Explore the vast range of titles available.

In recent years, the integrity of food production and distribution has become an issue of wide social concern. The media frequently report on cases of food contamination as well as on the risks of hormones and cloning. Journalists, documentary filmmakers, and activists have had their say, but until now a survey of the latest research on the history of the modern food-provisioning system-the network that connects farms and fields to supermarkets and the dining table-has been unavailable. InFood Chains, Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz present a collection of fascinating case studies that reveal the historical underpinnings and institutional arrangements that compose this system. The dozen essays inFood Chainsrange widely in subject, from the pig, poultry, and seafood industries to the origins of the shopping cart. The book examines what it took to put ice in nineteenth-century refrigerators, why Soviet citizens could buy ice cream whenever they wanted, what made Mexican food popular in France, and why Americans turned to commercial pet food in place of table scraps for their dogs and cats.Food Chainsgoes behind the grocery shelves, explaining why Americans in the early twentieth century preferred to buy bread rather than make it and how Southerners learned to like self-serve shopping. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the value of a historical perspective on the modern food-provisioning system.

Three women of immigrant families who lived in Pittsburgh between 1900 and 1930 had very different experiences with home cooking. One, born in 1901 in what is now Serbia, emigrated with her parents in 1905. In America her mother helped run the family confectionery store, cooked for her boarders, and put up enormous quantities of food for her family. Her daughter remembered, “In the fall [her mother] would make her own sauerkraut, make her own wine and butcher a 300-400 pound hog. Then she would have that smoked and some meat, it would be fresh. She would salt it down

In the period 1875-1930, working-class people in American cities cooked less and bought more ready-to-eat food than previous generations had. In dense urban areas, there were many locally-produced commercial options to replace cooking. And some working-class people may have wanted to cook less, because of the difficult conditions of shopping, cooking, and serving food in poor and working-class homes. In this dissertation, I argue that material considerations were as important as considerations of culture and the maintenance of social ties. By material considerations, I mean the physical and technological structure of people's lives. Food choices are conditioned by the time, space, and tools available to cook and eat with; people cooked not just what they wanted, but what they reasonably could cook in their circumstances. Along with choosing what to eat, people decide how to cook it, and sometimes whether they can hire or convince someone else to do it for them. I am interested in that decision, and in the range of possibilities open to urban working-class people. The decision to cook less ran against the grain of the large prescriptive literature on domestic economy, which in the last quarter of the nineteenth century urged housekeepers, paradoxically, to seek greater \"efficiency\" in cooking and keeping house by using old-fashioned methods of preservation, storage, buying in bulk and utilizing leftovers. These suggestions operated on two implicit assumptions, both of which were false: that home cooks in working families had the abundant kitchen equipment and storage space necessary to practice this economy; and that the time and effort of a homemaker was unwaged and therefore \"free.\" Workers took a more practical view, and often chose to purchase food that was quick-cooking or ready-prepared, in order to save the cook's time for waged work or other household tasks. In other words, poor and working families recognized clearly the value of the cook's time and effort; and they often chose to convert that value into cash for rent, rather than a lower food bill. They decided for themselves how to combine production and consumption. In doing so, they asserted their adherence to a new consumption-oriented family economy, rather than the more traditional (and morally fraught) middle-class view of women's duties as home manager. Thus they anticipated the later turn toward a self-consciously consumer society.

Turner reviews Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America by Marina Moskowitz.

Like thousands of other Greeks, he learned the confectionary trade from family connections, and in 1904 he opened his Candy Kitchen—one of the Greek-owned candy, ice cream, and fruit stores that were ubiquitous in early twentieth-century American cities and towns. Initially starting as railroad laborers or pushcart fruit sellers, Greeks quickly found a niche in the food industry with confectioneries, ice cream shops, and small restaurants. [...]she reads ethnic pride in the oft-repeated description of Greek candy stores as “clean and sanitary,” but this was a nearly universal assertion about public food businesses in an era newly aware of germ theory and among individuals living through a flu pandemic.