Food and Morality: Gender, Class, and Nation-State Formation in Mexico

This paper analyzes the connections between morality and food between 1935-1965 based on the study of cookbooks, women's magazines, state records, medical journals, and oral histories. In doing so, this work explores the ways in which working-class families were expected to embrace middle-class values and practices even if they did not see the logic within their own life. After the Mexican Revolution the government became concerned about the productivity of its citizens. Poverty, disease and crime were considered to be interconnected and the solution to these problems became education and welfare. Endorsed by the tenets of Eugenics, doctors and scholars would argue that improving the Mexican race was the key to achieve progress. In order to do that both men and women had to change their daily practices: women had to learn how to bake wheat bread and keep their house nice and clean while men become responsible fathers and husbands. Ultimately women became the target of reformers trough doctors, policy makers, visiting nurses, teachers, and social workers. According to them, reaching women would help them instill new values into children, who were the future of the nation. By looking at the advice given to women this paper seeks, on the one hand, to stress the role of middle-class reformers who argued that transforming daily practices, in particular cooking and eating, was essential in the development of a modern nation. On the other hand, women’s memories reveal the difficulties of implementing middle-class ideals in working-class households, and the various reasons that they chose to adopt or not these new practices.