The book is still A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression, recommended to us by reader Phil Wagner, and Part I of the review is here.

Condescension, Means Testing, and Infinite Busybodies

The other big thing we learned from A Square Meal, besides the fact that food in the 1920s was bonkers, is that the Great Depression brought out the absolute worst in the American political machine: the tendency for condescension to the unfortunate, constant means testing to make sure the needy are really as needy as they say, and infinite busybodies of every stripe.

Some of this was just standard government condescension. In WWI, the United States Food Administration tried to convince Americans that dried peas were a fine substitute for beefcake, and that “Wheatless, Eggless, Butterless, Milkless, Sugarless Cake” was a food substance at all. Sure.

When the Great Depression hit, things got steadily worse. Homemakers were encouraged to turn anything and everything into casseroles, which had the benefit of making their contents indistinguishable under a layer of white sauce and bread crumbs. The housewife could serve unappetizing food or leftovers over and over again without her family catching on, or at least that was the idea. Among other things this gives us this unusual early example of the overuse of the term “epic”:

Whatever the answer, [the casserole] is bound to be an epic if mother is up to the minute on the art of turning homely foods into culinary triumphs

Some people in government seemed to be confused — they seemed to think that the food issues facing the nation were a matter of presentation, that food just didn’t look appetizing enough. It’s hard to interpret some of these suggestions in any other light, like the idea that good advice for Americans in the Depression could be, “to impart a touch of elegance to a bowl of split pea soup, why not float a thin slice of lemon on top and sprinkle it with some bright red paprika and finely chopped parsley.” Or the suggestion that beans could be fried in croquettes to make them more appealing. Authorities trotted out “reassuring” announcements like: 

The fact that a really good cook can serve better meals on a small budget than a poor cook can serve on the fat of the land suggests that the fault may be not in the food material itself but in the manner in which the food is prepared and served, and therein lays a tale!

But what really grinds our gears isn’t the condescension, it’s the means testing. The second half of the book is mostly depressing stories about the government refusing to provide basic aid to starving families, or screwing up one relief program after another with means testing, or other things along these lines.

American society at the time was firmly anti-charity. People thought that everyone on the breadline could be divided into the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor”, and it was their job to search out which was which. They seemed to believe that even one whiff of assistance would immediately turn any hardworking, self-respecting American into a total layabout. 

People in the 1930s are always saying things like, “if a man keeps beating a path to the welfare office to get a grocery order he will gradually learn the way and it will be pretty hard to get him off that path.” They really seemed to believe in the corrupting power of government support, to the point where they were often afraid to even use the word “charity”.

Before the Great Depression, there was very little history of big-picture welfare. The support that society did provide was administered locally, and not very well administered at all:

The poor laws combined guarded concern for needy Americans with suspicions that they were complicit in their own misfortune. Under the poor laws, the chronically jobless were removed from society and dispatched to county poorhouses, catchall institutions that were also home to the old, infirm, and mentally ill. Those who could ordinarily shift for themselves but were temporarily jobless applied to public officials, men with no special welfare training, for what was known as outdoor or home relief, assistance generally given in the form of food and coal. To discourage idlers, the welfare experience was made as unpleasant as possible. Before applying for help, the poor were made to wait until utterly penniless, and then declare it publicly. When granting relief, officers followed the old rule of thumb that families living “on the town” must never reach the comfort level of the poorest independent family. The weekly food allowance was a meager four dollars a week—and less in some areas—regardless of how many people it was supposed to feed. Finally, it was customary to give food and coal on alternate weeks, providing minimal nourishment and warmth, but never both at the same time.

Journalists called people who received government assistance “tax eaters”. When support from the town was forthcoming, it looked like this: 

…the board made all relief applicants fill out a detailed form with questions like: Do you own a radio? Do you own a car? Do you spend any money for movies and entertainment? Did you plant a garden? How many bushels of potatoes do you have? The board gave aid in the form of scrip, which now could only be used to purchase the “necessities of life” at local stores: “flour, potatoes, navy beans, corn meal, oatmeal, coffee, tea, sugar, rice, yeast cakes, baking soda, pepper, matches, butter, lard, canned milk, laundry soap, prunes, syrup, tomatoes, canned peas, salmon, salt, vinegar, eggs, kerosene.”

The Manhattan breadline is emblematic of the Great Depression, so we were sort of surprised at just how much people at the time hated them, even very mainstream sources. You’d think that giving out bread to the starving would be one of the more defensible forms of charity, but people loathed it. And none more than the city’s social workers, described as the breadlines’ “harshest critics”:

Welfare professionals with a long-standing aversion to food charity, social workers condemned the breadlines as relief of the most haphazard and temporary variety, not much different from standing on a street corner and handing out nickels. The people who ran the breadlines, moreover, made no attempt to learn the first thing about the men they were trying to help, or to offer any form of “service” or counseling. The cause of more harm than good, the breadlines were humiliating and demoralizing and encouraged dependence, depriving able-bodied men of the impulse to fend for themselves. Social workers were adamant. Breadlines were the work of fumbling amateurs and “should be abolished entirely; if necessary by legal enactment.”

As the Depression dragged on and things became worse, more relief did come. But when it came, the relief was invasive. Housewives were told not only what to cook, but where to shop. Some women had to venture far outside their own neighborhoods to use food tickets. Social workers dropped in on schools to criticize the work of teachers, in particular the tendency of teachers to be overly “sentimental” or “solicitous”. They feared that schoolteachers lacked the “well-honed detective skills” required to distinguish between whining and genuine tales of woe. 

To ascertain that applicants were truly destitute, officials subjected them to a round of interviews. Candor was not assumed. Rather, all claims were verified through interviews with relatives and former employers, which was not only embarrassing but could hurt a man’s chances for employment in the future. More demeaning, however, were the home visits by TERA investigators to make sure the family’s situation was sufficiently desperate. Investigators came once a month, unannounced, anxious to catch welfare abusers. Any sign that the family’s finances had improved—a suspiciously new-looking dress or fresh set of window curtains—was grounds for cross-examination. If the man of the house was not at home—a suggestion that he might be out earning money—investigators asked for his whereabouts, collecting names and addresses for later verification. Finally, though instructed otherwise, investigators were known to reprimand women for becoming pregnant while on relief, the ultimate intrusion.

Families lived in dread of these monthly visits, terrified they would be cut off if it was discovered that one of the kids had a paper route or some similar infraction.

…

In some areas, including New York City, “pantry snoopers” accompanied women to the market to confirm that all parties (both shopper and shopkeeper) were complying with TERA’s marketing guidelines. More prying took place in the kitchen itself, where investigators lifted pot covers and peered into iceboxes on the lookout for dietary violations.

Relief was often inadequate. Public officials were sometimes able to set relief levels at whatever amount they saw fit, regardless of state or federal guidance. Some of them assumed that poor families would be able to provide their own farm goods, but often this was not the case. In some places officials reasoned that poor workers would be easier to push around, and kept food allowances low to keep them in line. There was also just straight-up racism: 

Six Eyetalians will live like kings for two weeks if you send in twenty pounds of spaghetti, six cans of tomato paste and a dozen loaves of three-foot-long bread. But give them a food order like this [$13.50, state minimum for six persons for half a month], and they will still live like kings and put five bucks in the bank. Now you ought to give a colored boy more. He likes his pork chops and half a fried chicken. Needs them, too, to keep up his strength. Let him have a chicken now and then and maybe he’ll go out and find himself a job. But a good meal of meat would kill an Eyetalian on account of he ain’t used to it.

Families on relief who asked for seasonings on their food, like vinegar or mustard, were refused on the grounds that they might “begin to feel too much like other families”. Officials who were afraid that cash handouts to the poor might encourage dependence instead used that money to hire a resident home economist to help the poor make better use of what little they had.

As with modern means testing, this seems heart-breakingly callous. All these “supervisory” jobs intended to keep poor people from getting too much relief look suspiciously like a method for taking money that’s meant to help starving families and using it to pay the middle class to snoop on their less fortunate neighbors. Everyone loves giving middle-class busybodies jobs in “charity” work, no one seems to worry all that much about getting food to malnourished children. 

To be fair, no one expected that the relief would have to go on for years. Everyone thought that the panic was temporary, that it would all be over in a couple of months. This doesn’t make it much better, but it does explain some of the reluctance.

Another surprising villain in all this is, of all things, the American Red Cross. Over and over again, the Red Cross either refused to provide aid or gave only the smallest amounts, even when people were literally starving to death. They sent officials to areas stricken by drought and flood, who reported back that there was not “evidence of malnutrition more than exists in normal times” or brought back stories about an old man complaining that the Red Cross was feeding him too well. Meanwhile, actual Red Cross workers were reporting circumstances like this, from Kentucky: 

We have filled up the poor farm. We have carted our children to orphanages for the sake of feeding them. There is no more room. Our people in the country are starving and freezing.

The Red Cross’s reasoning was the same as everyone else in government: “If people get it into their heads that when they have made a little cotton crop and tried to make a corn crop and failed and then expected charity to feed them for five months, then the Red Cross had defeated the very thing that it should have promoted, self-reliance and initiative.” Actually this statement is on the friendlier side of things; another Red Cross official, after touring Kentucky, wrote: “There is a feeling among the better farmers in Boyd County that the drought is providential; that God intended the dumb ones should be wiped out; and that it is a mistake to feed them.”

Was Hoover the Villain? 

This brings us to a major question — namely, was Herbert Hoover the real villain of the Great Depression? 

At first glance it certainly looks that way. Hoover consistently blocked relief bills in Congress. He had a clear no-relief policy, and he stuck to it throughout his time as president. And he did send the US Army to drive a bunch of poor veterans out of DC. 

(He also lived in incredible opulence during his time in the White House. Always black tie dinners, always a table awash in gold, always fancy gourmet foreign food, always a row of butlers all exactly the same height. As they say, “not a good look”.)

But when you start looking at things in more detail, it becomes more complicated. It may seem naïve, but Hoover really thought that Americans would come together and take care of each other without the need for government assistance. He seemed to oppose relief because he thought that the federal government stepping in would make things worse. In one speech, he promised that “no man, woman or child shall go hungry or unsheltered through the coming winter” and emphasized that voluntary relief organizations would make sure that everyone was taken care of. He might have been wrong, but this doesn’t look villainous. (He also said, “This is, I trust, the last winter of this great calamity.” It was 1932.)

In a pretty bizarre state of affairs, he also seems to have been thwarted by the Red Cross at every turn, especially its chairman John Barton Payne. It makes sense that Hoover approved of the Red Cross, since it was one of the voluntary generous organizations he liked so much. What’s strange is how frequently the Red Cross just didn’t do jack, even when asked.

For example: In 1930, Hoover pressured the Red Cross to help out with drought relief in the Mississippi delta. The Red Cross agreed to give out $5 million in aid, but by the end of the year they had spent less than $500,000, mostly on handing out seed to farmers. 

Another time, Hoover went to the Red Cross to help provide relief to striking miners. This time the Red Cross refused, though again they offered seed to the miners (it’s unclear if there was even arable land near the mine). So Hoover went to a Quaker relief organization instead, and the Quakers agreed to help feed hungry children in the mining areas. Hoover struck a deal where the Red Cross would provide $200,000 to help the Quakers out. The Quakers waited two months before the Red Cross refused again. So the Quakers went ahead without them.

Somehow Hoover never turned his back on the Red Cross. Maybe he just liked the idea of aid organizations too much to realize that this one kept undermining him in times of crisis. 

But the other thing to understand about Hoover is that, despite his gruff no-handouts exterior, inside he was a bit of a softie. He stuck to his guns on the subject of cash relief, but he usually found a way to help without breaking his own rules. When the Red Cross refused to help the Quakers, Hoover rooted around and found $225,000 in an idle account belonging to a World War I relief organization, and sent that instead. In the flood of 1927 (when he was secretary of commerce), he refused to allocate federal funds directly, but he did have the U.S. Army distribute rations, tents, and blankets, organized local governments to rebuild roads and bridges, and got the Red Cross to distribute seeds and farm implements (the only thing they seem comfortable with). This was a huge success, and a big part of what won him the 1928 presidential election!  

The reason Hoover believed in the no-relief approach was simple — he had used it many times before, and it had always worked. He had a long track record of dealing with this kind of crisis. Before he was president, his nickname was “The Great Humanitarian” for the relief work he had done in Europe during World War I. People saw him as an omnicompetent engineering genius, and the reputation is at least partially deserved. It’s hard to overstate just how popular he was before the Depression: He won the election of 1928 with 444 electoral votes to 87, a total landslide.

Hoover thinks that attitude is the key to fighting financial panics, because this is exactly what he saw in 1921. There was a big stock market panic, which Hoover recognized was at least partially psychological. So he put out a bunch of reassuring press releases, told everyone that the panic was over, and sure enough, the market recovered.

So when the same thing happens in 1929, he figures the same approach will work. He does everything he can to project confidence and a sense of business as usual, and tries not to do anything that will start a bigger panic. This includes no federal relief — because if the federal government starts handing out money, that must mean things are REALLY bad. It makes a certain amount of sense, it did work for him in the past, but for some reason, it doesn’t work this time around. Maybe blame the Red Cross. 

FDR definitely jumped in to take advantage of the confusion. As then-governor of New York, he started implementing the kind of relief plans that Hoover refused to consider. He gave direct food relief. He used the word “charity”. And when he ran for president, he made it very clear that he thought the federal government should cover what the states could not, and make sure that no one would starve.

This did win him the election. But afterwards, he started looking a lot more like Hoover and some of his cronies. In his 1935 state of the union address, he said, “continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.” We’re right back to where we started. 

FDR rolls out the Works Progress Administration, another program that ties relief to a person’s work. But this isn’t administered much better than the Red Cross. Many workers couldn’t live on the low wages they offered. Even when they could, the jobs lasted only as long as the projects did, so workers often went months without jobs between different programs. 

The Civilian Conservation Corps was for a long time the most popular of these programs, but in 1936, Roosevelt decided to focus on balancing the budget instead. He slashed the program from 300,000 people to about 1,400. Over time, most of the relief burden fell back on state and city governments, many of which descended back into cronyism.

Some of the programs, for migrants and “transients”, were worse, nearly Orwellian:

Before the New Deal, transients were the last group to receive relief under the old poor laws. Now the FTP funded a separate system of transient centers guided by federal regulations meant to guard against local governments’ ingrained cultural biases against drifters and migrant job seekers. In rural areas, transients would be gathered into federal “concentration camps” (a term that had not yet gained its ominous connotations) designed for long-term stays.

As waves of agricultural migrants spread across the United States, by 1940 the FSA had opened 56 camps around the country, 18 of them in California, each accommodating up to 350 families. Administrators nevertheless continued to keep costs as low as possible, following the “rehabilitation rather than relief” rule handed down by President Roosevelt. Rather than give migrants food, the camps taught home economics–style classes on nutrition and food budgeting.

By 1937 everything seems to have fallen apart again, and the authors suggest that the second half of the 1930s was as bad or worse than the first half. In 1938, Roosevelt refused to give any further direct food relief from the WPA coffers. The stories from 1939 are kind of harrowing. 

By 1939, the problems of unemployment and what to do with millions of jobless Americans seemed intractable. The economy continued to sputter along; real prosperity remained an elusive goal; and Americans were losing compassion for the destitute and hungry.  

…

A Houston, Texas, reporter lived for a week on the city’s $1.20 weekly food handout, eating mostly oatmeal, potatoes, stewed tomatoes, and cabbage, and lost nearly ten pounds. In Chicago, a family of four received $36.50 a month, meant to cover food, clothing, fuel, rent, and everything else. But fuel in the cold Chicago winters was expensive; families had no choice but to cut back on food. In Ohio, the governor again refused to give aid to Cleveland, which ran out of money for nearly a month—called the “Hunger Weeks”—at the end of 1939. The city was reduced to feeding its poor with flour and apples as desperate families combed garbage bins for anything edible. Adults lost as much as fifteen pounds, while children had to stay home, too weak from hunger to attend school. Doctors saw a jump in cases of pneumonia, influenza, pleurisy, tuberculosis, heart disease, suicide attempts, and mental breakdowns.

So whatever Hoover did wrong, he doesn’t deserve all the blame, and the WPA certainly did not end the Great Depression.

[Content warning: Food, culture shock, milk]

They say that the past is a foreign country, and nowhere is this more true than with food. 

The book is A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe, recommended to us by reader Phil Wagner. This book is, no pun intended, just what it says on the tin, a history of food during the 1920s and 1930s. Both decades are covered because you need to understand what food was like in the 1920s to understand what changed when the Great Depression battered the world in the ‘30s. 

Home is where the lard-based diet is

We read this book and were like, “what are you eating? I would never eat this.” 

The book picks up at end of World War I, and the weird food anecdotes begin immediately:  

Their greeting back in American waters—even before they landed—was rapturous. Local governments, newspapers, and anybody else who could chartered boats to race out to meet the arriving ships. When the Mauretania, carrying 3,999 troops, steamed into New York Harbor late in 1918, a police boat carrying the mayor’s welcoming committee pulled alongside. After city dignitaries shouted greetings to them through megaphones, the troops who crowded the deck and hung from every porthole bellowed en masse: “When do we eat?!” It became a custom for greeting parties to hire professional baseball pitchers to hurl California oranges at the troops—some soldiers sustained concussions from the barrage—to give them their first taste of fresh American produce in more than a year.

Not that the soldiers weren’t also well-fed at the front lines: 

Despite the privations they had undergone, the Americans held one great advantage over both the German enemy and the soldiers of their French and British allies. They were by far the best-fed troops of World War I.

The U.S. Army field ration in France varied according to circumstances, but the core of the soldiers’ daily diet was twenty ounces of fresh beef (or sixteen ounces of canned meat or twelve ounces of bacon), twenty ounces of potatoes, and eighteen ounces of bread, hard or soft. American troops were always proud that they enjoyed white bread, while all the other armies had to subsist on dark breads of various sorts. This ration was supplemented with coffee, sugar, salt, pepper, dried fruit, and jam. If supply lines were running, a soldier could eat almost four pounds of food, or 5,000 calories, a day. American generals believed that this was the best diet for building bone, muscle, tissue, and endurance. British and French troops consumed closer to 4,000 calories, while in the last months of the war the Germans were barely receiving enough rations to sustain themselves.

The overall food landscape of the 1920s is almost unrecognizable. The term “salad” at the time referred to “assemblages made from canned fruit, cream cheese, gelatin, and mayonnaise,” which the authors note FDR especially hated [1]. Any dish that contained tomatoes was called “Spanish” (a tradition that today survives only in the dish Spanish rice). And whatever the circumstances, there was ALWAYS dessert — even in the quasi-military CCC camps, even in the government-issued guides to balanced meals, even in school lunch programs that were barely scraping by. 

This book also has some interesting reminders that constipation used to be the disease of civilization. In fact, they mention constipation being called “civilization’s curse”. This is why we have the stereotype of old people being obsessed with fiber and regularity, even though that stereotype is about a generation old now, and refers to a generation that has largely passed.

In the countryside, farm diets were enormous and overwhelmingly delicious: 

In midwestern kitchens, the lard-based diet achieved its apotheosis in a dish called salt pork with milk gravy, here served with a typical side of boiled potatoes:

On a great platter lay two dozen or more pieces of fried salt pork, crisp in their shells of browned flour, and fit for a king. On one side of the platter was a heaping dish of steaming potatoes. A knife had been drawn once around each, just to give it a chance to expand and show mealy white between the gaping circles that covered its bulk. At the other side was a boat of milk gravy, which had followed the pork into the frying-pan and had come forth fit company for the boiled potatoes.

The first volume of their oral history, Feeding Our Families, describes the Indiana farmhouse diet from season to season and meal to meal. In the early decades of the century, the Hoosier breakfast was a proper sit-down feast featuring fried eggs and fried “meat,” which throughout much of rural American meant bacon, ham, or some other form of pork. In the nineteenth century, large tracts of Indiana had been settled by Germans, who left their mark on the local food culture. A common breakfast item among their descendants was pon haus, a relative of scrapple, made from pork scraps and cornmeal cooked into mush, molded into loaf pans and left to solidify. For breakfast, it was cut and fried. Toward fall, as the pork barrel emptied, the women replaced meat with slices of fried apples or potatoes. The required accompaniment was biscuits dressed with butter, jam, jelly, sorghum syrup, or fruit butter made from apples, peaches, or plums. A final possibility—country biscuits were never served naked—was milk gravy thickened with a flour roux.

Where farmhouse breakfasts were ample, lunch was more so, especially in summer when workdays were long and appetites pushed to their highest register. With the kitchen garden at full production, the midday meal often included stewed beets, stewed tomatoes, long-simmered green beans, boiled corn, and potatoes fried in salt pork, all cooked to maximum tenderness. At the center of the table often stood a pot of chicken and dumplings, with cushiony slices of white bread to sop up the cooking broth. The gaps between the plates were filled with jars of chow-chow; onion relish; and pickled peaches, cauliflower, and watermelon rinds. The midday meal concluded with a solid wedge of pie. Like bread, pies were baked in bulk, up to a dozen at a time, and could be consumed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Ingredients were prepared in ways that sound pretty strange to a modern ear. Whole onions were baked in tomato sauce and then eaten for lunch. Whole tomatoes were scalloped on their own. 

Organ meats were considered perfectly normal, if somewhat tricky to cook. The book mentions how food columnists had to teach urban housewives about how to remove the “transparent casing” that brains naturally come in, the membrane from kidneys, and the arteries and veins from hearts — not the sort of thing you would expect from a modern food columnist. On hog-killing day, an annual event all over the rural United States: 

The most perishable parts of the animal were consumed by the assembled crowd, the brains scrambled with eggs, the heart and liver fried up and eaten with biscuits and gravy. Even bladders were put to good use—though it wasn’t culinary. Rather, they were given to the children, who inflated them, filled them with beans, and used them as rattles.

There are a lot of fascinating recipes in this book, but perhaps our favorite is this recipe that appears in a section on the many uses of pork lard: 

Appalachian farm women prepared a springtime specialty called “killed lettuce,” made from pokeweed, dandelion, and other wild greens drizzled with hot bacon grease that “killed,” or wilted, the tender, new leaves. The final touch to this fat-slicked salad was a welcome dose of vinegar.

You might expect the urban food situation to be more modern, seeing as it involves less hog-killing. But if anything, it’s stranger. 

To start with, ice cream delicacies were considered normal lunch fare: 

The most typical soda fountain concoction was the ice cream soda, which was defined as “a measured quantity of ice cream added to the mixture of syrup and carbonated water. From there, the imaginations of soda jerks were given free range. Trade manuals such as The Dispenser’s Formulary or Soda Water Guide contained more than three thousand soda fountain recipes for concoctions like the Garden Sass Sundae (made with rhubarb) and the Cherry Suey (topped with chopped fruit, nuts, and cherry syrup). … From relatively austere malted milks to the most elaborate sundaes, all of these sweet confections were considered perfectly acceptable as a main course for lunch, particularly by women. In fact, American sugar consumption spiked during the 1920s. This was in part thanks to Prohibition—deprived of alcohol, Americans turned to anything sweet for a quick, satisfying rush.

Delicatessens and cafeterias, which we take for granted today, were strange new forms of dining. The reaction to these new eateries can only be described as apocalyptic. Delicatessens were described as “emblems of a declining civilization, the source of all our ills, the promoter of equal suffrage, the permitter of business and professional women, the destroyer of the home.” The world of the 1920s demanded an entirely new vocabulary for many new social ills springing up — “cafeteria brides” and “delicatessen husbands” facing down the possibility of that new phenomenon, the “delicatessen divorce.” The fear was that your flapper wife, unable to make a meal in her tiny city kitchenette, or out all day with a self-supporting career, would feed you food that she got from the delicatessen, instead of a home-cooked and hearty meal. 

In all of these cases, the idea was that new ways of eating would destroy the kitchen-centric American way of life — which, to be fair, it did. Calling a deli “the destroyer of the home” seems comical to us, but they were concerned that these new conveniences would destroy the social structures that they knew and loved, and they were right. We think our way of life is an improvement, of course, but you can hardly fault the accuracy of their forecasting.

Really, people found these new eateries equal parts wonderful and terrifying — like any major change, they had their songs of praise as well as their fiery condemnations (hot take: delicatessens were the TikTok of the 1920s). For a stirring example from the praise section, take a look at this lyrical excerpt from the June 18, 1922 edition of the New York Tribune:

Spices of the Orient render delectable the fruits of the Occident. Peach perches on peach and pineapple, slice on slice, within graceful glass jars. Candies are there and exhibits of the manifold things that can be pickled in one way or another. Chickens, hams and sausages are ready to slice, having already been taken through the preliminaries on the range. There are cheeses, fearful and wonderful, and all the pretty bottles are seen, as enticing looking as ever, although they are but the fraction of their former selves [i.e., under Prohibition].”

Sandwiches were not only strange and new, but practically futuristic. “Before the 1920s, sandwiches were largely confined to picnics and free lunches in saloons,” they tell us, “and, with their crusts cut off, delicate accompaniments to afternoon tea.” The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types: Swiss cheese, ham, sardine, liverwurst, egg, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue (yes). But by 1926, he “claimed that he had counted 946 different sandwich varieties stuffed with fillings such as watermelon and pimento, peanut butter, fried oyster, Bermuda onion and parsley, fruit salad, aspic of foie gras, spaghetti, red snapper roe, salmi of duck, bacon and fried egg, lettuce and tomato, spiced beef, chow-chow, pickled herring, asparagus tips, deep sea scallops, and so on ad infinitum.”

Like the delicatessen, Americans were not going to take this sandwich thing lying down. Nor would they take it at all calmly! Boston writer Joseph Dinneen described sandwiches as “a natural by-product of modern machine civilization.”

Make your own “biggest thing since sliced bread” joke here, but actually this sandwich craze led directly to first the invention of special sandwich-shaped loaves with flattened tops, and then to sliced bread, which hit the market in 1928.

Frozen foods had also just been invented (frozen foods are soggy and tasteless unless you freeze them really fast; Clarence Birdseye figured out how to do quick freezing by seeing fish freeze solid during an ice fishing trip in Labrador) and were considered a novelty. Yet somehow the brand name Jell-O dates all the way back to 1897.

Many new foods didn’t fit squarely within existing categories. This is sort of like how squid ice cream seems normal in Japan. We have rules about what you can put in an ice cream — mint ice cream makes sense, but onion ice cream is right out — but the Japanese don’t care what we think the ice cream rules are. In the 1920s and 1930s many foods were unfamiliar or actually brand new, so no one had any expectations of what to do with them. For example, the banana, which you know as a fruit, was new enough to Americans that they were still figuring out how the thing should be served: 

We’re sure bananas would be fine served as a vegetable, or with bacon, but this is certainly not the role we would assign to them today.

When the Depression hit, grapefruit somehow found its way into food relief boxes in huge quantities; “so much grapefruit that people didn’t know what to do with it.” Soon the newspapers were coming up with imaginative serving suggestions, like in this piece from the Atlanta Constitution:

It may open the meal, served as a fruit cocktail, in halves with a spoonful of mint jelly in the center or sprinkled with a snow of powdered sugar. It bobs up in a fruit cup, or in a delicious ice. It may be served broiled with meat, appear in a fruit salad or in a grapefruit soufflé pie. Broiled grapefruit slices, seasoned with chili sauce, make an unusual and delightful accompaniment for broiled fish, baked fish or chops.

Some of these sound pretty good; but still, unusual.

Vitamins

The other really strange and exciting thing about this period is that they had just discovered vitamins.

As we’ve covered previously, this was not as easy as you might think. It’s simple to think in terms of vitamins when you’re raised with the idea, but it took literally centuries for people to come up with the concept of a disease of deficiency, even with the totally obvious problem of scurvy staring everyone right in the face. 

Scurvy isn’t just a problem for polar explorers and sailors in the Royal Navy. Farm families living through the winter on preserved foods from their cellar tended to develop “spring fever” just before the frost broke, which the authors of this book think was probably scurvy. Farmwives treated it with “blood tonics” like sassafras tea or sulfured molasses, or the first-sprouted dandelions and onions of spring.

But just around the turn of the century, and with the help of cosmic accidents involving guinea pigs, people finally started to get this vitamin thing right. So the 1920s and 30s paint an interesting picture of what cutting-edge nutrition research looks like when it’s so new that it’s still totally bumbling and incompetent. 

In 1894, Wilbur Olin Atwater established America’s first dietary standards. Unfortunately, Atwater’s recommendations didn’t make much sense. For example, in this system men with more strenuous jobs were assigned more food than men with less strenuous jobs — a carpenter would get more calories than a clerk. This makes some sense, but Atwater then used each man’s food levels to calculate the amount of food required for his wife and kids. The children of men with desk jobs sometimes got half as much food as the children of manual laborers! The idea of treating each member of the family as their own person, nutritionally speaking, was radical in the early 1900s, but the observation that some children were “kept alive in a state of semi-starvation” had begun to attract attention.

People knew they could do better, so following Atwater’s death in 1907, the next generation got to work on coming up with a better system. Atwater had assumed that basically all fats were the same, as were all carbohydrates, all protein, etc. But Dr. Elmer V. McCollum, “a Kansas farm boy turned biochemist”, was on the case investigating fats. 

We really want to emphasize that they had no system at this point, no idea what they were doing. Medical science was young, and nutritional science was barely a decade old. Back then they were still just making things up. These days “guinea pig” and “lab rat” are clichés, but these clichés hadn’t been invented back in 1907. Just like how Holst and Frolich seem to have picked guinea pigs more or less at random to study scurvy, and how ​Karl Koller’s lab used big frogs to test new anesthetics, McCollum was one of the first researchers to use rats as test subjects.

Anyways, McCollum tried feeding his rats different kinds of fats to see if, as Atwater claimed, all fats had the same nutritional value. He found that rats that ate lots of butterfat “grew strong and reproduced, while those that ate the olive oil did not”. He teamed up with a volunteer, Marguerite Davis, and they discovered a factor that was needed for growth and present not only in milk, but eggs, organ meat, and alfalfa leaves. This factor was later renamed vitamin A (as the first to be discovered), and the age of the vitamins had begun. Soon McCollum and Davis were on the trail of a second vitamin, which they naturally called vitamin B.

The public went absolutely bananas for vitamins. It’s not clear if this was a totally natural public reaction, or if it was in response to fears drummed up by… home economists. Yes, home economics, the most lackluster class of all of middle school, represents that last lingering influence of what was once a terrible force in American politics: 

More than anything else, women were afraid of the “hidden hunger” caused by undetectable vitamin deficiencies that could well be injuring their children. … Home economists leveraged those fears. To ensure compliance, bureau food guides came with stark admonitions, warning mothers that poor nutrition in childhood could handicap a person for life. Women were left with the impression that one false move on their part meant their children would grow up with night blindness and bowed knees.

Whatever the cause, vitamins took America by storm. Any food found to be high in one vitamin or another quickly turned that finding to advertising purposes. Quaker oats, found to be high in vitamin B, advertised to kids with a campaign that “teamed up with Little Orphan Annie and her new pal, a soldier named Captain Sparks, who could perform his daring rescues because he had eaten his vitamins.” For adults, they implied that vitamin B would help make you vigorous in bed: 

…a snappy new advertising campaign: “I eat Quaker Oats for that wonderful extra energy ‘spark-plug.’ Jim thinks I have ‘Oomph!’ but I know it’s just that I have plenty of vitality and the kind of disposition a man likes to live with.” What she did with her extra “oomph” was unspecified, but the graphic showed a young couple nose to nose, smiling into each other’s eyes.

Vitamins continued to have this weird grip over the imagination for a long time. As late as the 1940s, American food experts worried that the Nazis had developed some kind of super-nutritional supplement, a “magical Buck Rogers pill,” to keep their army tireless and efficient (there probably was such a pill, but that pill was methamphetamine). In response, Roosevelt convened a 900–person National Nutrition Conference for Defense, a full quarter of them home economists, to tackle malnutrition as part of the war effort.

Maybe it’s not surprising that vitamins had such a hold on the popular imagination. It’s hard for us to imagine growing up in a world where scurvy, beriberi, and rickets were a real and even terrifying danger, not just funny-sounding words you might encounter in a Dickens novel. But for people living in the 1920s, they were no joke. Look at your local five-year-old and think how they will never understand the real importance of the internet, and what life was like before. You’re the same way about vitamins.

Milk

The final thing we learned is that people from the 1920s and 1930s had an intense, almost deranged love for milk.

Milk was always mentioned first and usually mentioned often. It was on every menu. Good Housekeeping’s 1926 article, Guide Posts to Balanced Meals, included “One pint of milk a day as either a beverage or partly in soups, sauces or desserts” as guidepost #1. Pamphlets from the USDA’s Bureau of Home Economics suggested that one fifth of a family’s food budget should be spent on milk. Milk was served at every meal in the schoolhouse, with milk and crackers at recess, the target being a quart of milk for every child, every day.

Milk was on every relief list. Food relief in NYC in 1930, a very strict beans-and-potatoes affair, still made sure to include a pound of evaporated milk for every family. Even for those on microscopic fifty-cent-a-day menus, milk was recommended at every meal, “one pint for breakfast, some for lunch, and then another pint for supper.” One father struggling to adjust to the Depression said, “We had trouble learning to live within the food allowance allotted us. We learned it meant oleomargarine instead of butter. It meant one quart of milk a day for the children instead of three.” Even the tightest-fisted relief lists included a pint of milk a day for adults, and a quart a day for children. The most restrictive diets of all were bread and — you guessed it — milk.

Milk was the measure of destitution. Descriptions of people eating “whatever they could get” sound like this: “inferior qualities of food and less of it; less milk; loose milk instead of bottled milk, coffee for children who previously drank milk.” When describing the plight of West Virginia mining families, a state union leader said, “Their diet is potatoes, bread, beans, oleomargarine, but not meat, except sow-belly two or three times a week. The company won’t let the miners keep cows or pigs and the children almost never have fresh milk. Only a few get even canned milk.”

There’s no question — milk was the best food. The government sent McCollum, the guy who discovered vitamins, around the country, where in his lectures he said:

Who are the peoples who have achieved, who have become large, strong, vigorous people, who have reduced their infant mortality, who have the best trades in the world, who have an appreciation for art and literature and music, who are progressive in science and every activity of the human intellect? They are the people who have patronized the dairy industry.

Normal milk wasn’t enough for these people, so in 1933 they developed a line of “wonder foods” around the idea of combining milk with different kinds of cereals. They called them: Milkorno, Milkwheato, and Milkoat. These products are about what you would expect, but the reception was feverish:  

With great fanfare, Rose introduced Milkorno, the first of the cereals, at Cornell’s February 1933 Farm & Home Week, where the assembled dignitaries—including Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the president-elect—were fed a budget meal that included a Milkorno polenta with tomato sauce. The price tag per person was 6½ cents. FERA chose Milkwheato (manufactured under the Cornell Research Foundation’s patent) to add to its shipments of surplus foods, contracting with the Grange League Federation and the Ralston Purina Company to manufacture it. … Milkwheato and its sister cereals represented the pinnacle of scientifically enlightened eating. Forerunners to our own protein bars and nutritional shakes, they were high in nutrients, inexpensive, and nonperishable. White in color and with no pronounced flavor of their own, they were versatile too. Easily adapted to a variety of culinary applications, they boosted the nutritional value of whatever dish they touched. They could be baked into muffins, cookies, biscuits, and breads; stirred into chowders and chili con carne; mixed into meat loaf; and even used in place of noodles in Chinese chop suey.

We had always assumed that the American obsession with milk was the result of the dairy lobby trying to push more calcium on us than we really need. And maybe this is partially true. But public opinion of dairy has fallen so far from the rabid heights of the 1930s that now we wonder if milk might actually be underestimated. Is the dairy lobby asleep at the wheel? Still resting on their laurels? Anyways, if you want to eat the way your ancestors ate back in the 1920s, the authentic way to start your day off right is by drinking a nice tall pint of milk.

[1] : There might be a class element here? The authors say, “FDR recoiled from the plebeian food foisted on him as president; perhaps no dish was more off-putting to him than what home economists referred to as ‘salads,’ assemblages made from canned fruit, cream cheese, gelatin, and mayonnaise.”

PART II HERE