How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working class Americans held eating habits that were shaped by the conditions of their work and home lives. For the urban poor, long hours in factories and small apartments with limited cooking facilities meant that many favored purchasing ready-made foods at delis and bakeries over cooking at home. Much like the campaign against childhood obesity raging today, turn-of-the-century progressive social reformers were acutely concerned with how poor people ate and worked tirelessly to enact change.

In How the Other Half Ate, historian Katherine Leonard Turner delivers an unprecedented and thoroughly researched study of the changing food landscape of poor American families from industrialization through the 1930s. Relevant to students and scholars across a range of disciplines—history, economics, sociology, urban studies, women’s studies, and food studies—this work fills a gap in historical literature by illustrating how the working poor experienced food and cooking during the so-called age of abundance. Turner reveals an engaging portrait of American food culture and the long history of how food choice is fundamentally intertwined with notions of health, class, and upward mobility.