Food Journalism

Development

Food writing appeared in the women's pages of American newspapers as early as the 1840s and by the 1880s was a staple of newspapers and magazines. From the beginning, food writers offered much more than simple guides for making the best plum puddings. They served an ideological function as well, giving women advice on how to comport themselves and manage their homes so that they lived up to the image of the proper, white, middle-class, Christian home that became the cornerstone of the nineteenth-century American “cult of domesticity.” Food, its preparation, and its consumption played a central role, and food writers advised women on how to prepare, for their husbands and children, economical and nutritious meals in an efficiently designed and managed kitchen, and how to serve and consume these meals at a well-ordered table that allowed for genteel conversation. These domestic duties, women were told, would ensure a morally and physically robust family, which in turn would ensure the health and vitality of the Republic.

In addition to preserving the moral and physical health of the country, food writers in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century also advised women to ensure its economic health by instructing them on how to become good “consumers” at a time when production of goods was shifting from the home to the factory, and people began buying rather than growing, raising, or making their own food. During the Civil War, canned and other packaged goods appeared in the markets and by 1897, Joseph Campbell had figured out how to can and condense soup. By the turn of the century, canned and other processed foods of all kinds—packaged dry cereals, pancake mixes, crackers, canned hams, and bottled corned beef—had become common in the American diet. Magazines and newspapers wrote about and accepted advertising for these goods, and taught women how to use them in their own cooking.

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