“Strong Men and Women are not Products of Improper Food”: Domestic Science and the History of Eating and Identity

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary thinking on food reform movements as a site for the continuous shaping and reshaping of the relationship between eating, Identity, and citizenship in America. It examines the turn of the century domestic science movements and argues that its goals included not only bread baking, but citizen making, and that its effects included not only changes in eating habits, but changes in the significance of eating habits. The author contends that domestic scientists made eating available as a system of self making and in so doing naturalized class differences and normalized a middle class standard for “alimentary subjectivity.”