The persistent burden: How women became the primary agents for solving systemic crises through consumption

“ The philanthropic progress of the century has reached the kitchen, and animal love is most intense in the vicinity of the stockpot. What would the kitchen of the Reform Club be without humanity and the liberal sentiments? ”

“ Women old enough for matrimony and older, therefore, will tend to be withdrawn more and more from industrial, commercial, and public life, and the old industries of the home—bread, cheese, butter, jam, and confectionery making—will be revived, and will flourish once more. Under the guidance of science, domestic medicine will gradually be transferred from the doctor’s consulting-room to the kitchen and the still-room, and there it will remain, as it always ought to have remained, and doctors and their powers will tend to disappear. ”

“ So the housekeeper who goes to her task of training the family palate to accept meat substitutes and meat economy dishes, who revolutionizes her methods of cooking so as to utilize even "the pig's squeak," will be doing her bit toward making the world safe for democracy.
The following charts, tables of nutritive values and suggested menus have been arranged to help her do this work. The American woman has her share in this great world struggle, and that is the intelligent conservation of food.
SELECTION OF MEAT
BEEF—Dull red as cut, brighter after exposure to air; lean, well mottled with fat ”

“ If man be the producer and distributer of wealth, woman is certainly the director of consumption. On her rests the responsibility of expending wisely and well the money entrusted to her for the nutrition and clothing of her family, and how can this be adequately fulfilled if she have no real knowledge of the subject beyond what she is able to pick up as she goes along, a method detrimental to all concerned? ”

“ If the kitchen be light, airy, and tidy, and the utensils bright and clean, the work of compounding those articles of food which grace the table and satisfy the appetite will be a pleasant task, and one entirely worthy of the most intelligent and cultivated woman. ”

“ How cosy and delightful everything seems in a kitchen like this, and what visions can we not see of home-made bread and cakes, well-cooked joints, succulent vegetables, delicious puddings, dainty dishes of all kinds concocted with skilful fingers! And why should not these visions turn into substantial realities? They will do so if women will consider it a pleasure, instead of a degradation, to "look well to the ways of her household," and establish a system of order and neatness from cellar to garret. ”

“ Thus we see that the housewife and the cook of the future, instead of feeling like a drudge in a smoky, smelly, overheated kitchen, will have the dignity of workers in a cool, clean laboratory for the scientific preparation of savory food and the abolition of dyspepsia.
The editor of the electric magazine referred to indicates another important result of this agreeable transformation of the kitchen. Caste feeling is largely a matter of dress. "The poorest stenographer is a lady, because, in so far as her stipend permits, she dresses like a lady. ”

“ These facts show that while the mother in the home by the preparation of food and resulting responsibilities is doing much for race betterment, there is imperative need for greater ability in some way to enable woman to make use of the results of scientific research, in order that there may be in the human race "an increase of vitality, of sound and high mentality, and of sociality." ”

“ Such being the case it will be necessary for those who prepare and serve the food to be cognizant of what kind of food the body requires for its highest efficiency, and since as society is now organized, the preparation of food is woman's work, it must be possible for women to know in some way the latest results of scientific research in foods and general hygiene in order to prevent disease.
Statistics tell us that misery, which represents maladjustment to environment, is frequent in rural as well as in city life. ”

“ Season the vegetables to your taste if you prefer a particular sauce! But have a single kitchen with a single fire and organize it as beautifully as you are able to.
Why has woman's work never been of any account? Why in every family are the mother and three or four servants obliged to spend so much time at what pertains to cooking? Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity to think "of those kitchen arrangements," which they have put on the shoulders of that drudge—woman. ”

“ On this point one clear comment has been made: "If kitchen life is such good training to mind and hand, why is it that so few of us are willing to follow the kitchen trades when we are grown? and why is it that competence in the kitchen is so rare?" This is a most practical observation. If fifteen-sixteenths of our women followed incessantly the occupation of shoemaking, and brought up their children in the shoe shop, we should hardly claim great educational advantages for that arrangement. ”

“ Kitchen-bred men born of kitchen-bred mothers are we, and inevitably must we consider the main duty of life to be the service of our own body. What else does the child see his mother do, but work, work, work to cover the family table with food three times a day, and clear up afterward? What else can he grow up to do but work, work, work, to provide the wherewithal for another woman to do the same?
A million women are making bread as their mothers made it. How many women are trying to lift the standard of bread-making for their country? ”

“ Now why do reasoning people, seeing all this behind them, so dread and resist the next step before them—the eliminating of the kitchen? Shall we never learn, that as a means of feeding the world it is not a success? It does not bring health and happiness. Every competent woman is not a competent cook and never will be; any more than every man is a competent carpenter. The preparation of food is too important a task to be left to a private servant—whether hired or married.
There are reasons, many, and good, why the kitchen must go ”

“ Others they cannot. No one can alter the economic status of the kitchen. Like the sweat shop, it must ultimately disappear.
What system of housekeeping will take the place of the present system cannot precisely be foretold. We know that the whole trend of things everywhere is toward co-operation. Within the past ten years think how much cooking has gone into the factory, how much washing into the steam laundry, how much sewing into the shop. As the cost of living increases, more and more co-operation will be necessary, especially for those of moderate income. ”

“ One of these is the tenement sweat shop, where women combine, or try to combine, manufacturing and housekeeping. The other is the private kitchen—the home—where the last stand of conservatism and tradition, the last lingering remnant of hand labor, continues to exist.
No woman who is free enough, strong enough, intelligent enough to seek work in a factory or shop, is ever found in a sweat shop or seen carrying bundles of coats to finish at home.
Exactly for the same reason the average American working woman shuns housework as a means of livelihood. ”

“ DIETETICS, the science of diet, i.e. the food and nutrition of man in health and disease (see Nutrition) . This article deals mainly with that part of the subject which has to do with the composition and nutritive values of foods and their adaptation to the use of people in health. The principal topics considered are: (1) Food and its functions; (2) Metabolism of matter and energy; (3) Composition of food materials; (4) Digestibility of food; (5) Fuel value of food; (6) Food consumption; (7) Quantities of nutrients needed; (8) Hygienic economy of food; (9) Pecuniary economy of food. ”

“ A sluggish housemaid exclaimed, when scolded for the uncleanliness of her kitchen, "I'm sure the room would be clean enough if it were not for the nasty sun, which is always showing the dirty corners."—Sel.
If we would look for ready hands and willing hearts in our kitchens, we should make them pleasant and inviting for those who literally bear the "burden and heat of the day" in this department of our homes, where, emphatically, "woman's work is never done." We should no longer be satisfied to locate our kitchens in the most undesirable corner of the house. ”

“ The character of a person's work is more or less dependent upon his surroundings, hence is it to be greatly wondered at that a woman immured in a small, close, dimly-lighted room, whose only outlook may be the back alley or the woodshed, supplies her household with products far below the standard of health and housewifely skill?
Every kitchen should have windows on two sides of the room, and the sun should have free entrance through them ”

“ Consider the kitchen with its accompanying rooms in the light of an economic plant. Give the same careful attention to its arrangement and equipment that the owner of a manufacturing establishment gives to the fitting-up of a new factory with all the latest labor-saving contrivances and facilities for work; study the plumbing and the water-supply with the zest of a scientific investigator and select the cooking- and [131] baking-utensils with the interest of an artist. ”

“ We all practically admit every day in eating our ordinary English dinner, that this excess of nitrogenous matter and fat is bad; we do so by mixing the meat with that particular vegetable which contains an excess of the carbo-hydrates [298] (starch) with the smallest available quantity of albuminoids and fat. The slice of meat, diluted with the lump of potato, brings the whole down to about the average composition of a fairly-arranged vegetarian repast. When I speak of a vegetarian repast, I do not mean mere cabbages and potatoes, but properly selected, well cooked, nutritious vegetable food. ”

“ According to what our neighbour the cook says, it appears that the Ministry of Public Nourishment has grounded its bill of fare on the experience gathered by scientific research as to the number of grains of nitrogenous matter and of hydro-carbonaceous matter that it is necessary to introduce into the body in order to keep the same intact. Each person’s daily portion is about one-third of a pound of meat, with either rice, groats, or some vegetable or other, to which is generally added a plentiful supply of potatoes. ”

“ It suggests to us how light, acting chemically on the leaves or fronds or cells of the green herb, stores up in them carbohydrates, rich in potential energy, which animals afterward use up as food, or man utilizes as coal in his grates and his locomotives. It exhibits to us the animal organism as essentially a food-engine in whose recesses solar energy, stored as potential by the plant, is once more let loose by slow combustion in the kinetic form as heat and motion. ”

“ Home Economics is at heart Consumption, and must be so because the home woman is more and more purely a consumer.
2. Consumption is the broadest of generalities, requiring the broadest of liberal educations.
3. So far as manual arts are concerned, the "non-academic" cookery of the girl is balanced by the "non-academic" carpentry of the boy.
4. Right Living and Wise Spending will, to a great extent, get diffused throughout the whole educational system for boys and girls, men and women, alike. ”

“ Just as we have seen that Home Economics does not consist essentially of sewing and cooking, we shall see that Consumption is not at all a specialized technique in the sense in which electrical engineering, department store buying, railroading, cotton manufacturing, medicine, and the other occupations of the outside world are specialized technigues. Home Economics will not narrow women's education but in the end will enlarge it, because Consumption, instead of being a specialty, is a generality so broad as almost to glitter. ”

“ Fat, trimmings, and bones all have their uses and should be saved from the garbage pail.
Careful buying, of course, depends on a knowledge of cuts, a study of the percentage of waste in each cut, and the food value of the different kinds of meat. Make a study of the different cuts, as shown in the charts on pages 36, 37, and armed with this knowledge go forth to the butcher for practical buying.
Then comes the cooking, which can only be properly done when the fundamental principles of the cooking processes, such as boiling, braising, broiling, stewing, roasting and frying are understood. ”

“ But, it might be objected, if science, realistically conceived, is a fictitious entity in no way corresponding to reality, how is it possible to have a method which by its uniqueness and definiteness effectively corresponds to the unalterable unity of this non-existent science? And what teacher would ever arbitrarily impose on his students such an abstract and mechanical method? This is true enough; but man learns to compromise with all deities, Science included. This divinity, in order somehow to exist, must assume a few human traits without however renouncing her divine prerogatives. ”

“ Science as culture, as personality, is free, perennially becoming, stirred by ethical impulses, multiple, varied. If we fix the method, it indicates that we are dealing with science realistically considered as pre-existing, and we can therefore have only one sole, definite, immutable method,—one for everybody, and devoid of freedom, not susceptible of development, refractory to all moral evaluation. We should have then a rigid law of the spirit, as compelling as the laws of nature. ”

“ It is known that the consumption of meat here has increased steadily, until in a communication from the Bureau of Agriculture in Washington we learn that it had recently reached the enormous amount of 172 pounds per capita yearly, much more than in England.
Cancer has been repeatedly spoken of as a disease of civilization, and there are many other elements besides meat to be considered in connection with its etiology. ”

“ In the same way, I fear, a universal recognition that excessive meat indulgence is a climatic error will take many decades before it is an article of national belief. In the schools, Cookery must form an all-important part of a girl's education—not a superficial knowledge of the science, but practical instruction, thorough, complete, real. The dietetic properties of meat, vegetables, of salad vegetables, and of fruit, from an Australian standpoint, should be so thoroughly inculcated that a proper conception of their respective food values should remain for a lifetime. ”

“ There can be little doubt that the habit of excessive eating and drinking, combined with the habit of too hasty eating and drinking, especially of meat, fish and eggs, are probably the most prolific sources of many bodily disabilities affecting men and women, and are [Pg 73] consequently the greatest deterrents to the attaining by men and women of a high grade of efficiency in work, of better health, of greater happiness, and of longer life. ”

“ Excessive meat eating often leads to consumption of large quantities of liquor. Stimulants crave company.
As will be noted, most fish and meat contain about 20 per cent. of protein, while about 75 per cent. is water. The fatter the meat, the less water it contains, and the more fuel value it has. The leaner the meat, the more watery the animal, and the more easily is the flesh digested. Beef is fatter than veal and harder to digest. Also, the flesh of old animals is more highly flavored than that of the young ones, because it contains more salts. ”

“ But how can we expect the children to reform when the parents continually set them bad examples in the matter of eating and drinking?
The cultivation of a taste for spices is a degradation of the sense of taste. ”

“ A good cook knows how to convert the remains of one dinner into various dishes to form the greater part of another dinner; and she will, also, be more capable than the other of forwarding her mistress's charitable intentions; for her capability in cooking will enable her to take advantage of everything which can be spared from the consumption of the family, to be converted into nourishing food for the poor, for those of her own class who have not the comfort of a home such as she herself enjoys. ”

“ This milk, and most of the milk in all our cities, goes into the kitchen; the blind, brainless, family-feeding kitchen, and from there is given us to drink.
What protest rises from the kitchens of New York, or Chicago, or any city? What mass-meeting of angry women, presenting to their legislators the horrible facts of strong men poisoned and babies slain by this or any other abomination in the food supply?
A young man writes a novel exhibiting the badness of our meat supply. Men become excited. Men take action. ”

“ In the first place we might curtail the number of our warm meals, or cook them on the coöperative plan in a separate building, where ten or twelve families could use a common stove and a joint stock of fuel and certain groceries, and thus save our sitting-rooms and studies from the effects which even a basement-kitchen fire exerts on the domestic atmosphere. ”

“ Family after family learned to prize the cleanliness and quiet, the odorlessness and flylessness of a home without a kitchen, and their questioning guests were converted by the excellent of the meals.
Critical women learned at last that a competent cook can really produce better food than an incompetent one ”

“ When our kitchen trades become world trades, when we are fed, not by the most ignorant, but by the wisest; when personal whims and painfully acquired habits give place to the light of science, and the fruit of wide experience; when, instead of dragging duty or sordid compulsion, we have wisdom and art to feed us; the change will be far greater than that of improved health. It will be a great and valuable advance even there. We shall become healthy, clean-fleshed people, intelligent eaters, each generation improving in strength and beauty, but we shall be helped in wider ways than that. ”

“ Those employers who “despise housekeeping,” who “cannot endure cooking,” who “hate the kitchen,” who “will not do menial work,” will come to regard household work in a different light. Indeed, until the members of this class, far too large in numbers, change either their opinion or their occupation, it is hopeless to look for a reform in domestic service. That “dignity of labor” so often prescribed as a panacea for the troubles in the kitchen must first be maintained in the parlor if reform is to come. The simple prescription of the remedy will not effect a cure. ”

“ It is said that the only way to strike at the root of all these difficulties is to dignify labor; the practical question is, how this is to be accomplished. In the light of all that has been done to attain this end, and the reasons for the comparative failure which has followed, may we not say that one great [72] difficulty has been the fact that reform has begun at the wrong end? unless the chasm has been bridged between kitchen and parlor we cannot dignify labor in the kitchen alone. All true reform must begin at the top. ”

“ For the typical U.S. household, a metric ton of carbon equals about 10,000 miles of driving at 25 miles per gallon of gasoline or about one year of home heating using a natural gas-fired furnace or about four months of electricity from coal-fired generation.↑ The United States accounts for nearly as many emissions as the former Soviet bloc, the Middle East, Central and South America, and Africa combined. Use of fossil fuel in the United States is split roughly into three categories: commercial and residential buildings and appliances, industry, and transportation. ”

“ Carbon dioxide and other ordinary pollutants often come from the same sources, mainly from the burning and utilization of fossil fuels. Controlling the use of fossil fuels and consequently reducing carbon emissions have a lasting impact on the economic structure, energy mix, forms of transport, modes of production, and ways of life. ”

“ Ancillary Benefits of Greenhouse Gas Restrictions By reducing the use of fossil fuels, restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions would also reduce emissions of other pollutants such as sulfur dioxide from coal burning and nitrous oxide from automobiles. ”

“ Clean alternative fuels The Administrator shall conduct a research program to identify, characterize, and predict air emissions related to the production, distribution, storage, and use of clean alternative fuels to determine the risks and benefits to human health and the environment relative to those from using conventional gasoline and diesel fuels. ”

“ Any strategy for reducing carbon emissions must also deal with coal, which is actually the most abundant source of energy in this country. To keep using this fossil fuel, I believe we need to invest in the kind of advanced coal technology that will keep our air cleaner while still keeping our coal mines in business. Over the next two decades, power companies are expected to build dozens of new coal-fired power plants, and countries like India and China will build hundreds. ”

“ This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others. ”

“ You know, we can put millions of Americans to work modernizing our water systems, transportation, our energy infrastructure to withstand the impacts of extreme climate. We’ve already reached a point where we’re going to have to live with what it is now. That’s going to require a lot of work all by itself, without it getting any worse.
When we think of renewable energy, we see American manufacturing, American workers racing to lead the global market. We see farmers making American agriculture first in the world to achieve net-zero emissions and gaining new sources of income in the process. ”

“ Even as our Nation emerges from profound public health and economic crises borne of a pandemic, we face a climate crisis that threatens our people and communities, public health and economy, and, starkly, our ability to live on planet Earth. Despite the peril that is already evident, there is promise in the solutions—opportunities to create well-paying union jobs to build a modern and sustainable infrastructure, deliver an equitable, clean energy future, and put the United States on a path to achieve net-zero emissions, economy-wide, by no later than 2050. ”

“ All of us deserve to enjoy America’s promise in full — and our nation’s leaders have a responsibility to overcome racial, gender, and other inequalities to make it happen. To that end, the President is calling on Congress to create new, good-quality union jobs for American workers by leveraging their grit and ingenuity to address the climate crisis and build a sustainable infrastructure. Increased unionization can also impact our economic growth overall by improving productivity. ”

“ In addition to a $5 billion increase in funding for other climate-focused research, his plan will invest $15 billion in demonstration projects for climate R&D priorities, including utility-scale energy storage, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, advanced nuclear, rare earth element separations, floating offshore wind, biofuel/bioproducts, quantum computing, and electric vehicles, as well as strengthening U.S. technological leadership in these areas in global markets. Eliminate racial and gender inequities in research and development and science, technology, engineering, and math. ”

“ Ongoing legacies of residential segregation and discrimination remain ever-present in our society. These include a racial gap in homeownership; a persistent undervaluation of properties owned by families of color; a disproportionate burden of pollution and exposure to the impacts of climate change in communities of color; and systemic barriers to safe, accessible, and affordable housing for people of color, immigrants, individuals with disabilities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender non-conforming, and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals. ”