How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century

California Studies in Food and Culture #48

by Katherine Leonard Turner

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class Americans had eating habits that were distinctly shaped by jobs, families, neighborhoods, and the tools, utilities, and size of their kitchens—along with their cultural heritage. How the Other Half Ate is a deep exploration by historian and lecturer Katherine Turner that delivers an unprecedented and thoroughly researched study of the changing food landscape in American working-class families from industrialization through the 1950s. Relevant to readers across a range of disciplines—history, economics, sociology, urban studies, women’s studies, and food studies—this work fills an important gap in historical literature by illustrating how families experienced food and cooking during the so-called age of abundance. Turner delivers an engaging portrait that shows how America’s working class, in a multitude of ways, has shaped the foods we eat today.

Genres: History, Food, Food History, Nonfiction, Food and Drink, Reference, Research

220 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Katherine Leonard Turner received her doctorate in history from the University of Delaware in 2008. She lives and teaches in the Philadelphia area.

Reviews

[Ai Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid, quick read--lots of examples to illustrate Turner's points, and I deeply appreciated her inclusion of gender as an analytical touchstone throughout the book, rather than touching on it as a special category in a segregated chapter. This book is super undertheorizied--the complexity of her analysis is maybe not what someone familiar with working class studies, for example, would hope. I would definitely recommend this for folks looking for an easy read into an understanding of how people outside the middle and upper classes ate.

[Pearse Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes dry, sometimes overly academic, but a really fun look into old foodways. Really fun, made me smile and think about different ways of food production/distribution/consumption, how automats and pushcarts and three-story lunch pails factored in yet were only the beginning.
This is a really good intro, I'm sure I'll follow it up with books by power-couple Jane Ziegleman and Andrew Coe, or things like Gilded Apple (or whatever that one's called, I have it in my room). A great source for primary or secondary sources in the back of this baby too.
God was the Mauve Decade/Gilded Age fucking amazing. Not to live in perhaps, but I'd love to VR into it sometime.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is required reading for anyone writing a book set between, say, 1880 to 1920 with working-class or rural characters. It's got a lot of extremely detailed information that contradicts contemporary assumptions about how people ate.

That said, for someone like me, who just likes material history and isn't planning a book, it was really disappointing. It's presented as an onslaught of facts, with too few anecdotes and history of people as opposed to practices to make it anything but dry and dull. It was like reading a grocery list.

It did improve in the penultimate chapter when Turner began discussing food in terms of women's work, but by then, I was already so impatient and frustrated that I just wanted it to be over.

A more enjoyable way to learn about eating habits from other times is the BBC TV show the Supersizers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Supe......

[Annette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting look into exactly what the title says, a history of working class meals at the turn of the century. A look at how class, region, environment, and your sex (yes, women really have been working and prepping food for years!) really played a part in how you prepared your meals, what you were able to afford to eat, and even the physical set-up of food preparation or purchase.

Although it is basically like reading a dissertation at times, it is a great reference and it really is fascinating to read how different classes prepared or bought food. Opened my eyes to the day-to-day environment that the working class was dealing with not only in food preparation but how their living conditions played a huge role in what they ate (or bought to eat).

Overall it makes me feel better about our living conditions and how we really take our overall safe food choices for granted.

[Rebekah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was warned this book was dry, and it was academic, but I read it through with interest. A very helpful look at eating habits and the middle class association of morality, cooking, and women's work. I was expecting to find background information for a novel I'm writing, but I also found a huge insight into my own complicated feelings about food and cooking.

[fspirate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Turner does use the phrase working class well. This author uses the liberal definition of the working class, that is, low-income and poor people who worked, and not the Marxist proletariat, those who sell their labour to the capitalist. They do not think "journalists, nutritionists, doctors and nurses, philanthropists, social workers, and government researchers" are a part of the working class, which would be interesting to learn about, for example, if doctors owned their businesses or were employed at hospitals and how that changed over time, but this is never mentioned. They also write a lot about the middle class as a separate class from the working class, who makes more money than lower-income working-class people, which also could be better and is never defined explicitly in the text. This all culminated in very little class analysis and how this affects food access and diets. To be fair, there is a clear message concluding this book that food distribution is a social and structural problem and not a personal one.

If you want a good book for turn-of-the-century food movements and diets, I recommend Modern Food, Moral Food by Helen Zoe Veit.

[Erin Becker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly readable. An academic study of working class food choices from 1870-1920s that serves to highlight the ways in which we're still facing the same problems in our food systems and social expectations.

[Mindy Burroughs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every page blew my mind. Book too short.

[Shahna · Rating 3 out of 5]

it's repetitive

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very dense, but very interesting. Would be useful as a reference if writing turn-of-the-20th-century fiction.