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Description
According to white-middle-class reformers, minority populations were greatly in need of the better living that the middle-class diet could provide. This statement encapsulated the complexities of the period during and surrounding the Progressive Era (1880-1920). Middle-class anxious due to the growing minority populations leaned into and created dietary boundaries that embodied “American dietary habits,” based on moderation, purity, and self-restraint. Setting themselves apart, middle class reformers believed that lower classes were inferior due to their lack of adherence to middle-class dietary customs. Electing themselves as guardians of dietary social betterment, middle-class reformers inserted themselves into minority communities to show them how to “eat right.” While previous historians have examined the development of dietary culture, the Progressive Era, and Americanization all as separate historical tracts, these events occurred concurrently within the United States, and all had an impact on what certain Americans were advised to eat. Thus, this thesis examines dietary literature from three perspectives utilizing textual, visual, and sensory analysis and taking into context the above overlapping factors. First, white middle-class prescriptive literature sought to establish an American cuisine fashioned after New England dietary traditions and beliefs of moderation, purity, and self-restraint. Secondly, this thesis examines the descriptive accounts of immigrant diets in densely populated urban communities. Their accounts both shed light on the dietary realities of the poverty-stricken immigrant communities and the meddling of middle-class reformers into immigrant homes to alter their diets. Thirdly, the work investigates the perspective of Indigenous children who were taken against their will to boarding schools and forcibly immersed into an unfamiliar diet and trained to produce meals modeled after Anglo-American dietary customs. Lastly, this thesis argues that overall minority populations resisted the intrusion of middle-class reformers into their spaces and dietary cultural traditions. This paradoxical period displays the way in which dietary selection and dietary socio-cultural boundaries are formed and shaped by non-dietary ideas, beliefs, and thoughts to create a perception of the “other.”
