How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working Class Meals at the Turn of the Century by Katherine Leonard Turner (review)

Since the early 1980s when feminist historians Susan Strasser and Ruth Schwartz Cowan published their pioneering studies of historical transformations in housework, food history has taken off. How the Other Half Ate straddles those two historiographical moments. Katherine Leonard Turner is “interested in cuisine,” (7) and she makes adept comparisons between the American working-class choices and practices she studies here and food trends and politics today – all of which suggest that it was working-class choices which prefigured, anticipated current trends. But, material questions are her main focus: “how people got food when money was tight and life was uncertain,” and the “task of getting breakfast, lunch and dinner on the table, day after day.” (7) It is this focus on the material, her insistence that “class mattered,” (141) and her argument that working-class choices reshaped American food consumption habits more generally that are the book’s strengths and that will be of most interest to readers of Labour/Le Travail.

How the Other Half Ate explores working-class food shopping, cooking, and meals between the 1870s and 1930s as industrialization, urbanization, and immigration reshaped both the working classes and food production and distribution. It is a broad study, based on wide use of secondary literature and the primary sources generated by reformers keen to reshape working-class habits of eating and spending. Turner shows how reformers made what others ate a public issue producing in the process a “priceless legacy of information,” studies, and photographs. (72) She deals sensitively and creatively with the challenge of seeking to discern patterns of consumption through the eyes of these middle-class observers. Their concentration in the Northeast, Midwest, rural Southeast, and, less so, in the West shapes the book’s geographical focus. She may miss specific regional customs, but overall the book paints a convincing picture of changing working-class meals, and of the transformations that the working classes wrought in American ways of eating. Her working classes extend beyond the city to the men and women labouring in textile mills, coal mining towns and lumber camps in “rural” areas. Yet they are predominantly more urban than rural. They do not inhabit Indian reservations.

Turner is alert to immigrants’ and African-Americans’ choices and to the impact of ethnic food and commerce on American eating. Indeed, one of her main arguments is that after 1930, American food would never again be defined as that of the “traditional native-born farming white Americans.” (8) (One might ask whether that was ever homogenous.) It had been irrevocably marked by the street food, ethnic food, and “fast food,” that began with the working classes.” (8) This argument is spelled out most explicitly in the third chapter on food and cooking in the city. There she details reformers’ moral judgment of housewives who purchased ready-made food. And, she shows throughout the book how the lack of utensils, equipment, money, and time led many working-class families to purchase such food from an array of bakers, small grocers, street peddlers, butchers, cheap ethnic restaurants, delicatessens, saloons, lunch restaurants, and by the turn of the century, chain cafeterias, pushcarts, etc., often selling food they or others of their ethnicity or locale had cooked or prepared. These working-class choices, she argues, initiated the integration of immigrant foods like pizza, spaghetti, and bagels into mainstream American eating habits and the move to fast food that has so characterized more recent decades.

Reformers encouraged wives to avoid such choices and to cook at home. Their solutions to the food problem, as Turner shows, were heavily gendered. She carefully describes the constraints of working-class kitchens in cities or resource towns and the diverse possibilities of supplementing food through garden produce or raising chickens or cows. She outlines the changing foods available, and details the kitchen equipment and utensils that housewives had, as...