Response to Food Fight

After reading Gabaccia’s Food Fights and American Values, I felt like it is completely ridiculous that Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth century tried to create a science to justify the fact that foods of other nationalities are incompetent and malnutritious. I think it is insulting that they call sweets and snacks of different nationalities “poison.” This field of science called “home economics” is not only self righteous and ethnocentric attempt to assimilate immigrants, but it is also sexist. This field of “science” was only taught to girls in school. Also, I found this program a joke since it is not only contradicting, but also very uncost-efficient. At times of war this program became more open to ethnic foods ethnic foods were very good at finding substitutes for commodities that are no longer available due to times of war and they are good at making the most out of whatever ingredients are available. So this attempt to “americanize” the way of cooking turns out to promote foods from other nationalities. Finally, I must point out that the only reason why home economics classes had to adopt the ways of cooking from other nationalities is because the “American” form of cooking is highly uncost-effective. Home economic classes taught girls to waste three eggs on making one cake and they expect poor families to adopt these ways. For this reason, during WWII, Americans had no choice but to learn how to cook ethnic foods that do not require as many ingredients.