Bioart Kitchen

Art, Feminism and Technoscience

Lindsay Kelley

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786720009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

What do new technologies taste like? A growing number of contemporary artists are working with food, live materials and scientific processes, in order to explore and challenge the ways in which manipulation of biological materials informs our cooking and eating. 'Bioart', or biological art, uses biotech methods to manipulate living systems, from tissues to ecologies. While most critiques of bioart emphasise the influences of new media, digital media, and genetics, this book takes a bold, alternative approach. Bioart Kitchen explores a wide spectrum of seemingly unconnected subjects, which, when brought together, offer a more inclusive, expansive history of bioart, namely: home economics; the feminist art of the 1970s; tissue culture methodologies; domestic computing; and contemporary artistic engagements with biotechnology.

1

Subject P: Embodying Home Economics

The oatmeal was […] mixed […] with the 95 gm. of cornstarch and added together with 40 gm. of butter fat and 5 gm. of salt to 440 gm. of hot water. This was cooked directly over the flame until a thick mush was obtained which was spread on pans in sheets a to ¼ to ⅜ of an inch thick and put in a Freas electric oven for a period of 2 hours and, when done, was quite dry and crisp throughout but not brown.¹

Excerpted from a technical paper in The Journal of Biological Chemistry, these instructions detail the preparation of oatcakes for a study on maximising caloric intake from oat protein. Tasked with consuming this strict diet was Subject P, also known as Velma Phillips, a young Home Economics graduate student who took her kitchen as a laboratory where she could experiment on her own body. Joining test kitchen cooks and dieticians, Subject P stands in for a fictional underprivileged subject as she transforms her flesh with exacting preparations of oatmeal.

Promoting efficiency and universal standards for everything from individual kitchens to the mass production of food in factories, Home Economics set the stage for many of the domestic technologies we use on a daily basis. This chapter reads Home Economics as an interdisciplinary field, paying special attention to the contradictions faced by women undertaking Home Economics research in a university setting. University Home Economics departments housed serious work in biology, chemistry and physics, but these projects were rarely acknowledged as such. Although Home Economics was an interdisciplinary and expansive field, women working on even the most technical projects had to adapt their research content and methodology to the domestic context. While university women contained their research in the home, homemakers began to see their work as research. A form of public amateurism develops from Home Economics that will later be taken up by feminists and bioart practitioners engaged with food and eating. Home Economics sets the table for a long and provocative meal, serving up feminism, technoscience and domestic technology to eventually arrive at what Robert Mitchell calls the ‘problematic of biotechnology’.² Before engaging this and other problematics, let us look first at the labour and bodies of home economists, among them some of the first women in science.

Among university Home Economics programmes, Cornell’s Home Economics Department offers one of the first, biggest and best-documented examples of Home Economics in the United States. What began as a reading course became a degree-granting co-educational department in 1907, becoming the New York State College of Human Ecology in 1969. Even though the Morrill Act of 1862 provided for co-educational land-grant colleges, women were not earning degrees from these institutions until much later. Because Cornell’s Home Economics programme began as a reading course for farmers’ wives, degrees were not seen as logical or desirable outcomes for participants – the non-credit reading course continued until 1921.³ Decades later, after establishing Home Economics as a department, professors Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose were the first women to be granted full professorships at Cornell. The American Home Economics Association was founded only a year after Cornell’s programme began, in 1908. Its first president, Ellen Swallow Richards, was the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied and later taught chemistry.

Richards promoted scientific engagement with domestic labour in books like The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning,⁴ and her Rumford Kitchen, a model kitchen installed at the 1883 Chicago World’s Fair.⁵ Had MIT been willing to grant a woman a graduate degree, she would have earned her doctoral degree in chemistry. Even without her PhD, she taught at MIT for many years (she was unable to find a job elsewhere), where she developed a laboratory space for women designed to accommodate diverse engagements with chemistry.⁶ While working in MIT’s chemistry laboratory before she had access to her own space, she wrote that she was ‘segregated in a special corner, “very much as a dangerous animal might have been”’.⁷ Perhaps as a means of assuring her co-workers that she was not such a dangerous animal, Richards and her students at the Women’s Laboratory chose gender-appropriate subjects: the home, domestic work and ‘sanitation’, a precursor of public health, which could be interpreted to include the urban systems Richards worked with extensively (especially the municipal water supply) and broader societal concerns about morality and family life.

As Home Economics developed within land-grant college curriculums and spread to other university settings, the undergraduate degree developed areas of concentration, including clothing and textiles (pattern making and home sewing grew in popularity alongside the Home Economics project), child care, hospitality, household equipment and technology development and food science. Mary Drake McFeely characterises Home Economics departments as institutional manifestations of Richards’ isolation in MIT’s chemistry lab: ‘Wary of female professors in traditional science departments, university administrators used Home Economics as a convenient place to segregate women scientists and keep them from competing with men.’⁸ This separation had the effect of focusing home economists on educational rather than industry opportunities. Although a range of jobs existed within Home Economics, teaching and homemaking dominated the field, with a large number of Home Economics graduates holding high school or university level teaching positions at one point in their careers.⁹ Many students of Home Economics chose to ‘enter marriage’ and embark on homemaking as the unpaid career they had been preparing for with courses devoted to cooking and laundry. Although Home Economics departments were either phased out or renamed by the 1970s, the 1950s and 1960s produced innovative if at times startling Home Economics experiments, including Cornell’s practice apartments, where students honed their homemaking skills with babies borrowed from local welfare agencies.¹⁰

As a discipline, Home Economics gave significant numbers of women opportunities to conduct scientific research in a university setting but continuing into the twentieth century such research was constrained by topics appropriate to domestic science, like cleaning chemistry or household efficiency testing.¹¹ The discipline’s commitment to food and nutrition allowed for a level of scientific seriousness and rigour unavailable to home economists focused on, for example, sewing and patternmaking. Nancy Berlage identifies the emphasis on nutrition as a pivotal professionalising move for the discipline and for women scientists: ‘By moving into nutrition, home economists made a statement that science was indeed a proper realm for women […] they transformed “cookery” and related experimentation in food preservation and conservation into nutritional science.’¹² Despite these tactical advances into professional territory, the home economist was often labelled ‘amateur’, but not in the progressive sense valued by today’s bioartists. She was rarely able to attain professional status in her workplace because Home Economics departments produced generalists, not specialists.¹³

Despite the limits imposed on their professional accomplishments, home economists have influenced how the general public performs nearly every activity in the home. Outside of the Home Economics classroom, everyone who works in the home, from working mothers to professional housecleaners, is unwittingly apprenticed to home economists and test kitchen technicians.¹⁴ Every time I follow the instructions on a cake mix, I am the inadvertent student of a team of researchers responsible for analysing the chemical, psychological and caloric properties of my finished cake. Later in this book, the artists I read as ‘recipe artists’ critically reinvent and reinterpret Home Economics pedagogy and principles, transforming our engagement with its subtle, internalised networks into explicit and conscious activities.

In addition to changing how we work, Home Economics changed our understanding of where we work when we work in the home. Household tasks can be interpreted as research, and the kitchen can be a laboratory. Who is allowed to work in the laboratory versus the kitchen? How do women convert one into the other, and how does the artist’s studio extend and subvert both? Kitchens and laboratories are locations of cultural stress and struggle between genders and between conceptions of the self and conceptions of the other. Feminist art, for example, asks how feeding others and the self can be taken up as political activities. Within both university and corporate laboratory spaces, women have operated in covert ways to produce hard science disguised as Home Economics. They have taken their own bodies as scientific instruments, conducting food studies and quantitative analyses that return decades later in critical art projects like Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972), and Martha Rosler’s Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977). Recipe art highlights the simultaneously expansive and constrained femininity of the form, shifting perspectives on both history and collaboration, and producing kitchens and laboratories as gendered workplaces.

Recipe art has a long and varied history which includes Home Economics as interdisciplinary science practice, domestic computing and ‘kitchens of the future’ and feminist interpretations of eating and food preparation. If domestic computers and Taylorist models of efficiency write women as mechanical brides, feminist art about food and eating seeks to divorce women from simple tasks and chores while simultaneously insisting that women’s work is legitimate labour. Tasks and chores have full rich histories of their own, and their histories were made legible by the Home Economics project, which applied scientific research principles to what had previously been cloistered, private work. Ruth Schwartz Cowan writes a history of domestic technology in her book More Work For Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. Cowan argues that the advent of home appliances mechanised tasks that men usually performed, making ‘more work for mother’ because women had to spend time and energy managing these machines, forfeiting male labour in the process.¹⁵ Kitchen computing and mechanical recipe indexes serve similarly ironic roles. As various kitchen controls are relinquished to machines, ‘smart’ appliances enlist women in managerial processes that range from drudgery to creative contributions.

Books like Christine Frederick’s Selling Mrs Consumer (1929) carved out a space for home economists in corporate America.¹⁶ Women working in corporate jobs ‘played a negotiating role between consumers and corporations’, with increasing opportunities to become involved in Home Economics in a corporate context during the interwar years in the United States.¹⁷ A surge of such opportunities characterised the late 1950s and early 1960s, decades when Home Economics flourished before its identity crisis arrived alongside second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Two books published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reveal the ways in which women used Home Economics degrees to pursue careers outside the home. Velma Phillips’s Home Economics Careers for You (1957) and Jeanne Paris’s Your Future as a Home Economist (1964) encourage women to consider pursuing university education.¹⁸ Both books follow Home Economics graduates into a variety of professions, including recipe development at the corporate level.

Phillips profiles Kay O’Neal, Director of Home Economics at Kroger. O’Neal assumes a collective corporate mascot identity, Jean Allen. Allen exists as four separate people who represent Kroger at public talks and cooking demonstrations. The Jean Allens also work behind the scenes ‘testing and developing recipes to be printed on Kroger labels’.¹⁹ Betty Linn works in the Mix Research and Development Division at Quaker Oats. Her laboratories produce both baking mixes and accompanying instructions.²⁰ Jeanne Paris profiles Joy Grawmeyer, executive dietician in the Menu and Food Standards Department of Linton’s Restaurants. Grawmeyer ‘dreams of test kitchens’, where she works with an assistant to ‘develop new recipes, products, and equipment in our research kitchen’.²¹ Grawmeyer rose to her executive position quickly after graduating with her Home Economics degree in 1955, and is the only woman working within a managerial role in her company. The test kitchen is one of the most important laboratories available to home economists. Recipe developers use test kitchens to refine standards for both the chemistry of food and efficiency in its preparation. Recipe developers typically work for large corporations, but test kitchens also existed in university settings and at travelling educational demonstrations, like Richards’ World’s Fair Rumford Kitchen.

Recipe development and cooking often disguised biology and chemistry research topics. Among the Home Economics Masters and PhD theses filed in 1954–5 in the United States, the following titles suggest that chemistry and biology thrived within Home Economics contexts, even if practitioners tended to wear aprons rather than lab coats: ‘Determination of meringue slippage and liquid drained from pies prepared in quantity’ (Shirley A. Felt, Cornell, 1955), ‘Lipid metabolism and cell division’ (Elinor Levin, Wayne University, 1955), ‘Effect of xanthophyll on the palatability, fat stability, and histological characteristics of fresh and frozen broad-breasted bronze turkeys’ (Burnadine L. Lewis, Kansas State, 1955) and ‘The effect of methods of preparation on the retention of ascorbic acid and dehydroascorbic acid of raw and cooked vegetables’ (Lois Ann Lund, University of Minnesota, 1954).²² These titles also reveal the importance of corporate connections for Home Economics as a discipline, showing that home economists engineered their research to be relevant to potential employers.

Although Home Economics brought many women into higher education who may not have otherwise pursued university study, the field emerged as a catchall for a wide range of ambi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What is Food?
• 1 Subject P: Embodying Home Economics
• 2 Chicken Heart Soup
• 3 Domestic Computing
• 4 Semiotics of the Kitchen: Feminist Food Art
• 5 DIY Coke
• 6 Meat Culture
• 7 Public Amateurism
• 8 Cookbook
• 9 Carnal Light
• 10 From Sanitation to Bioremediation
• 11 Plumpiñon
• Epilogue: Dysphagiac
• Notes
• Bibliography