Food in Boston

Just finished Revolution at the Table, Harvey Levenstein’s account of the changes in American eating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There’s a pretty clear lesson to be gleaned from these pivotal years: people don’t change their eating habits based only on taste, health, and cost. Social factors, including economic aspirations, are also significant. Fortunately for the purposes of Food in Boston, Levenstein provides a local example.

In 1889, three prominent members of the first wave of nutritionists (including Ellen H. Richards, the first female grad of MIT) launched a project that would become known as the New England Kitchen. Their aim was to help poor people learn how to get by on less expensive foods - say, eating some beans instead of mostly beef. The public kitchen would lead by example, providing affordable meals that fit the nutritionist’s understanding of healthy eating.

While the first New England Kitchen in Boston met with some success, it didn’t seem to end up influencing people’s diets. Other public kitchens in the same mold were even less successful, particularly when opened in immigrant neighborhoods where altogether different cuisines ruled. The nutritionists, disgusted with the failure of the project, decided that the poor didn’t make rational decisions about food, and that it would be better to focus on reforming the middle class’ dietary habits. They thought that changes among the middle class would inspire the poor to emulate their betters, and to a degree this turned out to be true.

The period covered in Revolution at the Table saw the birth of most of the factors affecting our current food system. Academics and food corporations, in particular, began to establish their positions as arbiters of the nation’s food choices, often through strange and irrational ways. Levenstein’s survey should be of interest to anyone who cares how our nation’s views on food came to be what they are.