Diet Quality of Farm and Nonfarm Households in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Roles of Technological Change and Women’s Work

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn recent decades, dramatic increases in Americans’ obesity rates have led some nutrition activists to call for a return to the dietary norms of earlier times when homemakers spent more time in meal preparation. Using archival data from unique survey records gathered in Upstate New York in 1936 and 1952, we provide descriptive information on the quality of the diets using measures of the variety of foods served and a modified version of U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Healthy Eating Index. Our multivariate analyses focus in on the relationships between diet quality and sociodemographics, homemakers’ time use, and household technology. We conclude that the typical Upstate New York diet of the 1930s was not of high quality, but improvements had occurred by the early 1950s. Our multivariate analyses reveal that access to modern kitchen technology had a strong, positive association with diet quality while homemakers’ time devoted to food-related activities was only weakly linked.