Why we need Home Economics
Long labelled as just ‘stirring and stitching’, Home-Ec could be the one thing we need to provide the necessary context about our highly industrialized food system.
I went to high school located in a small village in a rural area of British Columbia. Kids were bussed in from even more rural towns to the school. It was an eclectic mix of daughters and sons of ranchers and farmers mixed in with those of us who lived in bigger villages and towns and whose parents had jobs in services.
Enthusiasm for liberal arts courses was not very high, let alone hard sciences; in my most senior year, for example, just four of us were in Chemistry, Biology and Physics classes.
Where did everyone else go? Well, the wood-working & automotive classes were pretty popular with the boys and Home Economics and typing were popular with the girls.
My mother insisted I take typing and I’m glad she did. She wasn’t able to foresee the personal computer revolution that came in the ‘90’s but, when it did, I was well prepared, and can still churn out a respectable 70–80 words a minute using all the fingers on both hands.
Home Economics was a mystery to me. My only significant memory was taking the time to peek into the classroom and marvel at the individual kitchen stations sprinkled around the room. I also benefitted from some of my friends cooking attempts as they distributed the muffins, cookies and other baked products to their mates at the conclusion of class.
But that was it. Very much a memory of young women ‘stirring’ whatever they were cooking that day, and ‘stitching’ fabric patterns into clothes.
So, when I ordered Danielle Dreilinger’s book entitled ‘The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way we Live’, I wasn’t sure what was waiting for me.
As it turns out, there is an un-sung herstory of bold, innovative women who charted out — amongst many other innovations and contributions — just how we would produce and buy clothes, how we would nourish ourselves for decades to come and how a population could economize during wartime.
Dreilinger’s book is an exhaustive look into the history of Home Economics in the United States.
Starting with the remarkable Catharine Beecher, born in 1800, who, after a series of attempts and failures at running her own girl’s school, garnered expertise in educating women. She always thought that the important elements that women of the day needed — education around morals, and how women should be running a household — were missing from the curricula of the few girls schools of the day and tried to bring that element to her coursework.
After yet another failure, she turned all she knew into ‘A Treatise on Domestic Economy’, a 400-page monster published in 1841 that yoked together ‘education, cleaning, religion, civics gender and morality’, and contained practical information on a wide range of subjects that included pimples, calisthenics, manners, time management as well as commentary on such subjects as how the corset weakened the spine. The State Education Board of Massachusetts adopted the book, making it, according to Dreilinger, the first Home Economics textbook.
Following the civil war, education was expanded greatly, particularly for African-Americans and women. The Historically Black Colleges and Universities opened, as well as six of the ‘Seven Sisters’ colleges for women. Within the new curricula of these institutions were the fledgling beginnings of Home Economics, in the form of ‘Domestic Science’ courses which promoted trade programs that taught proper sewing, baking and embroidery.
In 1899 the term ‘Home Economics’ was adopted by a group of ten individuals (all white) who gathered in Lake Placid, New York for the first conference to bear the name. Over the course of those five days, those individuals re-baptised the name of the profession from ‘Domestic Science’ to ‘Home Economics’, in part, to give it a better profile that would be taken more seriously by more traditional (male) academic administrators.
The profession hit its stride in the inter-war years, as well as during World War II and during the post-war boom years, by introducing some key innovations in how we live.
Take clothing sizes.
Before the 1930’s, standard sizing for clothes didn’t exist. When the Bureau of Home Economics was created within the US Department of Agriculture in 1923, its first Director — Louise Stanley — embarked on an ambitious research program that included studying the Vitamin C content in green tea, how the human body processed calcium in spinach, roasting over 2,400 cuts of meat to determine the best cooking methods, developing the first plan of nutrition requirements based on food groups and, of course, standardized clothing measurements.
The measurements were developed by, well, measuring human beings. There was a ready pool of people to be hired during the depression and the Bureau of Home Economics hired them by the hundreds, eventually measuring over 150,000 children and 15,000 women to develop their standardized clothing sizes.
Another example is nutrition.
With the entry by the United States into the Second World War, Army recruiters found that almost a third of draftees were unfit for service due to malnourishment. Home Economists were tasked with the job of developing recommended daily allowances that outlined the appropriate levels of protein, calorie intake and vitamins for the population that included children of several ages, adult men and women and pregnant women.
In addition, they were largely responsible for providing advice to the US population — through a flurry of bulletins — on how to better conserve materials so that valuable and necessary items could be diverted to wartime production. As Dreilinger reveals, ‘Bureau scientists figured out how to sterilize wool, treat cotton against mildew and improve the flavour and nutrient retention of dehydrated foods.’
During the inter-war years, and through World War II, Home Economist scientists also provided guidance on the overhaul of the home kitchen due to industrialization and the introduction of electric stoves and fridges. They cooked innumerable recipes on the new stoves so they could determine the best temperature to cook, well, just about anything. Prior to electric stoves, cooking was done, as we say in Quebec, au pif (by feel); people didn’t cook with recipes with exacting temperatures or times. It was based solely on experience and experimentation. Suddenly, with a stove capable of measuring temperature more exactly, recipes had to be (re)written with that in mind.
From such noble beginnings, and important and crucial contributions to our modern way of life, Dreilinger’s book also explores the place of Home Economics in the US Education System.
Post-WWII, things got a bit weird for the profession. It was caught up in the same wholesale ‘return to the home for women’ culture that seemed to swallow all the advances that women made in the inter-war and WWII years. Rather than develop strategies for women to farm housework out of the home — which is what Home Economists of the day were promoting — the focus turned into the home, with an accent on new gadgets and devices that were supposed to ‘save time’ but instead, just created more work that kept women stuck within the four walls of the house.
There were still Home Economists doing innovative work, such as for the US Space Program, but by and large, with the return of men into the work force and, by extension, into positions of power, the profession was relegated to supporting the new domestic agenda. As Dreilinger states: ‘Though high school classes still spent most of their time cooking and sewing, now they learned to cook in order to please their family (…)’. I have visions of Betty Draper in her kitchen, slowly smoking a cigarette and fantasizing what life could be if she could just get out of the damn house.
As I left high school behind, those images were the ones that stayed with me whenever someone mentioned Home Economics.
And yet, as I began to explore food systems in more depth, I came to my own realization that the general population doesn’t know a lot about where their food came from, how it’s processed, how it’s delivered to their grocery store and what the ingredients on the package really are. We have shifted our relationship with food from knowing intimately where it came from, who produced it and how fresh it was to being an item of simple convenience that is always there and that we don’t have think a lot about.
And that got me thinking again of Home Economics. Where else could we get an education of our food system? I didn’t get the benefit of any education about our food system in primary or secondary schools in my youth.
So, I asked my adult children who both went through the primary and secondary school system in Quebec 4 years apart. Nothing. Not a single course talked specifically about food, or our food system.
And that surprised me. Quebec prides itself on the uniqueness and abundance of its terroir (foodway). We have a unique Northern cuisine and a palette that is broad — we have no problem trying just about anything that is put in front of us. David McMillan — owner of five restaurants in Montreal, including Joe Beef — has indicated that Quebecers’ palettes are unique in North America, as we’ll try just about anything, leaving chefs in the province with a very wide latitude for trial and error.
There’s been significant investment in food culture, home-grown restaurants and the exploitation of the food that we can cultivate in this province, versus that which we acquire elsewhere. The provincial government is fixated on augmenting the production of food within the province, whether by natural means, or through the build-out of gigantic greenhouses. Roof-top greenhouses are spreading in urban centres, and distribution and development of new food products — all based on local, natural ingredients — is flourishing. And at-home delivery of locally produced products — via Lufa and Good Foods, for example — has skyrocketed during the pandemic.
And yet, the school system ignores the sector entirely. I know, because I checked the school curriculum. There are no courses on food, food policy or even Home Economics as it traditionally was offered. Ontario is equally bereft of anything resembling a course about our food, or food systems.
British Columbia, on the other hand, seems to have doubled down on this kind of education. They continue to offer a Home Economics and Culinary Arts stream that is nestled within the Applied Design, Skills and Technologies curriculum. Starting as young as Grade 5, the Food Studies stream starts with educating kids about basic food prep and handling, nutrition and factors that influence food choices, such as costs, availability and cultural influences.
From there, as the kids go through their more senior years, the topics are expanded to include elements of meal preparation, food contamination and outbreaks and their causes, First Nations food principles, ethics around cultural appropriation, the relationship between eating practices and habits and personal health, food trends (including food marketing and food systems) and how the global food system affects food choices and availability.
Wow.
And that’s just the Food Studies stream. There’s also Culinary Arts, Family & Society and Textiles, if you’re interested.
If I had that when I was going through school, I may have chosen another career. Or been bored out of my mind. But I would’ve had the exposure to basic elemental requirement in our daily lives.
This is not to say that having this kind of education necessarily turns everyone into locavores or has any impact on the food choices that individual consumers make. I couldn’t find any data to support this, one way or another, from attendance of such courses in BC versus other provinces.
But if people are exposed to the ingredients that go into their food, and how to read nutrition labels on food packaging, and know where the food they’re buying comes from, it’s a start. There are many other factors that influence food purchases, not the least of which is income.
If we can start with teaching everyone about food basics — somewhat along the lines of what BC is doing — it might be a lot easier to implement more progressive food policies, which in turn will put pressure on our agricultural system to be more conscious of the healthier foods that consumers want. And the domino effect of more locally grown, more variety, more sustainable agricultural methods would be good for all of us.
