Frances Perkins’s “City Diets and Democracy” (1941)

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What about wage earners without gardens, and without home demonstration agents such as rural folks have?…

1. One of the hopes of this generation is to be able to make available to all our people the goods they need for satisfactory living. The most indispensable of these goods is food. American workers have always been among the best fed in the world. According to the data compiled by the International Labor Office in the late 1930’s, only in the Scandinavian countries, Great Britain and the British Dominions were average diets as high as in the United States.

2. But this average is in some respects below the standard which scientific research has set for optimum growth and health. And there are many families living below the average—families with a disproportionately large number of children.…

3. In my opinion, however, the fundamental problem is economic. More than one quarter of the families surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1934–36 did not spend enough to...