The 1920s marked the end of an era, one of home-cooked dinners prepared by meticulous housewives who labored over a stove for their families. According to food and culture journalist Samantha Barbas, “urbanization, changing gender roles, and increased culinary standardization and commercialization led Americans to lament the demise of home cooking. Gone, they claimed, were large country kitchens, run by full-time housewives, serving home-baked bread and made-from-scratch pies.”
In 1927, home economist Christine Frederick reported: “Woman is no longer a cook—she has become a can opener.” Critics of the time pointed to women’s laziness and selfishness as the reason for the new “can opener” cuisine, while the restaurant industry was busy planning ways to get people away from the kitchen and into their businesses. The crisis over the decline of home-cooking gave restaurants the chance to serve as surrogate homes for mixed-sex, middle-class patrons. This movement became known as the “home cooking” campaign, and according to Barbas, “with hearty foods, matronly servers, and cozy decor, restaurants recreated the aura of a nostalgic pre-modern kitchen—the very institution that they had helped to destroy.”
The family dinner decline continued steadily into the 1940s; families were increasingly on the go, and meals were served on a kitchen counter for everyone to eat at their leisure. Canned, frozen, and precooked foods relieved women of the burden of making meals from scratch, and in the 1950s, T.V. dinners took American households by storm. With meals ready-made, mass produced, and easily consumed without a table, home home-cooked family dinners were becoming harder to organize and easier to avoid.
The restaurant industry had long served male, working-class customers, so the notion of getting “home cooked” dinners seemed unlikely. “To most Americans,” Barbas explains, “eating in restaurants was a hurried, unappetizing, and generally unpleasant experience—nasty, brutish, and short.” But in 1919, the National Restaurant Association was created by a coalition of restaurant owners, suppliers, and managers. Together, their crusade to change the image of the rough, working-class restaurant led to a revolutionary transformation of American dining.
“In one of the great ironies of the modern social experience, Americans were lured into restaurants by promises of home.” —Samantha Barbas
Restaurants aimed to provide a sanctuary to an increasingly busy American family, a place to escape the chaos of modern life, or at least keep it away from their own houses.
Busy lives and more sophisticated ways of preparing food have transformed the family dinner, but there’s hope that it’s not becoming entirely obsolete. Recent studies highlight the benefits of the traditional family dinner, and many people believe that sitting down for a family meal is one of the most critical efforts a family can make to keep kids out of trouble and protect the integrity of the nuclear family. American families still value the simple routine of eating dinner together; they just don’t want to cook it.
—Jamila Reddy