Home economists and domestic scientists were convinced that all Americans ate badly, but as they collected information about immigrant diets, they were convinced that the destructive role of food in public and personal health, family income, intemperance, and sickly children necessitated an immediate response. The diets of Italian families were included in this general condemnation and often singled out as particularly damaging. Reformers working within the Italian neighborhoods of Chicago set out to alter the choice and preparation of food within the Italian home.

The influence of women on the purchase and preparation of food within the family became their primary focus. Hull-House resident Florence Kelley explained:

The bane of the tenement is the unskilled mother. She it is who feeds the baby foul milk, bananas and beer. She drugs with sleeping draughts the crying victim of the vermin she does not know how to banish. She exhausts him with excessive clothing which she washes so irregularly that he languishes for the want of the simplest freshness. It often seems that of the baby's three enemies--milkman, landlord and unskilled mother--the unskilled mother is the deadliest, because her opportunities for doing him harm are continuous and her means of attack so varied. A number of different approaches were tried to reeducate mothers and thereby influence family diet. They varied widely in form, sensitivity, and results. [190]

Hull-House experimented with one of the most non-traditional approaches to the issue of food preparation and consumption with the opening of their Public Kitchen in 1893. Jane Addams explained the direct and specific observation that was its inspiration:

An investigation of the sweatshops had disclosed the fact, that sewing women during the busy season paid little attention to the feeding of their families, for it was only by working steadily through the long day that the scanty pay of five, seven, or nine cents for finishing a dozen pairs of trousers could be made into a day's wage; and they bought from the nearest grocery the canned goods that could be most quickly heated, or gave a few pennies to the children with which they might secure a lunch from a neighboring candy shop. [191]

The Public Kitchen reflected Addams' faith in cooperative ventures as a remedy for many urban problems. The settlement house itself was a cooperative institution that freed middle and upper class women from the cares of individual housekeeping while providing a supportive environment for professional work. Addams also supported cooperative cooking as a solution for middle and upper class housewives plagued by a lack of servants. She believed that cooperative ventures offered even greater benefits for working class people and could beneficially be applied to the problem of food. She explained,

.. the plan of buying cooked food from an outside kitchen and of having more and more of the household product relegated to the factory will probably come from the comparatively poor people in the city, who feel most keenly the pressure of the present system. . . . The difficulties really begin when the family income is so small that but one person can be employed in the household for all these varied functions, and the difficulties increase and grow almost insurmountable as they fall altogether upon the mother of the family, who is living in a flat, or worse still, in tenement house, where one stove and one set of utensils must be put to all sorts of uses, fit or unfit, making the living room of the family a horror in summer, and perfectly insupportable in rainy washing days in winter. [192]

Hull-House's Public Kitchen was modeled on Boston's New England Kitchen, opened in 1890 by home economists Ellen Richards and Mary Hinman Abel. The New England Kitchen used inexpensive ingredients and slow cooking methods to prepare meals which could be purchased by poor families to take home for their dinners. Richards and Abel publicized their idea at the World's Columbian Exposition where it received a flurry of publicity. Hull-House, which had recently cooperated with the Departments of Agriculture and Labor in their dietary studies, concluded that a public kitchen would both provide nutritious and affordable foods and also educate their neighbors on the variety of American foods available. Hull-House resident Anna Lathrop, sent to Boston to train in the New England Kitchen, returned in 1893 to fit out a public kitchen which would prepare meals for home consumption. [193]

Advertised as "cheaper than cooking at home" and a way to save on fuel and labor, the kitchen was intended to provide working women with cheap, nutritious, ready-made meals to take home. The design of the kitchen was based on the most current concepts of cleanliness and sanitation and featured a cement floor, oil painted walls, and "hard wood or metal appointments for cleanliness." Modern gas stoves, a gas-cooking table, and double-jacketed steam kettles for holding in the nutrients in soups were featured. The Kitchen boasted several Aladdin Ovens, based on a design by Edward Atkinson, which were insulated with asbestos and heated by a kerosene oil lamp to give slow cooking times and use of minimal fuel. An 1894 menu shows a wealth of creamed soups such as pea, corn, and asparagus. Featured meats included roast beef, mutton stew, corned beef hash and creamed codfish and breads included white, whole meal, graham, and Case's Health bread. Coffee, soups, and stews were available for factory delivery in "indurated fiber cans" for nominal prices. [194]

A Coffee House, modeled on an English Country Inn, was opened in conjunction with the kitchen. George Twose, a resident of Hull-House, commented on its use, "The social advantage of such a restaurant, in a neighborhood which has had, as is usual in dense groups of the public, no accommodation whatever of a dignified public nature, is too obvious to need remark." The Coffee House succeeded in becoming a social center in the neighborhood, attracting local businessmen, schoolteachers and a major part of its clientele from the settlement itself. Yet, even though the settlement appealed to ethnic diners by offering "special Italian dinners, served to parties ordering in advance," it failed to attract neighborhood immigrants. The refined atmosphere of the coffeehouse and its unwillingness to serve alcohol may have been a factor. Jane Addams recalled, "I remember one man who looked about the cozy little room and said, "This would be a nice place to sit in all day, if one could only have a beer." [195]

It was a greater success, though, than its neighbor, the Public Kitchen, which never competed with the free lunch from local saloons or the ethnic foods cooked in cramped tenement kitchens. Jane Addams explained the failure of the kitchen in Twenty Years at Hull-House:

We did not reckon, however, with the wide diversity in nationality and inherited tastes, and while we sold a certain amount of the carefully prepared soups and stews in the neighboring factories--a sale which has steadily increased throughout the years--and were also patronized by a few households, perhaps the neighborhood estimate was best summed up by the woman who frankly confessed, that the food was certainly nutritious, but that she didn't like to eat what was nutritious, that she liked to eat "what she'd ruther."

In a speech sponsored by the Philadelphia Branch of the Collegiate Alumnae, Addams summed up the impediment to cooperative efforts towards food preparation and supply when she blamed the "lack of standard" and "mere food preferences and traditions" of consumers for the failure. [196]