Katherine Leonard Turner. How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century.

Abstract

Katherine Leonard Turner's How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century is a concise and well-researched corrective to a burgeoning field of study—the social and cultural history of food—that emphasizes the culinary lives of those who left behind ample evidence of what they swallowed. We already know a great deal about what entered the gullets of the elite, and even the middle classes, at the turn of the twentieth century. But when it comes to “ordinary urban working-class people” (p. 8), those for whom “there were no regular meal hours” (p. 3), those for whom eating was not the pursuit of pleasure in the land of plenty but a “problem” (p. 18), we know much less. Turner's book, which essentially explores “how people got food when money was tight and life was uncertain” (p. 7), may not make a sweeping argument about American food and the working class, but it does an admirable job of illuminating the darker and more remote corners of the American diet during the Progressive Era.