Yet as successful as domestic science was in finding institutional support in schools, it was a failure when it came to elevating the status of homemaking and winning the allegiance of young people. “Home Economics and the Battle for the Stomachs of American Children” maintains that soda fountains and store-bought cake mixes increasingly shaped children’s ideas about food and that high school cooking classes could not compete. Despite dutifully copying the recipes they were given, school-age children rejected the simple menus and severe economy that domestic scientists preached.
Home economics would suffer due to its association with the deprivations of the Great Depression and World War II, but its influence among school children was already waning in the 1920s. Young girls and boys sought culinary advice from the growing number of cookbooks written especially for them and from recipes that advertisers promulgated in housekeeping and young adult magazines. These culinary compilations sought to make cooking fun and frivolous. They emphasized easy preparations and party foods that distanced children from the drudgery of daily cooking while celebrating the importance of hosting parties as a means of keeping friends. Ultimately, young people’s rejection of the regimented diets that home economics celebrated and their embrace of prepackaged foods and restaurants demonstrate a shift from a producer to a consumer mentality that would have lasting impacts on how Americans ate in the twentieth century.
[1] Megan J. Elias, Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).