Modern Food, Moral Food: Self Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century by Helen Zoe Veit (review)

In Modern Food, Moral Food, Helen Zoe Veit examines Americans’ shifting relationships to food in the early twentieth century. She compellingly argues that a network of forces in the 1910s and 1920s, many of them tied to the rationalization of food during World War I, fundamentally reshaped American foodways. During this period, home economics, nutrition science, an increasing emphasis on willpower and self-control, a new racialized discourse, the Americanization of immigrant foods, and the demonization of fat all came together to imbue food with a new moral significance.

During World War I, the American government created the U. S. Food Administration to oversee food aid abroad and food conservation domestically. The Administration’s slogan, “victory over ourselves,” captures the strain of self-deprivation and suppression of pleasure that dominated this period. On the whole, as food became more scientific and more regulated, it became less about taste and memory and desire. As Veit writes, food was stripped of its “messy cultural contexts” (8). This allowed characters like Herbert Popenoe to introduce his notorious “cat feasts in 1918,” in which he served cat meat to his friends in an effort to save more valuable meats for the war effort. The idea of substitution was supported by the rise of nutrition science in the 1910s, which encouraged people to see foods as no more than the sum of their component nutrients. This led nutritionists to a “kind of cultural algebra” in which immigrant food like lentil curry could become nutritionally equivalent to the American meat and potatoes—what home economist Ellen Richards referred to as “food synonyms” (46, 137).

Home economics as a discipline grew and thrived during the Progressive Era, embodying the period’s penchant for professionalization. Women who sought positions of influence saw an opportunity in the assumed expertise of women over domestic matters. Borrowing the language of science and economics, they created a realm in which they could ascend professionally without challenging male hegemony. As Veit describes, however, the ironic effect was in fact the de-professionalization of housework, as Americans moved away from paying servants to cook and clean, and toward the expectation that women within families would perform this work. Remaining attuned to the new technologies that enabled this shift, Veit underscores the importance of items like canned foods, refrigerators, and vacuums that put housework within the reach of—and expectations for—middle-class women.

One of Veit’s most significant contributions is to bring histories of race and immigration into the story of food modernization. In paired chapters on euthenics—the study of how environment affects race—and the Americanization of immigrant food, she highlights how food choice has long been used to marginalize minority groups. Before World War I, many Americans believed that different races were biologically suited to different foods. But as scientific ideas about food conservation and substitution began to rise to prominence, Americans had to rethink their assumptions about what they could and could not eat. During the war, despite documented African American participation in food conservation efforts, many whites believed blacks to be unable to restrict their diets, making racist claims about African American’s supposedly inherent wastefulness and their overly-strong attachment to the pleasures of familiar foods. Meanwhile, around 1920, foreign foods went from being demonized for their strong flavors and indigestibility to becoming the mark of an adventurous eater, one who welcomed “culinary diversity [as] one more manifestation of American abundance” (156). This transition was possible because home economists, cookbook authors, and industrialists adapted immigrant foods to American ingredients and tastes, through a process of “madcap culinary commingling” (148).

Veit’s final chapter focuses on the ideal of thinness that emerged from the Progressive Era, imposing the push for...