As immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe poured into Chicago in the late nineteenth century, some Chicagoans expressed concern over how these new immigrants, with their strange languages, exotic dress, and abject poverty, would affect the social, economic, and political environment of the city. Both public agencies and private charities explored living conditions of new immigrants and discovered dilapidated housing, low wages, and exhausting work conditions. In the process, they developed a critique of tenement life that redefined formerly private issues as public. One of these issues was food. As they studied Italian immigrants, city officials, Progressive reformers and ordinary citizens articulated a number of urban problems in which the Italian diet was a possible element. City officials connected Italian foods with health and sanitation, workers saw it as a component of labor issues, and reformers identified it as a factor in the ill health and poverty that characterized slum life.