Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Allen, Keith Richard

Titel

Eating out in the age of industry: Public policy toward food in Berlin, 1870-1950

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

1997

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• My dissertation considers the process by which the midday meal, previously a private matter of home production and consumption, became a subject of public interest. During the period under consideration, the confluence of four factors--the rise of the wage economy, growing distance between residence and workplace, shorter lunch breaks, and the expansion of women's paid labor outside of the home--created the need for the mass provision of meals in Berlin and other large European cities. Through examination of soup kitchens, penny eateries, the rationing of basic foodstuffs, school meals, and cookery instruction for young women, I investigate how contemporaries responded to the new need for meals outside of the home I demonstrate that one core belief--the midday meal should remain an intensely private, family affair--hindered all public initiatives to provide meals outside of the home in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Berlin. Unlike historians of the United States, Great Britain, France, or Russia, scholars of Germany have failed to consider the importance of food to the emergence of the modern idea of welfare. Theirs is an unfortunate oversight, for the story of meal provision challenges historians' view of welfare on virtually every count. Whether as a model of progress, or as an instrument of social control, historians consider Germany's social entitlement programs the world's most comprehensive. And yet, measured in terms of the provision of meals, Germany lagged far behind Britain and France. German policymakers' particular view of family relations, symbolized by their commitment to the sit-down family meal, ensured that eating out became a preserve of commerce. In the wake of state neglect and philanthropic failure, two Berlin entrepreneurs created the world's first fast food chain and a distinctly modern mid-day habitus: a sphere where material class differences receded behind the reality of tasty food at reasonable prices and a veneer of equal opportunity.