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Articles

African American Dietary Patterns at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Robert T. Dirks^* and Nancy Duran

^* Anthropology Program and Milner Library, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790-4640

¹To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: rtdirks{at}ilstu.edu.

	ABSTRACT

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION Dietary studies during the... Comparing typical diets Tuskegee and the "Black... Eastern Virginia The Institute for Colored... DISCUSSION SUMMARY REFERENCES

 
Early field studies in human nutrition documented the eating habits of African Americans living in a variety of circumstances. We compare the results of these investigations. Our analysis shows systematic differences along a continuum reaching from remote, rural communities in the South toward increasingly metropolitan locations. On the latter end of the continuum, we find diets richer in protein, composed of a wider variety of foods and containing fewer of what we now call "soul foods." Greater market involvement and access to low cost alternatives to more traditional foods help explain these developments.

KEY WORDS: • African American • dietary change • food habits

	INTRODUCTION

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION Dietary studies during the... Comparing typical diets Tuskegee and the "Black... Eastern Virginia The Institute for Colored... DISCUSSION SUMMARY REFERENCES

 
This paper draws upon some of the earliest studies of food consumption in the United States. Several of these concerned the diets of African Americans. Together, they allow us to compare and contrast the eating habits and nutrition of communities in a variety of locations just before the Great Migration northward. We pay special attention to dietary composition, nutritional contents and food variety.

We begin with a description of methods employed in early dietary studies and an overview of our approach. Brief sketches of the works that provided the bulk of our data are presented, followed by summaries of the data themselves. We frame our analysis in terms of a rural-urban continuum. On the rural end, we find traditional "soul foods," frank undernutrition and diets lacking variety. On the urban end, we find middle-class consumption patterns, better nutrition and a wider variety of foods. We explain the shift away from rural Southern foods at the urban end of the continuum as a matter of cost and convenience. Dietary quality appears related to access to metropolitan markets and the amount of money families spent on foods.

	Dietary studies during the Atwater period

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION Dietary studies during the... Comparing typical diets Tuskegee and the "Black... Eastern Virginia The Institute for Colored... DISCUSSION SUMMARY REFERENCES

 
Our knowledge of what ordinary people ate more than a century ago depends almost entirely on literary accounts such as cookbooks, memoirs and diaries. Systematically collected information began to appear in the 1880s when chemists became interested in nutritional requirements and how much food people consumed. W. O. Atwater, head of the USDA’s Office of Experiment Stations (OES), took the lead in documenting American eating habits (1) . He and his associates conducted field studies. They selected family households, boarding houses, institutional dining halls, and other venues and groups regarded as typical of some region or segment of society. Atwater’s method involved weighing all of the food on hand and everything entering the premises for at least a week. Field workers calculated the quantity consumed by deducting waste from the total weight. They also subtracted food remaining at the end of the study. Reports usually contained a brief description of household members and their activities. Authors provided a detailed list of the foods consumed and a nutritional analysis of each. Costs were recorded using prices at the nearest market for items home produced.

Nutritional values were expressed as daily "adult male equivalents." These were averages based on observations of how much food women and children ate compared with a moderately active man weighing 150 lb (68 kg). An adult woman usually consumed 80% of what a man consumed. A girl between 14 and 17 y ate 70% and so on. Expressed as adult male equivalents, the daily consumption values for a household consisting of a married couple and one child, a girl of 16 y, would be total consumption for the day divided by 2.5 (1 + 0.8 + 0.7). Such calculations allowed researchers to compare data collected from groups that differed in size and composition over various periods.

Studies fashioned along these lines continued as the standard throughout the Atwater Era, almost to the beginning of American involvement in World War I (2 ,3) . Researchers made major advances in the science of nutrition during this time, publishing >400 dietaries in an effort to map consumption patterns and nutritional needs across a broad spectrum of society. Field work produced 49 studies involving African American households. Major projects conducted in Alabama (4) and Virginia (5) accounted for 39 of these. The rest were collected in the course of broader investigations in Philadelphia (6) and Washington, DC. (7) . We have in addition summary data for 60 students who boarded at the Institute for Colored Youth in Cheyney, PA (8) and 20 individual African American women in New York City (9) .

These diverse locations and situations open the door to a number of comparisons. Alabama and Virginia on the one hand and Philadelphia, Washington and New York City on the other afford a look at rural-urban and North-South differences. The Virginia material includes one set of data from a backwoods community relatively isolated from the marketplace and another set drawn from townsmen and farmers completely dependent on it. The Alabama dietaries were collected for the most part from an oppressed community still laboring under debt servitude >30 y after the demise of slavery. At the opposite end of the spectrum, forward-thinking attitudes and middle-class ideals informed consumption patterns at the Institute for Colored Youth.

	Comparing typical diets

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION Dietary studies during the... Comparing typical diets Tuskegee and the "Black... Eastern Virginia The Institute for Colored... DISCUSSION SUMMARY REFERENCES

 
Early dietaries allow comparisons of households, communities and other groups in terms of typical foods, the variety of foods consumed and the nutritional contents of diets. Contents in Atwater’s day meant carbohydrates, fats, protein and energy. Vitamins had not been discovered and the importance of minerals was not yet appreciated, leaving food characterizations incomplete. Our attention to food variety compensates for this and recognizes that even with today’s knowledge, nutrient intake never completely depicts food consumption (10) . Thinking about diets in terms of foods and the variety of foods people eat subsumes a great deal of complexity. It takes account of the fact that variety is essential to balanced nutrition and relates positively to health.

To typify the diets of communities, we use the model of Bennett et al. (11) as a starting point. Bennett and his colleagues devised the model to help understand changes affecting the dietary patterns of Southern Illinois in the late 1930s. They represented a typical diet as consisting of three sectors, i.e., a (primary) core, a secondary core and a periphery. The primary core included the most basic or commonly eaten items of food. It also embraced "traditional foods," or surviving elements of older dietary patterns. Secondary core foods covered introductions that were more recent. These were foods gaining popularity because of increasing urbanization and expanding markets in the region. Peripheral diet consisted of novel products and luxury foods beyond the reach of most people.

We quantify the model of Bennett et al. (11) . The primary core of a diet for us consists simply of the most frequently eaten foods in a community or region. We arbitrarily set the threshold at 51%, i.e., items consumed by more than half of the sample over some specified period. Within one particular group, primary core foods are those eaten at least every other day. Foods in the secondary core are those eaten >25% of the time or by more than a quarter of the households in a community. Peripheral items are consumed less often. All of this, of course, is relative to the period it represents. Core items in season (zucchini in late summer) can become peripheral out of season (in February). We do not automatically regard traditional foods as core items. Indeed, traditional foods are often peripheral because, though much celebrated, like the Christmas goose, people in fact rarely eat them.

	Tuskegee and the "Black Belt"

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION Dietary studies during the... Comparing typical diets Tuskegee and the "Black... Eastern Virginia The Institute for Colored... DISCUSSION SUMMARY REFERENCES

 
W. O. Atwater and his collaborator, Charles Woods, selected Tuskegee, Alabama for the OES’s first study of African American food habits (4) . Locating their work in and around Tuskegee took advantage of the expertise and goodwill associated with Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute and its famous principal, Booker T. Washington. Atwater and Woods appointed Washington research supervisor. He assigned a staff member to field work. The Institute’s farm manager recruited subjects, enlisting 18 families in all, including his own.

The study began in the spring of 1895, and the first phase was completed in June. The second phase, a study of winter eating habits, began in December. It was completed in February 1896. The participants received a daily visit from a field worker during both phases of the research. He weighed all foods brought into the household and collected ethnographic information over a period of 2 wk.

The families selected for study included some villagers, but most were tenant farmers and plantation workers living up to 9 miles (14.4 km) away. All told, the cases were supposed to represent a range of social and economic conditions. Those residing near the village and attached to the Institute lived comfortably. Others, particularly families situated on large plantations, labored in hopeless poverty and were meant to be typical of most African American farm families inhabiting the so-called "Black Belt" of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Most families in the countryside around Tuskegee lived in one- or two-room log cabins. These contained little furniture. People possessed one or two rope bedsteads, corn shuck mattresses, patchwork quilts and maybe a clock. Household inventories also included a small cupboard, a few dishes, a wooden chest or old trunk for holding food and clothing, a pine table, a few chairs, a pair of andirons and an iron pot.

Few people owned land. Most rented between 20 and 60 acres (8–24 ha). Tenants generally had at least one mule or an ox, and most owned at least one pig and some chickens. People living in and near the village usually kept a cow.

Agriculture employed both men and women for just over 7 mo/y. These included two busy seasons. The first, the time for planting and cultivating cotton, began in March and ran through June. July though mid-August was "laying-by time," an interlude for resting and going to camp meetings. Heavy work resumed with the cotton harvest in mid-August and lasted through November. Farmers were idle much of the winter. Occasionally they collected wood for sale, fixed fences, or made chairs or baskets. A few found wage work.

Farmers devoted most of their land to cotton. They grew corn (maize), sweet potatoes, sugar cane and sorghum for food, but rarely did families raise enough to meet their annual needs. Only a few had gardens for growing collards, turnips and other vegetables.

Atwater and Woods listed staple foods as fat salt pork, cornmeal and molasses. Table 1 places these, along with lard and wheat flour, at the core of the diet. Flour, used mainly to make biscuits, had only recently become cheap enough to purchase regularly.

Tuskegee families prepared simple meals. Most people sliced their salt pork or bacon thin and cooked it in their fireplace. Only two families in the study owned stoves. Bacon grease was mixed with molasses to make "sap." People ate meat and sap with cornbread, which they made simply from cornmeal and water baked on a griddle or the flat surface of a hoe. This was the standard repast, 3 times a day, 365 d a year.

There were a few exceptions. Sometimes during late fall or winter, fresh pork and sweet potatoes were served. Occasionally, someone prepared an opossum dinner. The cook seasoned the carcass with red peppers and baked it surrounded by sweet potatoes in a big pot. People made "cracklin bread" from time to time by frying fat until brittle, crushing it into a mixture of cornmeal, water, soda and salt, and baking. They also boiled collards or turnips with pork fat every so often. The fat, it was said, made the vegetables taste "rich." From a yearly perspective, however, vegetables other than sweet potatoes were peripheral to the diet.

In Table 1 and throughout, peripheral items used in <10% of the households studied are not listed. A complete list of peripheral fruits and vegetables would include beets, blackberries, cabbage, dried apples, green corn, okra, onions, peaches, strawberries, string beans and tomatoes. Although this might be regarded as an impressive array, note that every item in the list comes from one of just two households, both connected with the Institute. Of the 20 dietaries collected from 18 different families, only 6 contain at least 1 root, green or fruit.

At its core, the typical diet changed little throughout the year; nonetheless, there were large fluctuations in nutritional values from season to season. Taking only families with no connection to the Institute and comparing April, May and June to December, January and February, the data show a nearly 30% decline in food consumption by weight during the winter (see Table 2 ). Animal products accounted for most of this decrease. Farm families on average ate almost 55% less animal matter in winter than they did during the spring. The decline in the consumption of vegetable foods amounted to 16% by weight. Energy intake dropped 37%. Protein intake decreased 29%. Consumption of animal-derived protein, as shown in Table 2 , averaged 12 g/(person · d) during the winter. One household took in just 26 g/(person · d) from both animal and vegetables sources.

Farmers in winter also faced dwindling stores and a diminishing wherewithal to purchase food. The underlying problem in large part was a so-called "mortgage system." This involved landowner or storekeepers making loans so that tenants could buy seed, tools and provisions sufficient to last from planting to harvest. The farmer signed a "waive note" giving the lender first right to whatever portion of the crop was needed to pay off the debt. Due to the high rates of interest, little was left to sell at the end of the season. The system favored the cash crop, cotton, over food production. As farmers exhausted their stores of homegrown corn and homemade molasses, they needed to increase purchases from the local store. However, cash income earning opportunities were rare. Accounts from crop sales became depleted, and purchases from the store had to be curtailed. This can be seen in the consumption of bacon, a store product usually purchased in small quantities every Saturday. Consumption averaged 194 g/(person · d) among tenants and plantation hands during the spring months. Consumption in winter dropped almost in half to 103 g/(person · d).

	Eastern Virginia

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The OES followed up its Alabama study with two projects in Eastern Virginia. The first researched the eating habits of families living around the Great Dismal Swamp in Franklin County (5) . The second dealt with families in Elizabeth City County and the town of Hampton (12) . These locations took advantage of sponsorship by the Hampton Institute, another prestigious black college.

Franklin County.

H. B. Frissell, principal of Hampton Institute, and his assistants assembled 12 dietaries from households scattered over a large, malaria-ridden area during the spring of 1897. Everyday for 30 d they traveled 15 mi (24 km) to weigh foods and waste. The refuse was collected in tin buckets left behind each day. Because kitchen scraps were ordinarily fed to pigs and chickens, the researchers carried feed for the animals with them as they made their daily rounds. Such activities caused resentment and stirred up opposition from whites. Frissell wrote vaguely about the matter, referring only to "... a suspicion of interference, or some other prejudice." Patient, tactful explanations eventually alleviated the antagonism.

Frissell worked with extremely poor families. Housing consisted of small cabins constructed of boards. Each had a fireplace used for cooking and in most cases lighting because lamps and candles were rare. People earned their living almost entirely from agriculture. Both men and women worked the fields. Many cleared and tilled "dead-tree farms," which they created by girdling trees, removing the underbrush and cultivating around the expired trunks.

The local economy depended little on cash. Farmers rented small tracts of land and paid in produce, sometimes as much as half of the crop. They raised cotton, peanuts and sweet potatoes for the most part and supplemented whatever income they made with odd jobs. Payment often came in the form of "rations." Food was largely home produced. Some families purchased no food at the store or at most a few cents worth of salt. Others bought a few canned goods and small quantities of green coffee, tea, baking powder and vinegar.

Frissell characterized the diet as "hog and hominy," similar to that in Alabama. It was, however, more varied (see Table 3 ). For one thing, bacon was not the only form of pork other than lard in the core diet. People boiled pork shoulders and ate boiled ham often. Side meat was fried and served with a cornbread called "ash cake." Ash cake was made from unbolted cornmeal containing large amounts of bran. The meal was mixed with water that was often brackish and muddy. No salt or leavening was added, and the cake was baked directly in hot ashes.

Isabel Bevier (12) conducted her research during May and June of 1898. She studied seven households, most of them over a period of 7 d. Her subjects lived under various economic circumstances but in an environment very different from the Great Dismal Swamp.

Elizabeth City County’s African Americans immersed themselves in commerce. Many owned small plots of land, truck farmed and produced two crops a year for urban markets. Farmers shipped early vegetables North and raised potatoes, peas, sweet corn and various fruits for sale in Washington, DC and other cities. Blacks took jobs in the fishing industry and the shipyards at Newport News. They worked in Hampton at various trades and professions, and the town supported several black-owned businesses, including a large building and loan association.

Bevier collected three dietaries from families in Hampton and four from areas outside of town. Two of the town families lived in large, comfortably furnished homes. People in the countryside typically lived in small frame houses. The inside walls were covered with newspaper, and the furniture consisted of no more than a few chairs, a bench, a table, a cupboard and sometimes a stove. About half of the people owned a cow. Most kept chickens and a pig. People commonly raised vegetables such as corn, sweet potato and cabbage in small gardens.

Diets included considerable quantities of fish, but pork was eaten in greater quantities. Families that owned a pig ate it during the winter. Otherwise, people ate "white meat," meaning salt side bacon from Chicago (see Table 5 ). Most households purchased bacon and other foods in very small quantities because of limited funds. Fresh foods presented the additional problem of being difficult to keep at home. Bevier encountered fresh meat in only one of her sample households.

Consumption patterns in the Hampton area reflected its commercial orientation. Not only did salt pork find its way to the table from the Midwest, but also there was rice from the Deep South. People purchased commercial products, including cornstarch, macaroni and oat flakes. As shown in Table 5 , processed beef (smoked, dried, or corned) was part of the core diet. The secondary core also included (white) wheat bread, usually not baked at home. Two women told Bevier they did not bake it because they did not have an oven. Two others declared they avoided wheat bread entirely because it was tasteless. Biscuits and "hoe cake" made from cornmeal remained the popular kinds of bread.

From a nutritional standpoint, the diets described by Bevier are not very different from those reported by Frissell (see Table 4 ). Bevier’s subjects consumed more food—in fact, 20% more per man per day. Considering animal products alone, they ate 30% more by weight. Nonetheless, other reported values are nearly identical to those of Franklin County.

Philadelphia and Washington, DC.

Researchers collected data from African American households in Philadelphia and Washington, DC as parts of larger studies (6 ,7) . The work in Philadelphia, conducted under the auspices of the College Settlement Association, took place during the winter of 1892. Investigators selected 25 families to represent the various nationalities served by the Philadelphia College Settlement. Five households represented the settlement’s African American constituency. Work in Washington was undertaken during the summer of 1905 and the winter of 1906 at the behest of the United States Bureau of Labor. The study produced data for 19 households, two of them African American, all living a "hand-to-mouth" existence.

Ellen Richards and Amelia Shapleigh, authors of the Philadelphia work, provided few details about their methods or their subjects other than age and sex. Data collection for the most part took place over a period of 7 d. It was first hand in some instances. In others, researchers relied on household account books.

S. E. Forman (7) wrote only terse characterizations of the families he studied. He focused on expenditures over a period of 5 wk, i.e., 3 wk in summer, 2 in winter. Data came from household account books. Forman tabulated purchases day by day, but his summary does not include weights or nutritional values.

Table 6 combines the summer and winter consumption patterns of both the Philadelphia and Washington families to show a typical African American urban diet. Table 4 includes the nutritional values for the Philadelphia dietaries.

	The Institute for Colored Youth

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The Institute presented its food program as prototypically modern. Current principles of management informed every aspect. Staff members kept a watchful eye over storeroom, kitchen and dining room, measuring everything and exercising the "... strictest economy in purchasing, preparing, cooking, serving, and preserving food materials." Faculty integrated these activities into the domestic science curriculum and tried to involve the entire student body.

Despite their concern with economy, school administrators did not impose especially dull meals on the students. During the month of October, the kitchen used >95 different commodities. Menus for a typical week listed 70 different dishes. Most of the recipes came from Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book (13) .

The diet at Cheyney bore little resemblance to the diets of Southern blacks. In October, for example, it featured meat (especially cuts of fresh beef), milk, butter, bread and white potatoes. These, along with fresh fish, mutton or lamb, rice and tomatoes, were more or less part of the core diet all year. Other items came and went. Apples, primary in October, were no longer seen by January. Eggs, scarcely eaten in October, became a core food in April. Such changes reflected seasonal availability and prices. Others, such as the sudden appearance of a generic breakfast cereal as a core item of diet in July, may have been strictly opportunistic, i.e., a good price for whatever reason at the time.

Table 4 shows the approximate nutritional contents of the students’ diet. The data were originally published as per person per day intakes. This presents a difficulty because there exist no surviving records indicating the gender composition of resident students. We use the university archivist’s estimate of 75% female as the basis for our values. Compared with the diets described previously, Cheyney’s weighed heavily in meat and dairy products and was exceedingly rich in protein.

New York City mothers.

In the fall of 1916 and the winter of 1917, Alfred Hess and Lester Unger (9) measured the food consumption of African American mothers in New York City. Their work developed as part of an effort to discover the cause of rickets in children, which the authors suspected involved maternal nutrition. Investigation focused on the Columbus Hill district where the disease was especially common. The residents, almost all black, were for the most part immigrants from the West Indies.

Hess and Unger weighed the food mothers ate in their own homes over the course of 2 d. Their published data included protein, fat, carbohydrate and energy values for the diets of 20 women. Their energy consumption averaged 12.85 MJ/(person · d) [3072 kcal/(person · d)]. In light of the nutritional standards of their day, the investigators discerned excessive protein intake [162 g/(person · d)] and a deficiency of almost 25% in fat consumption [93 g/(person · d)].

	DISCUSSION

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION Dietary studies during the... Comparing typical diets Tuskegee and the "Black... Eastern Virginia The Institute for Colored... DISCUSSION SUMMARY REFERENCES

 
It is easy to fault a science as it was practiced 100 years ago. Researchers at that time collected data from a mere handful of subjects. For the most part, these were groups such as households rather than the individual consumers nutritionists focus on today. Early investigators knew nothing about sampling. They selected their subjects opportunistically. Representing them as typical was a matter of opinion.

The opinions, however, were those of people dedicated to close and accurate observation. If the number of cases they studied was small by today’s standards, it was because of concern for direct and precise measurement. Intensive field work produced systematic information, which for all its shortcomings stands head and shoulders above the ad hoc materials historians otherwise have had to rely on to glimpse the food habits of previous generations.

The earliest systematic studies of eating habits represent a spectrum of typical African American diets at the beginning of the 20th century. At one end, there are the "hog and hominy" traditions of the rural South. At the other end, stands the respectable middle-class menu presented to the student teachers at Cheyney in which beef outranked pork, and wheat was favored over corn.

Curiously, the sweet potato alone found a home everywhere. More than side meat and corn bread, it occupied an important place from the cotton lands of the Black Belt to the slums of Philadelphia. Sweet potato’s popularity was obscured somewhat by its seasonality. For example, from an annual perspective, it appeared to be a secondary item in the Tuskegee diet (see Table 1 ). Nevertheless, when fall and winter arrived, it became a primary food. Similarly, Bevier saw no sweet potatoes being served in the Hampton area while she was doing fieldwork, but their seasonal importance as a garden crop did not escape her attention (12) . Sweet potatoes at the Institute for Colored Youth often arrived at the table as "sweet potato puffs," but they rated as regulars nonetheless.

In Philadelphia and Washington, where researchers looked at black and white families in identical circumstances, the presence of sweet potatoes on the table was distinctive. European immigrants, who figured prominently in these studies, were probably unfamiliar with them. Americans generally had little taste for sweet potatoes unless they lived in the South. Researchers inventoried sweet potatoes in only 117 of 479 dietaries reviewed during the Atwater Era. They were reported in just 24% of the studies conducted among non-African Americans. In contrast, sweet potatoes appeared in 47% of the African American dietaries. The species rated nearly as popular among Southern whites, appearing in no <40% of their dietaries.

Other Southern favorites appeared regularly on the tables of African Americans living in Philadelphia and Washington’s slums. Pork sausage, rice, beans and cabbage rated as core items. These same foods typically amounted to secondary or peripheral foods among poor urban whites. Bacon was part of the secondary core for blacks, but it was not a favorite of whites. Ham, chicken, cornmeal, hominy and peanuts occupied the periphery of the urban diet of blacks but were used less often, if at all, in the poor white households of Philadelphia and Washington.

Today, we think of these foods as important components of the "soul food" tradition. As such, they represent Southern roots and African American ancestral experience. A century ago, however, most of these foods were far from prominent on African American tables, even in the rural South. Beans, for example, were all but absent from the typical diets of Tuskegee or Franklin County. Dried peas and rice were very rarely encountered. The Tuskegee series refers to cowpeas twice and rice three times. Frissell found just one family in his sample eating peas and none serving rice. Leafy greens such as collards and mustard, basic to the "soul food" tradition, are found in just 5 of the 20 Tuskegee dietaries.

Meats regarded as traditional also made rare appearances. Ham was peripheral to the typical diets of African American households in Eastern Virginia and entirely absent from Tuskegee. Chicken showed up in three of the Virginia dietaries and just twice in Tuskegee. The Tuskegee field workers did not see pork sausage at all. The Virginia studies cited it only three times.

Location and season, of course, can be blamed for some scarcities. In Franklin County, for instance, Frissell found nobody eating rice and beans. However, given greater access to markets, rice and beans became meal-time regulars. The typical diet in Elizabeth City County included rice as a core item and beans as an important peripheral commodity. Conversely, the sweet potato remained a staple in Franklin even in the spring but, as noted earlier, it was missing from Elizabeth City menus at that time of the year. Chicken, absent from Tuskegee households during the cold months, became a peripheral food in the spring. Fresh pork appeared in 25% of the households in the winter but was missing entirely in the spring.

Although some traditional foods actually may never have been central to African American diets, others frankly lost popularity as people moved from isolated, rural settings toward increasingly metropolitan environments. Such was the case with salted pork sides and cornbread. In Franklin County, families ate salt pork and almost no beef. Around Hampton, a more commercial area, salt pork remained at the center of the typical diet, but corned and other forms of preserved beef also became part of the core. Fresh beef and pork, often in the form of sausage, removed bacon to the secondary core in Philadelphia and Washington, and pushed salt pork to the periphery of the typical diet. Finally, at Cheyney, we see pork in any form other than ham served only occasionally.

The diminishing importance of cornmeal and bacon and salt pork was largely an economic matter. Cornmeal in Eastern Virginia cost families only $0.05/kg, but in Philadelphia, customers paid twice as much. Bacon in rural Eastern Virginia could be purchased for as little as $0.01/kg. A kilogram of salt pork cost $0.04. The price for both increased to $0.05 in Hampton and Philadelphia. At that price, one could buy fresh pork chops and shoulders. Beef rounds and chuck sold for only $0.01–0.02 more per kilogram. What is more, spoilage was not the big problem it was in the country because nearby shops sold fresh meat in small quantities daily.

The urban diet, its shortcomings notwithstanding, offered a great improvement over the Black Belt, especially with respect to protein intake. The data of Atwater and Woods (4) indicate an annual average of 62 g/(person · d) for the region. They knew of no other American diets containing so little protein. Black farmers consumed protein at the level of Italian street beggars. Considering winter alone, the situation was worse, with average protein intake plummeting to an average of 50 g/(person · d).

There is no telling whether such low protein intake led to pellagra, the often fatal deficiency disease once common throughout the region and strongly associated with poverty and a corn-based diet (14) . Atwater and Woods made no medical observations. Even if they had, one very likely would be left guessing because pellagra did not come to the attention of Alabama physicians until 1907. Almost certainly it was present before then, but not likely in epidemic proportions. The stage for massive outbreaks was not set until 1906 when new milling machines began degerminating seeds and in the process removing half of the tryptophan from meal (15) . After that, the disease became a plague, especially among tenant farmers, showing up at the end of winter in areas of monocrop cotton production, chronic debt and a "3 M" diet of meat, meal and molasses (14) .

The sharp decline in energy availability in winter coupled with lower temperatures and the need for more fuel simply to stay warm compounded the difficulty. For many, it very likely spelled seasonal hunger. "Hungry seasons" are still seen in parts of Africa (16 ,17) . Disease and death rates increase as the weeks go by. Work usually goes undone due to lack of energy, and people cease other nonessential activities to conserve strength. Atwater and Woods’ (4) unwitting remark that "men pass much of their time by the fire" during the winter and only rarely work appears to capture the characteristic inanition.

Other areas may have had problems, but they were not so glaring. The protein values reported for Eastern Virginia appear high compared with Alabama. Energy intakes appear relatively low for New York City and Philadelphia, but there was no indication of inadequacy. Households in Philadelphia spent nearly 60% of their food budgets on relatively expensive animal products rather than cheaper, energy-rich vegetables. Moreover, although Philadelphians consumed more vegetable products by weight than Alabama farmers, they selected species yielding less energy. These are not patterns typically seen among people in desperate circumstances (7) . For New York City, the presence of rickets among children indicates vitamin D insufficiency. However, the presence of liver, an excellent source of vitamin D, in the core diet of Philadelphia’s blacks makes it unlikely that rickets was a universal problem for city dwellers.

Cheyney’s dormitory meals appear nearly adequate by today’s standards. Its menus for the first 15 d of October indicate that the dining hall regularly met current USDA minimum serving recommendations in the "Meat," "Dairy" and "Vegetable" food categories (18) . In the area of "Fruits," students received the prescribed minimum of two servings about every other day, but everyday there was at least one fruit on the table. At least three different items from "Bread, Cereal, Rice & Pasta" group were offered daily. An extra slice or two of bread and second helpings would have provided the 6 servings recommended for this category. The biggest problem perhaps was 2–5 daily servings of "Fats, Oils and Sweets," the foods the USDA advises to "use sparingly."

Nutritional advantage on balance rested with the more metropolitan diet. This becomes more apparent comparing typical diets in terms of variety. Relative variety can be assessed using any consistent set of food categories (10) . Table 7 utilizes the categories employed by Atwater Era researchers. It shows both the average number of foodstuffs consumed per week and the maximum number used by any one family. The last column, showing the maximum number of foods consumed per week, indicates variety in a way that compensates for the lack of a standardized period of observation. The values show that even the sorely impoverished Washington residents observed by Forman enjoyed more varied and presumably healthier diets than the more isolated communities of the rural South.

	SUMMARY

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION Dietary studies during the... Comparing typical diets Tuskegee and the "Black... Eastern Virginia The Institute for Colored... DISCUSSION SUMMARY REFERENCES

 
Typical African American diets of a century ago can be arranged along a rural-urban continuum. At the one end of the continuum, there were the traditional foods of the rural South, which have been deployed as symbols of African American identity ever since the 1960s. At the other end were the metropolitan, middle-class, Yankee eating patterns embodied in the dining hall menus of the Institute for Colored Youth. Early studies provide evidence of more ample protein and energy supplies and greater dietary variety toward this latter end of the continuum. The relative absence of "hog and hominy" on the urban side, thought to be a matter of trying to appear respectable (20) , probably was as much a matter of cost and convenience. Fresh red meat in metropolitan areas could be purchased for about the same price as salted and smoked pork fat, and cornmeal was more expensive than flour.

The experiment station studies a century ago applied what was then innovative nutritional science to understanding nutritional needs. We have essentially recycled them to create a baseline for measuring dietary changes. Atwater Era dietaries captured the eating habits of the first and second generation of postemancipation African Americans. Between World War I and World War II, another generation of studies documented the eating habits of African Americans in areas of rural Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas, in a number of small Alabama towns and in several cities (2) . Attention to these studies will extend the work begun here and allow us to trace African American eating habits through the Great Depression and early years of the Great Migration north. They afford an opportunity to see whether the developments we infer by comparing typical diets around the beginning of the 20th century in fact continued to the present day.

	REFERENCES

TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION Dietary studies during the... Comparing typical diets Tuskegee and the "Black... Eastern Virginia The Institute for Colored... DISCUSSION SUMMARY REFERENCES

 

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