a solution only possible of application to one family in a thousand. It
is a question of our time and the future, and not met by a solution
which consists in maintaining an elaborate archaism. The proper feeding
of the world to-day is no more to be guaranteed by one millionaire's
French cook, than was the health of the Roman world by one patrician's
Greek doctor.
Human needs, in remote low stages of social development, were met by
privately owned labourers. As late as the Middle Ages the great lord
had in his_menie_ every kind of functionary to minister to his
wants; not only his private servants of the modern kind, with butlers
and sutlers and pantlers in every degree; but his armourer, his tailor,
his minstrel, and his fool.
The feudal lord kept a fool to amuse him, whereas we go to the theatre.
He kept a cook to feed him--and we do it yet. He kept a poet to
celebrate his deeds and touch his emotions. We have made poetry the
highest class in literature, and literature the world's widest art--by
setting the poet free.
To work for the world at large is necessary to the development of the
work. A private poet is necessarily ignoble. So is a private cook. The
iron limitations of household service are immutable--world service has
none. To cater to the whims of one master lowers both parties
concerned. To study the needs of humanity and minister to them is the
line of social progress.
There is nothing private and special in the preparation of food; a more
general human necessity does not exist. There must be freedom and
personal choice in the food prepared, but it no more has to be cooked
for you than the books you love best have to be written for you. We
flatter ourselves that we get what we want by having it done at home.
Apply that condition to any other kind of human product and see if it
holds. We get what we want by free choice from the world's markets--not
from a workshop in the back yard. Imagine the grade of production, the
arts, crafts, and manufactures, that we should have to select from, if
we tried to have all things made for us by private servants! Apply the
intelligence and skill of this zoetrope procession of housemaids to
watch-making or shoe-making, or umbrella-making, or the making of
paper, or glass, or steel, or any civilised commodity; and if we can
easily see how immeasurably incompetent these flitting handmaids would
be for any of these lines of work, why do we imagine them competent to
prepare food and take care of children? Because we have never thought
of it at all.
Men are too busy doing other things, too blinded by their scorn for
"women's work." Women are too busy doing these things to think about
them at all; or if they think, stung by the pain of pressing
inconvenience, they only think personally, they only feel it for
themselves, each one blindly buried in her own home, like the crafty
ostrich with his head in the sand.
The question is a public one; none could be more so. It affects in one
of its two branches every human being except those who board; every
home, without exception. Perhaps some impression may be made on the
blank spaces of our untouched minds by exhibiting the economic status
of home industry.
We Americans are credited with acuteness and good business sense. How
can we reconcile ourselves to the continuance of a system not only so
shamefully inadequate, but so ruinously expensive? If we are not
mortified to find that our boasted industrial progress carries embedded
in its very centre this stronghold of hoary antiquity, this knotted,
stumpy bunch of amputated rudiments; if we are not moved by the low
standard of general health as affected by food, and the no standard of
general education as affecting the baby, perhaps we can be stimulated
somewhat by the consideration of expense.
The performance of domestic industries involves, first, an enormous
waste of labour. The fact that in nine cases out of ten this labour is
unpaid does not alter its wastefulness. If half the men in the world
stayed at home to wait on the other half, the loss in productive labour
would be that between half and the fraction required to do the work
under advanced conditions, say one-twentieth. Any group of men
requiring to be cooked for, as a ship's crew, a lumber camp, a company
of soldiers, have a proportionate number of cooks. To give each man a
private cook would reduce the working strength materially. Our private
cooks being women makes no difference in the economic law. We are so
accustomed to rate women's labour on a sex-basis, as being her "duty"
and not justly commanding any return, that we have quite overlooked
this tremendous loss of productive labour.
Then there is the waste of endless repetition of "plant." We pay rent
for twenty kitchens where one kitchen would do. All that part of our
houses which is devoted to these industries, kitchen, pantry, laundry,
servants' rooms, etc., could be eliminated from the expense account by
the transference of the labour involved to a suitable workshop. Not
only our rent bills, but our furnishing bills, feel the weight of this
expense. We have to pay severally for all these stoves and dishes,
tools and utensils, which, if properly supplied in one proper place
instead of twenty, would cost far less to begin with; and, in the hands
of skilled professionals, would not be under the tremendous charge for
breakage and ruinous misuse which now weighs heavily on the
householder. Then there is the waste in fuel for these nineteen
unnecessary kitchens, and lastly and largest of any item except labour,
the waste in food.
First the waste in purchasing in the smallest retail quantities; then
the waste involved in separate catering, the "left overs" which the
ingenious housewife spends her life in trying to "use up"; and also the
waste caused by carelessness and ignorance in a great majority of
cases. Perhaps this last element, careless ignorance, ought to cover
both waste and breakage, and be counted by itself, or as a large item
in the labour account.
Count as you will, there could hardly be devised a more wasteful way of
doing necessary work than this domestic way. It costs on the most
modest computation three times what it need cost. Once properly aroused
to a consideration of these facts it will be strange indeed if
America's business sense cannot work out some system of meeting these
common human necessities more effectually and more economically.
The housemaid would be more of a step in advance if the housewife,
released from her former duties, then entered the ranks of productive
labour, paid her substitute, and contributed something further to the
world's wealth. But nothing could be farther from the thoughts of the
Lady of the House. Her husband being able to keep more than one woman
to do the work of the house; and much preferring to exhibit an idle
wife, as proof of his financial position,[4] the idle wife proceeds so
to conduct her house as to add to its labours most considerably. The
housewife's system of housekeeping is perforce limited to her own
powers. The size of the home, the nature of its furnishings and
decorations, the kind of clothes worn by the women and children, the
amount of food served and the manner of its service; all these are
regulated by the housewife's capacity for labour. But once the
housemaid enters the field of domestic labour there is a scale of
increase in that labour which has no limits but the paying capacity of
the man.
[4] See Veblen again.
This element of waste cannot be measured, because it is a progressive
tendency, it "grows by what it feeds upon" (as most things do, by the
way!) and waxes greater and greater with each turn of the wheel. If the
lady of the house, with one servant, were content to live exactly as
she did before; keeping the work within the powers of the deputy, she
would be simply and absolutely idle, and that is a very wearing
condition; especially to woman, the born worker. So the lady of the
house, mingling with other ladies of houses, none of them having
anything but houses to play with, proceeds so to furnish, decorate, and
arrange those houses, and so to elaborate the functions thereof, as to
call for more and ever more housemaids to do the endless work.
This open door of senseless extravagance hinges directly upon the idle
wife. She leaves her position of domestic service, not to take a higher
one in world service; but to depute her own work to an inferior and do
none at all.
Thus we find that in the grade of household labour done by the
housewife we have all those elements of incapacity and waste before
explained; and that in the grade done by the housemaid we have a
decrease in ability, a measurable increase in direct waste, and an
immeasurable increase in the constantly rising sum of waste due to
these bloated buildings stuffed with a thousand superfluities wherein
the priceless energies of women are poured out in endless foolishness;
in work that meets no real need; and in play that neither rests nor
refreshes.
So far our sufferings under the present rapid elimination of the
housemaid have taught us little. Our principal idea of bettering the
condition is by training servants. We seriously propose to establish
schools to train these reluctant young women to our service; even in
some cases to pay them for going there. This is indeed necessary; for
why should they pay for tuition, or even waste time in gratuitously
studying, when they can get wages without?
We do not, and cannot, offer such graded and progressive salaries as
shall tempt really high-class labour into this field. Skilled labour
and domestic service are incompatible. The degree of intelligence,
talent, learning, and trained skill which should be devoted to feeding
and cleaning the human race will never consent to domestic service. It
is the grade of work which forever limits its development, the place,
the form of service. So long as the home is the workshop the housewife
cannot, and the housemaid will not, even if she could, properly do this
work for the neglected world.
Is it not time that the home be freed from these industries so palpably
out of place? That the expense of living be decreased by two-thirds and
the productive labour increased by nine-twentieths? That our women
cease to be an almost universal class of house-servants; plus a small
class of parasitic idlers and greedy consumers of wealth? That the
preparation of food be raised from its present condition of inadequacy,
injury, and waste to such a professional and scientific position that
we may learn to spare from our street corners both the drug-store and
the saloon? That the care of children become at last what it should
be--the noblest and most valuable profession, to the endless profit of
our little ones and progress of the race? And that our homes, no longer
greasy, dusty workshops, but centres of rest and peace; no longer
gorgeous places of entertainment that does not entertain, but quiet
places of happiness; no longer costing the laborious lives of
overworked women or supporting the useless lives of idle ones, but
properly maintained by organised industries; become enjoyed by men and
women alike, both glad and honourable workers in an easy world?
VII
HOME-COOKING
We are all reared in a traditional belief that what we get to eat at
home is, by virtue of that location, better than what we get to eat
anywhere else. The expression, "home-cooking," carries a connotation of
assured excellence, and the popular eating-house advertises "pies like
those your mother used to make," as if pie-making were a maternal
function. Economy, comfort, and health are supposed to accompany our
domestic food supply, and danger to follow the footsteps of those who
eat in a hotel, a restaurant, or a boarding house. Is this
long-accepted theory correct? Is the home, as the last stage of our
elaborate processes of social nutrition, a success?
"Home-cooking" is an alluring phrase, but lay aside the allurement; the
term applies to Eskimo hut, to Choctaw wigwam, to Turk and Chinaman and
Russian Jew--whose home-cooking are we praising? Our own, of course.
Which means nothing--absolutely nothing--but that the stomach adapts
itself to what it has to live on--unless it is too poisonous. Of course
we like what we are used to; be it sauerkraut or saleratus biscuit. We
like tobacco too, and alcohol, and chloral and morphine.
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.
In a city block there are, let us say, two hundred families, which, at
our usual average of five individuals to a family, would number one
thousand persons. The thousand persons should consume, we will say,
five hundred quarts of milk a day. The purchase of five hundred quarts
of milk and the proportionate cream, as well as butter, would maintain
a nice little dairy--several blocks together would maintain a large
one. Your bustling restaurant proudly advertises "Milk and cream fresh
every day from our own dairies!" But your beloved home has no such
purchasing power, but meekly absorbs pale cultures of tuberculosis and
typhoid fever at eight cents a quart. The poorer people are, the more
they pay for food, separately. The organised purchasing power of these
same people would double their food supply, and treble it.
Besides the expense entailed in purchasing is that of private
preparation. First, the "plant" is provided. For our two hundred
families there are two hundred stoves, with their utensils. The
kitchen, and all that it contains, with dining-rooms, etc., have been
already referred to, but should be held firmly in mind as a large item
in rent and furnishing. Next, there is the labour. Two hundred women
are employed for about six hours a day each,--twelve hundred working
hours,--at twenty cents an hour. This means two hundred and forty
dollars a day, or sixteen hundred and eighty dollars a week, that the
block of families is paying to have its wastefully home-purchased food
more wastefully home-cooked. Of course, if these cooks are the
housewives, they do not get the money; but the point is, that this much
labour is _worth_ that amount of money, and that productive energy
is being wasted. What ought it to cost? One trained cook can cook for
thirty, easily; three, more easily, for a hundred. The thousand people
mentioned need, in largest allowance, thirty cooks--and the thirty
cooks, organised, would not need six hours a day to do the same work,
either. Thirty cooks, even at ten dollars a week, would be but three
hundred dollars, and that is some slight saving as against sixteen
hundred and eighty!