparation of family meals.88 An article by the architect Jane Drew, “The Kitchen of the Future,” which appeared in Women’s Illustrated in 1945, reflected the trend: “I feel that every woman agrees that household drudgery must be banished after the war and that’s why I’m concentrating on kitchens.”89 Nonetheless, a PEP survey on household appliances showed that Britain lagged a long way behind the United States, with only 8.5 million gas and 1.5 million electrical cookers in operation (in other words, at least 25 percent of the population had neither), and most women still spent forty-nine hours a week on housework, even before allowance was made for shopping.90 Not surprisingly, therefore, some women remained skeptical about efficient kitchens. One complaining to the Builder that the “super kitchen idea needs debunking”: it owed more to science fiction than to any appreciation of the realities of domestic life.91 The delivery of labor-saving homes, complete with efficient kitchens capable of transforming housewives into domestic scientists, was distinctly uneven. Yet the ideal was closer to realization by the 1940s, in hearts and minds if not in Formica and linoleum, than many had thought possible in 1918.
Battling on the Kitchen Front in the Second World War
During the Second World War the state, in the form of the Ministry of Food, became directly implicated in the project to make Everywoman a nutritionally informed domestic scientist and every kitchen an efficient one. It did so by drawing upon the new cadre of freshly trained domestic scientists as well as on many of the commercial techniques responsible for the popularization of domestic science between the wars. The discipline of the ration book, together with the work of the ministry’s Food Advice Division, subjected consumers to new pedagogies that encouraged them to purchase and prepare foods, as well as to plan and cook meals, in the new socially responsible way — that is, efficiently and healthily. The social democratic and state-centered project of food rationing also depended, then, on educating citizens to maximize their own health and efficiency, and made those social ends an object of commercial endeavor.
The by now familiar figure of Le Gros Clark wrote a report for the Ministry of Food in 1946 praising the work of its Food Advice Division as the “first systematic effort to sustain a long-term campaign” to “instruct the public in dietetic matters.”92 Mobilizing an impressive network of nutritionists, domestic scientists, market researchers, and housewives, the Food Advice Division sought to translate nutritional science “in simple and practical terms which could be understood and applied by the average housewife,” so that she could improve the nutritional health of her family through the most efficient use of available foods.93 Despite its modest beginnings in late 1940, the division had grown considerably by the time Le Gros Clark wrote. Its headquarters boasted a staff of twenty-five dieticians and domestic scientists who, working closely with the ministry’s Scientific Adviser’s Division and Public Relations Department, not only operated an experimental kitchen where new foodstuffs and recipes were tested, but translated the fruits of that work into publicity materials. The media disseminating food advice, which were numerous and diverse, included bimonthly culinary calendars with topical recipes, posters, charts, and photo prints illustrating nutritional requirements and food values, books and pamphlets of recipes and basic cooking methods, periodicals aimed at domestic science teachers and others supplying food advice, short films on a variety of topics, exhibitions, lectures, and demonstrations.94 Probably the best known of all were the regular Kitchen Front broadcasts on the BBC, which, appearing daily after the morning news, generated an audience of around five million listeners, “15 per cent of the available audience, and four times the audience of any other daytime talk.”95
All these materials emphasized how greater nutritional knowledge would enable those battling on the kitchen front to reduce the waste of food, fuel, and labor, while boosting the nutritional health of their family. Key here was the discipline of menu planning. The first step was to understand the nutritional functions of what were described as the three essential food groups (“body-building,” “energy,” and “protective” foods), which foodstuffs belonged in each group, and each family member’s differing requirements for each category. The housewife was encouraged to plan out all the meals to be provided over a week, carefully balancing the need for economy with variety, so as to satisfy the family’s nutritional needs with the demand for tasty and attractive dishes. Such planning would produce a range of economies: knowing the ingredients for each meal would reduce time spent shopping; several dishes could be prepared together to save fuel and labor; food wasted in the preparation or consumption of one meal could be recycled in another (hence the popularity of soups).96
Drawing on its extensive use of the Wartime Social Survey and market research, the ministry recognized, in a way its food economy campaigns of the First World War had not, that, as “the average housewife does not wish to be consciously ‘educated’ in her craft,” its publicity materials should offer “advice,” not edicts.97 Accordingly, the Food Advice Division sought to “establish direct, personal contact between the Ministry and the women of this country,” tailoring its practical advice to the particular needs and circumstances of specific groups and individuals.98 By the end of the war the Food Advice Division had assembled an extensive network for its outreach work, twenty-five regional Food Advice Organizers coordinated the tours of a further 150 qualified lecturers and demonstrators, as well as the activities of some fifty Food Advice Centres. In addition, beginning in spring 1941 local voluntary workers were recruited and briefly trained as “Food Leaders,” to facilitate more direct but informal access to housewives: by June 1946 no fewer than 22,300 wore a badge to prove they were food leaders, and they could keep up to date through their own journal, Food Leader News.99
At the heart of all this endeavor were the Food Advice Centres that began opening on the main streets of larger towns from spring 1941 on: they publicized the ministry’s food advice and provided a “drop-in” destination for the curious and self-improving, as well as the headquarters for regional organizers, demonstrators, and local food leaders. Radio and theater stars were hired to open the centers and attract the attention of the public, which was regaled with announcements in newspapers and cinemas, or emanating from street posters and loudspeaker vans, all promising that a short demonstration would be followed by tea and cookies.100 Radiating advice, not instruction, the centers were designed to give no “suggestion of an Official Bureau” or “smack too much of the schoolroom,” but to “look like a warm, homely kitchen; the sort of kitchen a housewife would like to drop into for help with her problems and a heart-to-heart chat.” Cooking facilities were to be plain and simple (to afford no “opportunity for a poor woman to think: ‘It’s easy for them to cook like that with all those grand pans, but I couldn’t do it’”), and nutritional advice was to “be given in simple words while explaining the cooking of homely dishes.” Still, detailed and technical leaflets were also distributed. Those appointed to achieve this delicate balancing act were to possess no less than the accumulated wisdom of the social, nutritional, and domestic sciences: an “exhaustive knowledge of cookery” along with “personal experience of family cooking and the difficulties of a small, poorly equipped kitchen”; they should evince “knowledge of the technique of demonstrating,” without “talking down to the women with whom they come in contact,” in addition to “knowledge of the elements of dietetics,” and “MOTHERLINESS: The will to serve: a keen interest in both people and food, combined with initiative and organising power.”101 Much of the burden of producing such superwomen fell on the National Training Colleges of Domestic Subjects, which were contracted to place their students as supervisors and demonstrators at Food Advice Centres, as well as to run refresher courses.102
It is difficult to tell how these centers actually worked in practice, or how many flocked to receive their food advice. The few detailed records we have indicate that on busy days a continual stream of up to three hundred people dropped in to some centers, and further inquiries arrived by mail or telephone, whereas on other days the stream was reduced to a trickle or even a drip, amounting to little more than thirty enquiries.103 Demonstrations were usually held on one or two afternoons a week (especially on market days) and were targeted at specific groups, like newlywed brides, young housewives learning how to manage their households, new mothers, or even men driven into the kitchen by their wives’ wartime work. This targeting of particular constituencies was also a feature of the demonstration work that cultivated “contacts” with myriad groups, ranging from political clubs and religious organizations to housewives’ associations and the Women’s Voluntary Service. Demonstration vans with fully equipped kitchens were vital to this work, especially in rural areas where alternative facilities, such as gas and electric display rooms, school and factory canteens, or British Restaurants, were rarely available. Exhibition work was also common: booths might be rented at local fairs and markets, as well as at larger events, such as the touring Dig for Victory exhibition in 1944 or the News of the World Home Making Exhibition and of course the Daily Mail’s Ideal Home Exhibition in 1947.104 The Food Advice Centre on St. John’s Road in Battersea had just short of ninety thousand such contacts in its inaugural year, 1944, a figure that doubled the following year.
Much of this activity demonstrated the difficulties Food Advice Centres had in reaching the majority of housewives who were not members of a voluntary organization. The food leaders scheme was intended to address this very problem. It represented the culmination of the ministry’s credo concerning food advice: rather than edicts from patronizing experts or austere officials, which would be quickly resented and soon forgotten, food advice was best spread informally: “The average housewife is best influenced by the opinions of her neighbours and acquaintances. The knowledge conveyed to her... should have the subtle force of a change of fashion; it should pervade her consciousness as she goes about her daily tasks.”105 As the vanguard of food advice, food leaders had to be average members of their community, but it was hoped that their own transformation into badge-wearing experts, following a brief training and a subscription to Food Leader News, would herald a broader transformation in food habits. As “average housewives,” they were expected to reach those untouched by the other work of the Food Advice Division, by inviting friends and neighbors to their own house for demonstrations or going from door to door in their localities dispensing pertinent advice and literature. In fact, fewer than half the food leaders were ever trained, and although the large majority “would be classified as housewives,” most had been recruited through organizations like theWomen’s Voluntary Service (or WVS, which had provided the initial idea for the scheme), the Women’s Institute, the National Union of Townswomen guild, and the YWCA, while the rest were professional health visitors, midwives, and domestic science teachers.106 The food leader scheme certainly broadened the network of those dispensing food advice but it is unclear how effective it was at drawing in housewives not affiliated with a particular organization.107
Working closely with the ministry’s Public Relations Department and the Ministry of Information, the Food Advice Division made extensive use of Mass-Observation, the Wartime Social Survey, and market research to monitor the effectiveness of its work. It did not always make for happy reading. During 1940 and 1941, for instance, Mass-Observation found that fewer than half of those they interviewed were aware of the Kitchen Front campaign, many of those who knew the catchphrase were unclear what it entailed, and the Kitchen Front Exhibition at Charing Cross attracted mainly middle-class men, not the working class women it was intended for.108 Similarly, Gert and Daisy’s comedic talks on food and cuisine for the Kitchen Front broadcast by the BBC initially went out after the six o’clock evening news, when many housewives were busy with their children — a finding that helped the Ministry of Food secure the coveted 8:15 morning slot for the broadcast.109 Although a Home Intelligence report in 1943 indicated “considerable appreciation” for the work of the Food Advice Division, opinions varied “as to the best or most popular medium ... On the whole, the radio and cinema seem to be liked rather better than the press; neither posters nor leaflets are thought ‘to cut much ice,’ and are considered by some housewives to be a waste of paper...except for leaflets giving food recipes or gardening hints.”110 Considerable scrutiny continued to be paid to the reception of new initiatives like the series of ads and leaflets called Food Facts, launched in December 1946. The British Market Research Bureau, which undertook a survey of reader responses over several months, each week interviewed a sample of between roughly a thousand and fifteen hundred housewives belonging to different social groups across the country. A depressing pattern was soon evident: fewer than 40 percent had seen the ads, fewer than 10 percent had found them helpful, and fewer than 5 percent had actually tried a suggested recipe.111 Of course, the Food Advice Division’s own network of regional food organizers and supervisors of Food Advice Centres also provided frequent, if less scientific, feedback on the success of particular campaigns and initiatives, as did the swollen mailbags of Lord Woolton and Jack Drummond.112
It is hard to square these gloomy assessments of the Food Advice Division’s impact in transforming dietary habits and raising nutritional consciousness with the hugely positive responses to it by those like Le Gros Clark. These differences may be rooted in the contradictory results of the Ministry’s own survey work. Thus, although Mass-Observation found a significant improvement in the nutritional knowledge of those attending the Kitchen Front Exhibition — with the percentage of those able to identify and distinguish between the different energy, body-building and protective food groups rising from 42.5 to 59 percent between the spring of 1940 and the autumn of 1941 — little more than eighteen months later the Wartime Social Survey study of two thousand consumers concluded that “large numbers of people have no scientific knowledge of dietetic food values.”113 Nonetheless, by 1946 the Midlands regional food organizer was asserting that it “has to a very large extent become part of the national habit to think of food in terms of its value; its place in the national interest can be assessed by the fact that the cartoonists and joke writers have found it essential to include this interest in food among their jokes.”114 Certainly, many of the letters and telegrams sent to Jack Drummond showed an impressive grasp of nutritional science.115 Similarly, reminiscences of wartime childhoods are rarely complete without some mention by the authors of their mothers’ struggles on the kitchen or food front, experiments with new foodstuffs and recipes, or attendance at various culinary demonstrations.116
Just as the objective of the Food Advice Division was to translate the principles of nutritional science into practical dietary advice by promoting the concept of meal planning, so the discipline of the ration book itself imposed certain rules and obligations on the housewife that forced her to plan her weekly shopping for supplies, if not necessarily her family’s meals. Some forty-four million ration books were issued in September 1939 to cover every member of the population, but the harassed housewife was left to coordinate the different allowances for adults, infants, and children, to procure food to meet those allowances through the different mechanisms of “straight” rationing and “points” rationing, and to secure unrationed foods on a first-come, first-served basis. We know little about how housewives adapted to these new disciplines but, despite the existence of a thriving black market, which we should be careful not to romanticize as simply a sign of resistance, it appears that for the most part they did so remarkably well. Or at least they coped, resigned to the idea that their struggles were a necessary part of the war effort.118 The long lines and inadequate supplies, not the necessity of planning budgets and dietaries, were the most frequent causes for complaints, although the waiting in lines highlighted the hollowness of claims that the planning was labor-saving.119 It was the demands of standing in lines — as well as its unfairness— that formed the initial focus for the animosity of predominantly middle-class women’s organizations — the Mothers League and the British Housewives League. With the extension of peacetime rationing in 1946, however, and especially the rationing of bread, they redirected their critique toward a more general attack on food controls and the overbearing and un-English intrusion of the state into domestic life.120 Given that the scientific management of the home had come to be equated with the efficiency of the middle-class housewife, the hostility toward state control and the continuation of austerity measures, not hostility to food advice and meal planning, were the factors that drove some local branches of the British Housewives League to protest outside Food Advice Centres.
However weary some women had grown of the discipline of the ration book, they were to enjoy no respite in the postwar years from the injunction to plan meals. New manuals and guides were produced by the Ministry of Food and the Association of Teachers of Domestic Subjects for the instruction of canteen managers, schoolchildren, and housewives charged with ensuring the nutritional health of postwar society. Written by Magnus Pyke (of the ministry’s Scientific Adviser’s Division) and Le Gros Clark, the publications demonstrated not only the centrality of nutritional expertise to the science of meal planning but the continued determination to find ways of making its complexities accessible through practical demonstrations, tables, charts, and quizzes.121 Indeed, meal planning was increasingly a sign of how women’s contribution to the kitchen front had helped elevate what the Coventry Evening Telegraph described as “the new domestic science as against the old ‘housework’” and its task in the project of social reconstruction.122 By the late 1940s cooking for the family had become integrally associated with meal planning and efficient management in the kitchen: “The principle of to-day’s Family Cooking is based on a well-organised kitchen, forecast shopping, planned menus and, of course, adequate knowledge of food values and general diet in relation to individual family requirements.”123
In 1947, Helene Reynard, who had been warden of King’s College of Household and Social Science for the past two decades, took stock of the public career of domestic science in Britain and its place in the project of postwar social reconstruction. “It is obvious,” she wrote, “that the health, comfort, and to a great extent the happiness, of the entire population depend on the success with which housewives perform their functions of home-makers and housekeepers.” The organizing principles of domestic science — economy, efficient organization, and sound nutrition — had ensured not only that a “well-planned ... clean and well-ordered” home and an “adequate, nourishing, varied and attractive diet” were now within the reach of every family, but that they were now also widely applied in the social work of public institutions. The extension of communal catering in schools, factories, hospitals, and prisons, the expansion of domestic science curricula in schools and training colleges, and the commercial marketing of efficient kitchens and nutritional health had created a plethora of well-remunerated new posts for the trained domestic scientist. To meet this need, the 1944 Education Act ensured that domestic science was taught to all girls in primary school, and that the majority of secondary schools would now include it as a component of the School Certificate Exam. No fewer than fifteen training colleges offered three-year diplomas, with tuition fees covered by government grants from 1946 on, and the Universities of Bristol and London offered undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses.124
Some citizens, of course, rejected the idea that the health, happiness, and prosperity of all depended upon the housewife’s ability to master the techniques of domestic science. These critics found the disciplines of rationing and meal planning profoundly un-English, a violation of the very liberties that the war was being fought to defend. Devon’s delightful wartime tirade against the ministry on behalf of all those “who enjoy their food and dislike being told officially what, when and where they shall eat” pointedly promised “no attempt to re-educate taste or re-align habit in eating” and certainly no “formulas or charts with ‘planned’ diets which most people have tried without great enthusiasm.” Devon made jokes at the expense of Glossop’s luckless medical officer of health, whose infamous “super diet” included the “Glossop Health Sandwich,” made of wholemeal bread, an ounce of cheese, meat, or dried yeast mixed with half an ounce of vitaminized margarine, mustard, and cress (or tomato or raw carrot): “It would be stupid to suggest that an expert in vitamins and correct diet does not know what is really good for you ... [but] if the Glossop menu is an ‘elixir’ of life, I am not sure that I want to prolong my life indefinitely.” Concluding that the experts were really “cranks,” the author of Let’s Eat! warned that if they got their way, traditional and much-loved, tasty foods like fish and chips and the roast beef of old England would be lost forever.125 He would not have mourned the steady flow of closures of Food Advice Centres that followed their transfer to local authorities’ control in 1949, or the dissolution of the Food Advice Division in 1952 or the abolition of the Ministry of Food in 1954 after the final cessation of food rationing.
Although the critics of rationing and food advice presented themselves as engaged in a David-and-Goliath struggle, championing the market-driven consumer against the colossus of state controls, the Ministry of Food and its “cranks” had actually ceded much control over diet to the citizen-consumers. The ministry’s unparalleled use of market research and advertising encouraged citizens to consume in more rational and self-improving ways. The ads did so not least of all by making nutritional health seem desirable: they promised women beauty, youthful zest, and happy children, and men strength and vitality. As the commercial marketing of foods had attracted a great deal of criticism from nutritional experts for willfully misleading consumers, the Ministry of Food was adamant that its food advice was scientifically accurate and that its scientific advisers would help regulate food advertising. Although the 1938 Food and Drugs Act had provided a regulatory framework to control the composition and labeling of foods, its powers had been suspended on the outbreak of the war, thereby leaving the way open for commercial manufacturers to make exaggerated claims about the nutritional properties and benefits of their products, often by appropriating the government’s own jingles and slogans.126 It was not just that many labels were outdated and depended upon unjustifiable claims, or that they used such vague and misleading descriptions as “tonic,” “nourishing,” and “natural,” but that they often implied “that a food has a dietetic or nutritional value when in fact the value is insignificant.”127 Determined to help “the housewife in making an intelligent choice from the foods available,” the ministry issued the Defence (Sale of Food) Regulations Order in 1943, which for the first time set particular standards that labels and advertisements had to meet. Precise nutritional quantities had to be specified, not just for the product as a whole, but for each individual serving, and a code of practice with precise guidelines was drawn up by the ministry’s scientific advisers in consultation with the Medical Research Council.128 Henceforth, consumers were advised how to procure their nutritional health through the market and were protected from anyone trying to exploit their hard-won nutritional knowledge. This marked a significant shift. Ensuring nutritional health was no longer simply about instructing citizens how to be rational consumers. Instead, individuals were encouraged to govern their own nutritional health by purchasing the appropriate foods. If scientific experts defined nutritional health, advertisements represented the benefits accruing to anyone who had achieved it, and manufacturers developed ever more nutrition-conscious products and labels. The role of government and of formal politics more broadly became one of facilitating informed consumer choice and ensuring that all the necessary information and the proper regulatory framework were available to support the responsible consumer. This occurred during the emergence of a social democratic state, and that confluence that might lead us to reassess the contention that the failure of social democratic politics in Britain, marked by the two protracted periods of Conservative government in 1951 and 1979, lay in the failure to engage with the commercial desires of its citizens, especially women.129 We have to recognize that the welfare state’s concentration on the subject of consumption elevated the political status of the housewife, albeit as a servant of her family. The shift was evident in the proliferation of such organizations such as Women’s Institutes, Townswomen’s Guilds, the Women’s Voluntary Service, and the British Housewives League — dedicated to the mobilization of housewives as key actors in the new society.
Notes
1. Board of Education, Health of the Schoolchild, 1926 (London: HMSO,1927), cited in David Smith and Malcolm Nicolson, “Nutrition, Education, Ignorance and Income: A Twentieth-Century Debate,” in Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840–1940 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 297.
2. F. Le Gros Clark (ed.), National Fitness: A Brief Essay on Contemporary Britain (London: Macmillan, 1938), 114.
3. A point first compellingly made in Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” History and the Category of “Women” in History (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1988).
4. B. S. Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London: Macmillan, 1901), 141–142, 74, 105.
5. B. S. Rowntree, The Human Needs of Labour (London: Longmans, Green, 1937),127.
6. B. S. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress: A Second Social Survey of York, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1942), 26.
7. Among many examples, see Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, vol. 1, Report and Appendix (London: HMSO, 1904), 41; Pilgrim Trust, Men without Work: A Report Made to the Pilgrim Trust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 115, 128. As Paul Johnson and Ross McKibbin have argued, middle-class social investigators utterly failed to comprehend the ways in which conspicuous and seemingly unnecessary forms of expenditure were intricately tied to the maintenance of working-class self-respect and cultural capital. Paul Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-Class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 6; Ross McKibbin, “Social Class and Social Observation in Edwardian England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 28 (1978): 175–199.
8. D. N. Paton, J. G. Dunlop, and E. M. Inglis, A Study of the Diet of the Labouring Classes in Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Otto Schulze, 1900), cited in Smith and Nicolson, “Nutrition, Education, Ignorance and Income,” 289; Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, 1:40.
9. For examples, see Pilgrim Trust, Men without Work, 114; PEP, “The Malnutrition Controversy,” Planning 88 (15 December 1936): 12–13. For the rare advocate of the housewife, see Maud Pember Reeves, Round about a Pound a Week (London:Virago, [1913] 1979), 75, 144.
10. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995); Eileen Yeo, The Contest for Social Science:Relations and Representations of Gender and Class (London: Rivers Oram, 1996); Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jane Lewis, “The Working-Class Wife and Mother and State Intervention, 1870–1918,” in Jane Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love:Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
11. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 128–130, 213–215.
12. Rowntree, Poverty, 223–225.
13. See Pember Reeves, Round about a Pound a Week, 10–15, for a detailed picture of grappling with accounts. See also Bowley’s telling remark that “few people have the patience, perseverance, willingness and skill to keep such accounts.” A. L.Bowley, The Nature and Purpose of the Measurement of Social Phenomena (London: King & Son, 1915), 139–140.
14. Max Cohen, I Was One of the Unemployed (London: Gollancz, 1945), 102.
15. Sir William Crawford and H. Broadley, The People’s Food (London: Heinemann, 1938), 314. Their survey, however, included all social classes, not, as with its predecessors, just the working class.
16. Kathryn Hughes, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton (London:Harper, 2006).
17. June Purvis, “Domestic Subjects since 1870,” in Ivor Goodson (ed.), Social Histories of the Secondary Curriculum (London: Falmer, 1985); Ann Marie Turnball, “Learning Her Womanly Work: The Elementary School Curriculum, 1870–1914,” in Felicity Hunt (ed.), Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850–1950 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
18. The “National” provided cooking courses and advice to the prison commissioners, the local government board, and the army. By 1913 it claimed to have supplied 75 percent of London County Council’s elementary cooking teachers. Dorothy Stone, The National: The Story of a Pioneer College, The National Training College of Domestic Subjects (London: Robert Hale, 1976), 91–92, 62–63, 95–97, 106.
19. Helen Sillitoe, A History of the Teaching of Domestic Subjects (London:Methuen, 1933), 27, 44.
20. Ibid., 41, 44; Anne Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity:Women and the English Gas Industry, 1889–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 32.
21. Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram, 1996), 149.
22. Cooking classes, it stipulated, should focus on economy, practicality, and nutritional knowledge; see Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, 1:43.
23. Sillitoe, A History of the Teaching of Domestic Subjects, 129–131. Board of Education, Special Report on the Teaching of Cookery to Public Elementary School Children (London: HMSO, 1907).
24. Board of Education, General Report on the Teaching of Domestic Subjects to Public Elementary School Children in England and Wales, by the Chief Woman Inspector of the Board of Education (London: HMSO, 1912), 38.
25. “Women, War, and Society” microfilm collection, IWM, pt. 2, Education Files, 2/9/6, Household and Social Science Department, King’s College for Women; Nancy L. Blakestead, “King’s College of Household and Social Science and the Origins of Dietetics Education,” in David F. Smith (ed.), Nutrition in Britain: Science, Scientists and Politics in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 1997), 75–98.
26. It has been estimated that by the 1890s over half a million women worked in what we might call the inspection business, on either a professional or a voluntary basis. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women:Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1985), 211–212.
27. Deborah Dwork, War Is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1898–1918 (London: Tavistock, 1986), 147, 154, 167.
28. Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity.
29. I am heavily indebted here to Michael Buckley’s forthcoming doctoral dissertation, “Recipe for Reform: Food, Economy and Citizenship in First World War Britain.” Parallel efforts were made by, among others, the National Training College of Domestic Subjects, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (whose Patriotic Housekeeping Exhibition in November 1915 focused specifically on menus and foodstuffs that maximized nutritional value and minimized cost and waste), and the British Commercial Gas Association. “Women, War, and Society” microfilm collection, IWM, pt. 4, Food, 1/25; Stone, The National, 128–129, 136; Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity, 186–189.
30. Lady Chance, “An Account of the Work of the National Food Economy League,” and National Food Fund, “The National Food Fund and Its Work,” both in the “Women,War, and Society” microfilm collection, IWM; “Classes in Household Economy,” Times, 12 March 1915. Scotland had its own Patriotic Food League.
31. On the Board of Education’s early activities, see “Memorandum on Work in Connection with Food Economy and Control, carried out by Miss Kate Manley, O.B.E.,” “Women,War, and Society” microfilm collection, IWM, pt. 4, Food, 3/9.
32. For a recent account that charts the emergence of consumer rights in formal political terms, see Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
33. Lady Chance, “An Account of the Work of the National Food Economy League.”
34. These publications were priced accordingly. See, for instance, Patriotic Food Economy for the Well-to-Do (6d); Handbook for Housewives (2d); Housekeeping on 25/- a Week (1d). See also “Syllabus for Working Women” and “Syllabus for Mistresses and Cooks,” “Women,War, and Society” microfilm collection, IWM.
35. Handbook for Housewives, 3, 4.
36. Patriotic Food Economy for the Well-to-Do, 4, 2, 11.
37. Despite the criticisms of the Food (War) Committee, see Mikulas Teich, “Science and Food during the Great War: Britain and Germany,” in Kamminga and Cunningham, The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 227.
38. C. S. Peel, A Year in Public Life (London: Constable, 1919), 106–107.
39. Here, for a work echoing the advice of the Food (War) Committee, see T. B. Wood and F. G. Hopkins, Food Economy in War Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), 35.
40. Peel, A Year in Public Life, 126, 26–27, 28.
41. “Report on Cookery Section of the Ministry of Food,” n.d., National Museum of Labour History (NMLH), CC/NK/4.ii; “Memorandum on Work in Connection with Food Economy and Control” 3. On the media-savvy Kennedy Jones, see Sir Thomas G. Jones, The Unbroken Front: Ministry of Food, 1916–1944: Personalities and Problems (London: Everbody’s Books, 1944).
42. Margaret L. Barnett, British Food Policy during the First World War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 76–77, 117.
43. Jones, The Unbroken Front, 4; Derek J. Oddy, From Plain Fare to Fusion Food: British Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 77–78.
44. Ibid., 23; Peel, A Year in Public Life, 167.
45. Oddy, From Plain Fare to Fusion Food, 82. The conversation runs like this: “My dear, I’ve been lecturing on food economy, and I’m dying for tea!” / “You poor dear!” / “As I’ve been telling them, it’s the amount of unnecessary food that people eat— / Thank you, I will—as I was saying— / The servants eat so much!” / “Just what I find!” / “If people would only deny themselves to ever so small an extent!” / “Don’t be afraid of it, it’s home made[.]” / “My dear, I see no sign of self-denial anywhere[.]” / “I’m afraid you’re right—I’ll just ring for some more bread and butter.”
46. Peel, A Year in Public Life, 126, 91.
47. “When at a cookery demonstration a bean was suggested as a substitute for the meat which it was so difficult to obtain, a good lady laughed ironically, “Give me ’usbin’ that muck? Yes, I don’t think!’ Whilst another added, ‘Give ’im beans, an’ get a black eye for me pains!’” Peel, How We Lived Then, 91.
48. NMLH, Consumers’ Council 1918–1920, CC/NK/2. By 1920 it was claimed that some three thousand had been reeducated as cooking instructors.
49. Stone, The National, 128–129, 136; “Memorandum on Work in Connection with Food Economy and Control,” “Women,War, and Society” microfilm collection, IWM, pt. 4, Food, 3/9, “Household and Social Science Department, King’s College forWomen, Appointments Gained by Past Students,” ibid., Education files, 2/9/4; Sillitoe, A History of the Teaching of Domestic Subjects, chap. 15.
50. Philippa C. Easdaile, “Memorandum on the Teaching of Domestic Science in England and Its Application toWork in the Colonies,” forwarded byW. Ormsby-Gore of the Colonial Office to British resident, Zanzibar, 21 April 1937, Zanzibar National Archives, AB 1/395 Secretariat, Domestic Science, 1937. My thanks to Corrie Decker for this memo.
51. Despite a rich historiography on domestic science in the United States, there has been a dearth of similar work on Britain. See, however, Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity; Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Berg: New York, 2004); Dena Attar, Wasting Girl’s Time:The History and Politics of Home Economics (London: Virago, 1990).
52. V. H. Mottram, Food and the Family (London: Nisbet, 1925); V. H. Mottram and W. M. Clifford, Properties of Food: A Practical Text-Book for Teachers of Domestic Science (London: University of London Press, 1929).
53. Established in 1917, the People’s League of Health appears to have quickly taken up the nutritional question. See Eric Pritchard, Principles of Diet: The People’s League of Health Pamphlets (London: Bailliere, Tindall & Cox, 1921).
54. Mottram, Food and the Family, 17–18, x. For a similar story of popularization, see Harmke Kamminga, “‘Axes to Grind’: Popularising the Science of Vitamins, 1920s and 1930s,” in D. F. Smith and J. Phillips (eds.), Food, Science, Policy and Regulation in the Twentieth Century: International and Comparative Perspectives (London:Routledge, 2000), 83–100; Rima D. Apple, Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996).
55. Here is Mottram’s explanation of how to calculate a family’s calorific needs: “Assuming father to be a clergyman, his index will be 1.0; his wife’s 0.83; the children, whom we will assume to be nine, twelve and fourteen years of age, the last being a boy, will need indices of 0.6, 0.7 and 1.0. Assuming there to be two maids each with an index of 0.83. The total index will be 1.0 + 0.83 + 0.6 + 0.7 + 1.0 + 0.83 + 0.83 or 5.79, i.e., the family counts as 5.79 adult males. The total calorie need per day will be 3,000 x 5.79 or 17,370, or per week, 121,590. The amount supplied in food taken during the week should cover this weekly need; if it does not, trouble will be brewing somewhere.” Got it? Mottram, Food and the Family, 140.
56. Violet G. Plimmer, Food Values at a Glance and How to Plan a Healthy Diet (London: Longmans, Green, 1935), 5.
57. Ibid., 13; R. H. A. Plimmer and Violet A. Plimmer, Food, Health and Vitamins (London: Longmans, Green, 1928), vii.
58. Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
59. Sally Horrocks, “The Business of Vitamins: Nutrition Science and the Food Industry in Interwar Britain,” in Kamminga and Cunningham, The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 247–248.
60. Plimmer and Plimmer, Food, Health and Vitamins, 89, 6. On the rise between the wars of the male cult of reducing, see Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “‘The Culture of the Abdomen’: Obesity and Reducing in Britain, c. 1900–1939,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (April 2005): 239–273.
61. George Newman, On the State of Public Health, 1932 (London: HMSO, 1933), 140n47. On the organic movement see David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1998), chaps. 3 and 4.
62. Mottram and Clifford, Properties of Food, 205. On interwar critiques of mass consumer culture, see D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). For a particular view of the “mob instinct” of the consumer in interwar Britain, see Percy Redfern (ed.), Self and Society: First Twelve Essays; Social and Economic Problems from the Hitherto Neglected Point of View of the Consumer (London: Ernest Benn, 1930), 4.
63. Mottram and Clifford, Properties of Food, 206.
64. PEP, Planning: What Consumers Need 36 (23 October 1934), 12. Much of PEP’s discussion of the need for consumer rights and protection were illustrated through reference to foods. Committee against Malnutrition, “Memorandum to the Advisory Committee on Nutrition from the Committee Against Malnutrition,” Bulletin of the Committee against Malnutrition, 10 (September 1935), 51.
65. Crawford and Broadley, The People’s Food, 303, 304, 86.
66. Fabian Society, “National Nutritional Conference,” BLPES, K25/1.
67. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Norton, 1948). See also Leif Jerram, “Buildings, Spaces, Politics: The City of Munich and the Management of Modernity, 1900–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Manchester, 2000); “Kitchen Technologies,” special issue, Technology and Culture 43, no. 4 (2002).
68. The following paragraphs in the text draw heavily on Deborah S. Ryan, The Ideal Home through the 20th Century: Daily Mail—Ideal Home Exhibition (London:Hazar, 1997).
69. Daily Mail Ideal Labour-Saving Home (London: Associated Newspapers, 1920).
70. Ryan, The Ideal Home, 34.
71. She had earlier published her own models in Dorothy Peel, The Labour-Saving House (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1917). See Chapter 6 for Peel’s Daily Mail cookbooks.
72. Tom Jeffrey and Keith McClelland, “A World Fit to Live In: The Daily Mail and the Middle Classes, 1918–1939,” in J. Curran, A. Smith, and P.Wingate (eds.), Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power (London: Methuen, 1987), 27–52. In 1921 the Ideal Home Exhibition was temporarily renamed the Daily Mail Efficiency Exhibition.
73. Ryan, The Ideal Home, 16. Mark Sandberg has suggestively written: “Domestic display has a long history, to be sure, but at some point in the early twentieth century, the idea of trying out space imaginatively before ‘buying’ it, began to be widely assimilated... The model home, I would propose, is the site for this transformation, and facilitated the spread of a modern logic of housing that saw fit between body and space as something performed, not given.” Mark B. Sandberg, “Temporary Housing; Model-Home Spectators and Housing Exhibitions in the Early Scandinavian Design Movement,” unpublished paper, February 2004.
74. Ryan, The Ideal Home, 55, 17. The colonial and postcolonial careers of ideal-home exhibitions are just beginning to receive attention; see the forthcoming doctoral dissertation of Bianca Murillo at University of California, Santa Barbara, on the Daily Graphic’s Ideal Home Exhibition in Accra, Ghana, which attracted fifty thousand visitors in 1967.
75. See Barbara Vaughan, Growing Up in Salford, 1919–1928 (Manchester: Neil Richardson, 1983), 24; “Papers from the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex,” microfilm 78388, pt. 1, reel 33, W42/J.
76. David Jeremiah, Architecture and Design for the Family in Britain, 1900–1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 106.
77. By 1932 there were twenty-five weekly and fourteen monthly magazines for women. Woman’s Weekly had over a million readers. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 508. I draw here on Ragtime to Wartime: The Best of Good Housekeeping, 1922–1939 (London:Ebury, 1986).
78. Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity, 268–270.
79. Georgie Boynton Child, The Efficient Kitchen: Definite Directions for the Planning, Arranging and Equipping of the Modern Labor-Saving Kitchen — A Practical Book for the Homemaker (New York, Robert McBride, 1925); Charles R. Darling, Modern Domestic Scientific Appliances: Being a Treatise for the Guidance of Users and Manufacturers of Domestic Appliances, Architects and Teachers of Domestic Science, with Special Regard to Efficiency, Economy and Correct Method of Use (London: Spon, 1932).
80. A mission not limited to the middle-class home. An EAW survey in 1935 estimated that domestic electrification could reduce the hours of housework for working-class women by 73 percent, from 26.5 hours a week to just over 7 hours. Caroline Davidson, A Woman’s Work Is Never Done: A History of Housework in the British Isles, 1650–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), 42–43.
81. On the EAW and Haslett see Suzette Worden, “Powerful Women: Electricity in the Home, 1919–1940,” in Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham (eds.), A View from the Interior: Feminism,Women and Design (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 128–143; Rosalind Messenger, The Doors of Opportunity: A Biography of Dame Caroline Haslett (London: Femina, 1967); Davidson, A Woman’s Work Is Never Done, 40–42. By 1940 the EAW had eighty-five branches and nine thousand members.
82. Quoted in Jeremiah, Architecture and Design for the Family, 69.
83. Worden, “PowerfulWomen,” 144; Messenger, The Doors of Opportunity, 79–
82. Under Haslett’s direction the EAW forged close links with the Association of Teachers of Domestic Science, holding an annual conference for them from 1930 and offering diplomas from 1933.
84. Established in 1934 the Women’s Gas Council followed the EAW’s lead and sought to bridge the divide “between the scientist and the housewife and link the manufacturer with the consumer.” By 1939 it had recruited thirteen thousand housewives to its regular weekly meetings in branch showrooms to discuss general issues of home management and the specific contribution of gas technologies to them. Clendinning, Demons of Domesticity, 285.
85. A variety of women’s organizations were represented, such as the National Council of Women, the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, and the Women’s Labour League, which had earlier published the pamphlet The Working Women’s House. Ministry of Reconstruction Advisory Council, Women’s Housing Subcommittee, First Interim Report, Cd. 9166 (London: HMSO, 1918); Ministry of Reconstruction Advisory Council, Final Report, Cd. 9232 (London: HMSO, 1919). See Barbara McFarlane, “Homes Fit for Heroines: Housing in the Twenties,” in Matrix, Making Space:Women and the Man-Made Environment (London: Pluto, 1986), 26–36. 86. Alison Ravetz, The Place of Home: English Domestic Environments, 1914–2000 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1995), chap. 8.
87. Alison Ravetz, “A View for the Interior,” in Attfield and Pat Kirkham, A View from the Interior, 198.
88. Ibid. The Daily Mail’s Book of Britain’s Post-War Homes, by Mrs. Pleydell Bouverie, was also published in 1944 after an extensive three-year survey to find the “house that women want.” Ryan, The Ideal Home, 89.
89. Cited in Marion Roberts, “Private Kitchens, Public Cooking,” in Matrix, Making Space, 107.
90. PEP, Report on the Market for Household Appliances (1945), cited in Helene Reynard, Domestic Science as a Career (London: Southern Editorial Syndicate, 1947), chap. 13.
91. Cited in Marion Roberts, “Private Kitchens, Public Cooking,” in Matrix, Making Space, 107.
92. F. Le Gros Clark, “Memorandum on the ‘Food Advice’Work of the Ministry of Food,” April 1946, 1, WA, GC/145/04. Historians have entirely neglected the work of the Food Advice Division.
93. Ministry of Food, “Food Advice Information Service,” NA, MAFF102/36 1.
94. See, for a full list of these materials, ibid., November 1951. The nostalgic or curious can sample many of Food Advice Division recipes in cookbooks written by one of its members; see Marguerite Patten, We’ll Eat Again: A Collection of Recipes from the War Years (London: Hamlyn, 2002); Post-war Kitchen: Nostalgic Food and Facts from 1945–1954 (London: Hamlyn, 2000); Victory Cookbook: Nostalgic Food and Facts from 1940–1954 (London: Bounty, 2002).
95. Sian Nicholas, The Echo of War: Home Front Propaganda and the Wartime BBC, 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 82.
96. For characteristic examples, see Barbara A. Callow, Good Health on War-Time Food (London: Oxford University Press, 1941); Ministry of Food, Wise Eating in Wartime (London: HMSO, 1943); Edinburgh Children’s Nutritional Council, It Should Be the Aim of All Housewives to Secure for the Family a Well-Balanced Diet (Edinburgh: Children’s Nutritional Council, 1944); Ministry of Food, The ABC of Cookery (London: HMSO, 1945).
97. Le Gros Clark, “Memorandum on the ‘Food Advice’Work of the Ministry of Food,” 1. Mass-Observation’s early report on reactions to the ministry’s publicity campaigns found that most unfavorable comment was “based upon resentment as to the fact that the Ministry should condescendingly inform ‘them.’”MO, TC67/2/A, Ministry of Food–Publicity Campaign Questionnaire, May 1940.
98. L. S. Horton, “Memorandum on Food Advice Centres,” 19 January 1941, NA, MAFF102/1; N. Bamworth, Food Economy Division, to H. P. Blunt, Public Relations Division, Ministry of Food, 4 April 1941, in “Food Education Campaigns: Establishment of Food Advice Centres,” NA, MAFF102/1.
99. The figure rose to 23,567 by the end of 1947. See James Hinton, Women, Social Leadership and the Second World War: Continuities of Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 168.
100. “Guidance Notes for Grand Openings of Food Advice Centres, March 1941,” in Ministry of Food, Food Education Campaigns. Freddie “Ricepud” Grisewood, host of the BBC Kitchen Front show, traveled the country, opening Food Advice Centres, often to large audiences that spilled out onto the pavement and road outside. See Norman Longmate (ed.), The Home Front: An Anthology of Personal Experience, 1938–1945 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981), 154.
101. L. S. Horton, “Memorandum on Food Advice Centres,” 19 January 1941, 1–3, NA, MAFF102/1.
102. Ministry of Food, Food Advice Division—National Training Colleges of Domestic Subjects, General Correspondence, NA, MAFF900/151; Stone, National, chaps. 39–40.
103. F. Chapman to Miss McKean,Weekly Report: Doncaster, 1 May 1943; Resume of Work Done in Eastern Division—both in NA, ibid.; Cardiff: Cookery Demonstrations, Lectures on Nutrition, Film Shows; Permanent Records of Divisional Food Advice Activities, 1940–1949: Midland Division; Food Advice Service in South Wales; Ministry of Food, Food Advice Centre, 79 St Johns Road, London, SW11—all in NA, MAFF102/30.
104. Ministry of Food, “Food Advice Centre—Doncaster,” NA, MAFF900/152; Ministry of Food, “‘News of the World’ Exhibition,” NA, MAFF128/16.
105. F. Le Gros Clark, “Memorandum on the ‘Food Advice’Work of the Ministry of Food,” 5.
106. In April 1946 fewer than half of the 22,300 food leaders were registered as trained. Just as there were considerable regional variations in the food leader scheme (Scotland and London between them accounted for less than 10 percent of the total), so the preponderance of certain organizations varied from locality to locality. In Newcastle 30 percent of Food Leaders belonged to the WVS, with a further 40 percent being professional women. Ibid., 2, 4.
107. Hinton has suggested that reliance on middle-class voluntary groups like the WVS made that contact even less likely. Hinton, “Women, Social Leadership and the Second World War,” 168–175.
108. MO, TC/67/2A, Ministry of Food—Publicity Campaign Questionnaire,” May 1940; ibid., “The Kitchen Front Exhibition: Investigation into the Public’s Knowledge of Energy, Body-Building and Protective Foods.”
109. It is true that 10 percent of working-class homes still lacked a wireless to hear it. Ibid., “April 1940: Gert and Daisy’s BBC Talks.”
110. Home Intelligence Special Report, no. 44, “Housewives’ Attitudes towards Official Campaigns and Instructions,” 14 May 1943, NA, INF1/293. Also cited in Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption 1939–1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 111–112.
111. Ministry of Food, “Reports on Enquiries into the Readership of ‘Food Facts,’ prepared for Ministry of Food by the British Market Research Bureau Limited, a branch of J.Walter Thompson Co. Ltd,” NA, MAFF223/23.
112. For instance, the supervisor of Doncaster’s Food Advice Centre complained that Gert and Daisy’s recent demonstration there had undone much good work by their too-liberal use of ingredients like eggs and sugar. Ministry of Food, “Food Advice Centre—Doncaster,” NA, MAFF900/152. Woolton personally received thirteen thousand letters in 1941. Times, 12 January 1942.
113. “The Kitchen Front Exhibition”; Wartime Social Survey, Food during the War, February 1942–October 1943, NA, RG23/9A.
114. Le Gros Clark, “Memorandum on the ‘Food Advice’Work of the Ministry of Food,” 10.
115. Ministry of Food, “State of Nutrition in UK,” NA, MAFF98/68.
116. For examples, see J. G. Atherton, Home to Stay: Stretford in the Second World War (Manchester: Neil Richardson, 1991); Barbara Atkinson, The Home Front: Life in Ashton during World War II (Ashton, U.K.: Tameside Leisure Services, 1995).
117. The General Ration Book (R.B.1) was issued to adults, whereas children under six had the Infants Ration Book (R.B.2) and children between five and eighteen the Children’s Ration Book (R.B.4). Straight rationing, which required the housewife to register with a particular retailer for supplies, applied to bacon, ham, butter, sugar, meat, tea, margarine, cooking fats, preserves, and cheese by 1941. Points rationing, in which consumers received sixteen points every four weeks to spend as and where they saw fit on a variety of foods (extended by 1942 to canned foods, dried foods, rice, tapioca, condensed milk, breakfast cereals, biscuits, and oats). Fruit, vegetables, fish, and bread were all unrationed.
118. The Ministry of Food was always careful to validate the patriotic efforts of the housewife in mastering the disciplines of rationing: “There were ration books to be remembered, points values and validity to be watched, occasional supplies of oranges and other rarities to be tracked down. Much time was spent in queues, even for the ordinary rations.” Ministry of Food, How Britain Was Fed in War Time, 49–50.
119. For an extensive discussion of attitudes toward food rationing and the politics of the black market, see Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, 69–86, 160–177.
120. James Hinton, “Militant Housewives: The British Housewives’ League and the Attlee Government,” History Workshop Journal 38 (1994): 129–156; Joe Moran,“Queuing Up in Post-War Britain,” Twentieth-Century British History 16, no. 3 (2005):283–305.
121. See Ministry of Food, Manual of Nutrition (London: HMSO, 1945), of which new updated editions were published in 1947 and 1953; F. Le Gros Clark and Margaret E. Gage, Planning Meals: Introductory Book for the Use of Beginners (London:Association of Teachers of Domestic Subjects, 1951).
122. Quoted in Sonya Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 34.
123. Family Cooking: A Guide to Kitchen Management and Cooking for the Family (Dublin: Parkside, 1947), 5.
124. Helene Reynard, Domestic Science as a Career (London: Southern Editorial Syndicate, 1947), 11, 12, 100.
125. James Devon, Let’s Eat! (London:War Facts, 1944), 3, 7.
126. Atherton, Home to Stay, 11. On the long-delayed and largely toothless 1938 act, which remained chiefly concerned with questions of adulteration, not advertising, see Michael French and Jim Phillips, Cheated Not Poisoned? Food Regulation in the United Kingdom, 1875–1938 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
127. Ministry of Food, The Advertising, Labelling and Composition of Food (London:HMSO, 1949), 9.
128. Ministry of Food, How Britain Was Fed in War Time, 50; Ministry of Food, The Advertising, Labelling and Composition of Food, 64–65. The Labelling of Food Order extended these standards in 1946.
129. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “Rationing Austerity and the Conservative Party Recovery after 1945,” Historical Journal 37, no. 1 (1994): 176–917; Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain.
By James Vernon in "Hunger, A Modern History", The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, USA, 2007, excerpts p.196-235 & 336-347. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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