The guest speaker at this week’s Rose Cafe was Ms. Jane Ziegelman, who is a historian and the  author of a book titled Nutrition Warriors: Home Economics and the Fight to Feed America During the Great Depression. The topic of the night was about the struggle of working class families to eat as nutritionally as possible under extreme financial distress. At the forefront of this moment for home economics was Cornell’s own Flora Rose.

Often times, when we learn about the Great Depression, we focus on the economics and governance of the time era, but just as important is the cultural aspect within the families. At the peak, the unemployment rate was 25% and people who had never accepted charity before, such as the professional middle class, found themselves in breadlines. Children stopped attending school because of the effects of malnutrition. We know today that mineral and vitamin deficiencies led to their poor physical and cognitive health, but these concepts were relatively new in the 1930s. Therefore, it was incredibly important to come up with solutions for feeding families, especially children. Flora Rose and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt worked together to come up with recipes that, as advertised, cost only seven and a half cents but contained all the vitamins for a nutritionally wholesome meal. Furthermore, this created a whole new home economics movement where women went to university for essentially a degree in the sciences, especially here at Cornell.  For example, Cornell was involved with the first nationally distributed fortified cereals, not unlike the ones we eat today.

It is so interesting to see how humans’ relationship with food has changed over the course of generations. Trends and fads, such as most recently a ‘gluten-free’ diet, come and go. In another example, the Atkins’ diet led to a decrease in sales for pasta and rice. However, most of the time, these diets have no scientific basis, unlike the scientific eating that was introduced during the Great Depression. Because the types of food we consume directly impact our well-being, the study of nutrition has always been and always will be an incredibly important science.