The home: its work and influence

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The long-suffering human system (perhaps toughened by ages of home-cooking)—will adapt itself even to slow death.

But how does our universally praised home-cooking affect our health? To find it pure and undefined, far from the deleterious products of mere business cooking, we must go to the isolated farmhouse. Does either the physician or the epicure point with pride to that dietary?

Its results are not due to lack of proper materials. There you have no much-blamed "baker's bread"; no "city milk"; no wilted vegetables and questionable meats; no painted confectionery and bakeshop sweets; no wild hurry to catch the morning car. You have mother love and mother instinct untrammelled, with the best materials we know, pure dairy produce and fresh vegetables and fruits. As a result, you should look for splendid health, clear complexions, bright eyes, perfect teeth, and sublime digestions. Instead, we find men who keep fairly well to middle life because their vigorous out-of-door work enables them to cope for a while with their home-cooking; but in the women you find a sadly low average of health and beauty. Dyspepsia is the rule. False teeth are needed before they are thirty.

Patent medicine is the family divinity. Their ordinary home-cooking is pork and potatoes; and their extraordinary home-cooking is such elaborate elegance of pie and cake as to supply every element of mischief omitted in the regular diet. The morbid appetites, the uneasy demand for stimulants, both in men and women, the rarity of good digestion—these do not prove much in favour of this system of preparing food.

The derivation of the habit is clear enough and easily traced. Among individual animals, the nutritive processes are simple. By personal effort each creature helps himself from a free supply, competing mercilessly with every other creature that comes in his way. Vegetarian animals compete peaceably as philosophical anarchists; carnivorous ones compete with more violence. Among both classes we find homes among those whose food is portable; holes, caves, or nests; places where the young can be guarded and their food brought to them. From the grisly heap of bones in the lion's den, or shells below the squirrel's nest, through the "kitchen middens" of primitive man, to the daily output of garbage from our well-loved homes to-day is an unbroken line. "A place to feed the young" was once a sufficient definition of a home, but the home has grown since then. Man is a social animal. He is part of something; his life is not dependent on his own efforts solely, but on those of many other men. We get our food, not by going out to quarrel with one another over a free supply, but by helping one another in various elaborate processes of production, distribution, and preparation. In this last process of preparation women long held a monopoly; and, as women were kept at home, so food was, naturally, prepared at home. But as soon as men banded together to go on long expeditions without women—which was at the beginning of the history of war—they learned to cook and eat away from home, and the cook, as a craftsman, was developed. This social functionary has been officiating for a long time. He has cooked as a business, giving his whole time to it; he has cooked for miscellaneous numbers, and has had to study averages; he has cooked for great dignitaries, epicurean and capricious. So, in course of time, has grown among us some little knowledge of the art and science of cooking. This growth has not taken place in the home. An ignorant overworked poor woman, cooking for her family, has not, and never can have, the time, means, or opportunity for the large experiment and practice which have given us the great diet-list of to-day. Each woman, learning only from her mother, has been able only to hand down to us the habits of a dark, untutored past. Outside the home, man, the specialised cook, acting under pressure of larger needs and general competition, has gradually improved the vessels, utensils, and materials of the home food supply.

Note carefully that, in home-cooking, there are absent these great necessities of progress—specialisation and competition, as well as the wide practical experience which is almost as essential. Go among the most backward peasantry of any country and compare the "home-cooking" of each nation in its present form, with the specialised cooking of the best hotels, clubs, or of those great official or private entertainments which employ the professional cook. It is rare, of course, to find home-cooking wholly unaffected by social cooking, for man, as an ultra-domestic character, learns something elsewhere and brings it home; but the point to be insisted on is that the development in cooking comes from outside the home, and does not originate in it. Still, in spite of all our progress, the great mass of mankind eats two meals at home; women and children, three.

The preparation of food is still the main business of housekeeping; its labour, the one great labour of the place; its cost, the main expense. In building, the conveniences for this trade—kitchen, dining-room, pantry, cupboard, and cellar—require a large part of the outlay, and the furnishing of these with linen, china, and silver, as well as the wooden and iron articles, adds heavily to the list. The wife and mother still has, for her main duty, the management of the family food supply, even if she is not the principal worker, and the maintenance of domestic service, to keep our food system in motion, is one of the chief difficulties of modern life. Nine-tenths of our women "do their own work," as has been before shown. Those nine-tenths of the female population—as well as the majority of servants—expend most of their labour in the preparation of food and the cleansing processes connected with it.

With all this time, labour, and expense given to the feeding of humanity, what are the results? How are we educated in knowledge and taste as to right eating? What are our general food habits? To these questions it may be promptly answered that no other animal is so depraved in its feeding habits as man; no other animal has so many diseases of the alimentary system. The dog ranks next to us in diseases, and shares our home-cooking. The hog, which we most highly recommend, is "corn-fed," not reared on our remnants of the table. The long and arduous labours of public-spirited men have lifted our standards of living in many ways. Public sanitation, beginning outside and slowly driven in on the reluctant home, has lowered our death rate in the great filth-diseases which used to decimate the world. But the food diseases are not lessened. Wrong eating and wrong drinking are responsible for an enormous proportion of our diseases and our crimes, to say nothing of the still larger average of unhealthiness and unhappiness in which we live. Can we get at the causes of this department of human trouble? and, when found, do they bear any relation to our beloved custom of home-cooking and home-eating? We can—and they do. The trouble springs from two main features: bad food—insufficient, oversufficient, ill-chosen, or ill-prepared; and our own ignorance and lack of self-control.

Consider the bad food first. Food is produced all over the earth, passes through many hands, and is finally selected by the housewife. She is not a trained expert, and can never be while she confines herself to serving one house. She does not handle quantities sufficient or cater for consumers enough to gain large knowledge of her business. She is, in nine cases out of ten, limited financially in her buying power. These conditions make the food market particularly open to adulteration, and to the offering of inferior materials. The individual housewife cannot herself discriminate in all the subtleties of adulterated food, nor has she the time or the means to secure expert tests of her supplies. Moreover, her separate purchasing power is so small that it cannot intimidate the seller; he has ignorance and a small purse to deal with, and he deals with them accordingly.

The purchase of food in quantities by trained buyers would lift the grade of our supplies at once. No man is going to waste time and money in adulteration subject to daily analysis, or in offering stale, inferior articles which will not appear saleable to the trained eye. The wholesale poisoning of babies by bad milk is an evil our city governments are seeking to combat, but the helpless anarchy of a million ignorant homes, unorganised, untrained, and obliged to get the milk at once, renders our governmental efforts almost vain. Insufficient food is owing, in part, to economic causes, and in part to ignorance of what the body needs. On the economic side comes in a most important view of the home as a food purveyer. The private purchase and preparation of food is the most expensive method. It is wonderful to see how people cling to their notion of "the economy" of home-cooking. By the simplest business laws, of world-wide application, the small purchaser has to pay the largest price. The expenses incident to the re-retailing of food, from the apples rotting on the ground in New York State to the apples we purchase at twenty cents a quart for New York City tables, form a large part of the cost of living. Thousands of middlemen thrive like leeches on the long, slow current of food material, as it pours in myriad dribbling streams from the great sources of production, far away, into our innumerable kitchen doors.