In the late 19th century, new technologies and industries signaled a greater sophistication in American manufacturing and distribution. Yet industry relied more than ever on backbreaking, unskilled labor. As workers flowed into the city from Southern and Eastern Europe, their suitability to the demands of a modern workforce was called into question. Attention was focused on two main concerns. First, to ensure a workforce fit for the new industrial age, and, secondly, to keep that workforce content enough to participate without disruption. Would the new immigrants, recruited to be the muscle of industry, have the strength, stamina, and endurance to become productive American workers? Or would they become exhausted by their work, only to become charges on the city's charities? Or worse, combatants in the growing flood of labor unrest and violence across the country?

One aspect of this issue that received attention was the diet of immigrant workers. Spurred by advances in the field of nutrition and discoveries about the chemical composition of foods, a number of agencies set out to assess the immigrant diet and its effect on worker performance and standard of living. Price, quality and quantity of foods were examined. In the process, Italian foods were redefined as a "problem" for the fitness, health, and future prosperity of the Italian worker and therefore a threat to workplace efficiency and productivity.

A connection between the Italian worker and the foods he ate first drew notice in relation to the padrone system of labor. The padrone, often an Italian who had resided in the city for some time, acted as a middleman in the labor market by recruiting and organizing gangs of laborers for the mines and the railroads. He gathered his labor gangs from among his paesani within the city and made an often-unscrupulous living by charging them a fee for his services and arranging overpriced transportation and housing. Despite the passage of the Foran Act in 1885, which prohibited assistance to immigrants who came under contract to perform labor, the padrone system continued to have relevance for Italian workers. In The Italians in Chicago, a study done by the Department of Labor in 1895-1906, 403 of 1860 men were reported as working for a padrone, and 94.04% of them admitted paying a commission for the opportunity. [146]
Reports of numerous swindles and of terrible conditions in labor camps seldom failed to mention the padrone's commissary system from which workers were often required to buy their food. A report by the Industrial Commission on Immigration and Education in 1901 commented that, "The food which he furnishes has a monopoly value, because his subjects are prohibited from purchasing elsewhere on pain of discharge. For this reason he is able to charge 10 cents for macaroni which in the market cost 3 cents, or 15 cents for beer which can be purchased for 4 cents, and so on." Other reports of food in these camps questioned the quality as well as the price of commissary food. Domenick Ciolli, an Italian American college student who signed on to a railway gang in 1917 reported that workers cooked on "rusty, perforated tin boxes propped up by stones" meals which consisted of a breakfast of coffee and a cold lunch of sausage and bread. Another writer reported a supper of macaroni cooked in rancid lard with rotten tomato sauce, washed down with beer. [147]