New Homes for Old

by Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge

Even the skilled housekeepers have little experience in buying. At home they were used to storing vegetables in quantities; potatoes in caves, beets and cabbage by a process of fermentation, other vegetables and fruits by drying. In the United States this sort of thing is not done. There is, in the first place, no place for storage, and the initial cost of vegetables is high and quality poor, and the women know nothing of modern processes of canning.

It is difficult to discover the general practice with regard to the quantity of food bought at one time, since it must necessarily vary considerably. Meat, milk, bread, perishable fruits and vegetables must usually be purchased daily. As for staple food, the thrifty housewife will buy in as large quantities as she can afford in order to save both money and time.

Reference has been made, however, to the lack of storage space and the consequent necessity of buying very little at one time. Thirty-three, or two fifths, of the 81 foreign housewives who were interviewed on this subject report that they buy food in daily supplies; 1 buys twice a day and 1 for each meal. Forty, however, buy in larger quantities. Twenty-nine for the week and 11 for a month at a time. Six say that they buy whenever they have the money. It must never be forgotten that among the lower-income groups, to have more in the house is to have more eaten, and that cannot be afforded.

Besides the high prices, one of the other limitations of the foreign-born neighborhood store is the low quality of the food. This may be illustrated by a description of the markets in one Lithuanian neighborhood back of the stockyards, where men are working at low-grade labor in the yards, and the women are keeping lodgers, where few speak English and not many ever go more than a few blocks from home. The typical market in this neighborhood—and there are sometimes as many as ten in a block—is a combined meat market and grocery store. Such stores are found in the poorer neighborhoods of every settlement.

Stock in all these stores is the same; there is a great deal of fresh meat, apparently the poorer cuts, scraps, etc.; shelves are filled with canned fruits, canned vegetables, canned soups, and condensed milk; there is much of the bakers' "Lithuanian rye bread," and quantities of such cakes as are sold by the National Biscuit Company. No fresh vegetables are to be seen in any of these stores. The reason given by shopkeepers is that they are little used in the neighborhood and that the truck wagons supply the demand.

Women who actually depend upon these stores and the truck wagons for all their supplies find them very unsatisfactory. No really fresh vegetables are to be found in either stores or wagons, they say. In commenting upon this situation, several persons have expressed a belief that the restriction of diet among Lithuanian immigrants was largely due to the fact that the markets afford so little variety, and that an effort to extend the stock in the stores would find a response in the community.

These stores, however, are widely different from those found in Italian neighborhoods. Practically all the food used by the Italian families of one such neighborhood is bought in these stores. In this district the population is as dense as back of the stockyards, and the families have comparable incomes, the men being engaged in unskilled occupations and their earnings being supplemented by the earnings of women and children. The number of food stores in a block is about the same as in the other district, but the stock carried differs greatly. Here, in place of shops that carry only meat, canned goods, and potatoes, cabbages, and beets, the greengrocery stores largely predominate.

There are four or five greengrocery shops to one meat market, and these stores have a surprising variety of fresh vegetables and fruits all the year. The variety of salad greens is remarkable. More Swiss chard, mustard, dandelion leaves, endive, squash blossoms and leaves, escarole, are to be seen in one little Italian store than in a half dozen American markets. Legumes are in stock in great quantity and variety—there are some little stores that do not handle greengroceries, but carry large stocks of legumes. Every store has a large case of different varieties of Italian cheese, and the variety of macaroni, spaghetti, and noodles is amazing to an American. Fish is frequently sold from stalls along the street, and on Friday fish wagons go about through the district. Sometimes meat is sold from wagons, but less to Italians than to other nationalities living in the neighborhood.

Certainly one effect of the organization of these shops on the basis of nationality is to prevent the members of one group from gaining the advantage of dietetically better practices followed in other groups. The Lithuanian and Italian neighborhoods described happened to be in widely separated districts of the city, but often similar differences may be observed between two shops within the same block that serve different national groups.

It is clear that the retail trade, being unstandardized, gives no help to the immigrant woman in the matter of efficient buying. There is as yet no fine art of service in this field based on careful accounting of cost and service. Obviously there is great waste in the number of stores, in the number of persons engaged in conducting them, in the needless duplication of even such meager equipment as is found in them. This waste will reflect itself in needlessly high prices which, while they mulct the buyer, bring the seller little gain.