The University Settlement

Society, for example, was very concerned with Americanizing the home. Domestic scientists attempted to replace the supremacy of the palate with the rule of scientific law. The rigorous methods of science could bring order to the diversified cultural approaches of immigrants to food preparation. For the reformers, eating was a distasteful but necessary biological function. Food could be civilized only by being controlled, limited, and changed through cooking. The totality of the immigrant homemakers’ foodways came under the scrutiny of the reformers. In 1889 a report titled “Food Stores and Purchases in the Tenth Ward” exemplified the scientific observation of culinary habits. Reformers followed the path of food from production to post-consumption, tracing food’s place of purchase; its storage, preparation, and consumption in the home; and its removal from the home as waste.