A SQUARE MEALA Culinary History of the Great DepressionBy Jane Ziegelman and Andrew CoeIllustrated. 314 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.
During his presidential campaign of 1928, Herbert Hoover declared that the United States was “nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.” The country was giddy with postwar prosperity, and the country’s mood was reflected on America’s dinner tables. As people flocked to cities and moved to small apartments, delicatessens, cafeterias and other purveyors of grab-and-go food began to proliferate. In rural communities, efficiency experts encouraged farm wives to lighten their loads with a range of new conveniences. When President Hoover and his wife, Lou, arrived in the White House, they set a regal tone, presiding over elaborate multicourse banquets and requiring dinner jackets even en famille.
The Depression brought all that to an end. And as Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe show in their engaging and often moving cultural history, “A Square Meal,” those years also changed the way America thought about food. We are what we eat — or in the case of the Depression, didn’t.
As in other respects, the gastronomic effects of Black Tuesday were not immediate. Warring reports and “slippery” statistics made the full impact of the stock market crash hard to gauge, and long into the crisis, the Hoover administration remained staunchly optimistic. In New York, increased numbers of people in the city’s bread lines were an early bellwether. The institution of the bread line dated back to the turn of the 20th century, when tourists would journey to the Bowery to gawk at the seasonal workers who queued up for “promenade breakfasts” of dry bread and coffee in the winter months. The official city charity — the dreaded “Muni” — imposed punitive “work tests” on its clientele and was regarded as a last resort. However, even the private bread lines carried a distinct whiff of the moralistic English poor laws: to ensure that only the most desperate benefited, officials generally distributed these meager meals in the middle of the night.
In the spring of 1930, the bread lines did not disperse as usual. They grew. As increasing numbers of urban workers were laid off and agricultural laborers began flooding the city in search of employment, makeshift bread lines popped up all over New York; by 1931 they were serving some 85,000 meals a day. The socialite Marian Spore handed out Y.M.C.A. meal tickets on the Bowery, while William Randolph Hearst funded — and publicized — two Army trucks serving hungry men sandwiches and crullers.
Hoover and his advisers had an unshakable faith in the spirit of private philanthropy and a constitutional aversion to any form of direct relief. But as the months passed and the waves of financial collapse reached farther, it became clear to city administrators that a more organized system was needed. The bread lines, with their dubious nutritional standards and uncertain supplies, had never been intended as more than a stopgap. On the right, critics charged that the ready food was making able men soft and encouraging freeloaders to flood the city. Social workers complained that amateurish handouts diverted funds from more organized efforts. Because it was socially unacceptable for young women to patronize bread lines, “business girls” often went hungry.
The suffering was not, of course, limited to the cities. Despite Hoover’s 1931 claim that “nobody is actually starving,” the country was desperately hungry. As the Depression deepened, for most Americans the question became not whether one suffered, but in what way. Ziegelman and Coe draw on a range of primary sources to produce grim pictures of subsistence diets across the country. An Arkansas widow and her seven children were found by a relief worker to have little more than “a pint of flour and a few scraps of chicken bones” in the larder; out-of-work West Virginia coal miners were limited to “potatoes, bread, beans, oleomargarine.” In the Dust Bowl, families “pared back their daily diet to the bare minimum of flour, lard and potatoes,” often supplemented by Russian thistle — better known as tumbleweed. Pellagra, rickets and other diseases of malnutrition were rampant. The effects of vitamin deficiency could be felt into the war years, when a startling number of young draftees failed their physicals.
Continue reading the main story