Chuck

And at one of these meetings, they chose the term home economics, like you said, to basically point out, not to kind of latch their field on economics, to point out that domestic work was a huge part of economics.

And up to this point, economists had basically just been looking at production.

They weren't looking at the demand side.

And one of the things Homek introduced was the idea of consumer sciences, like studying consumption as well as part of the larger economy, which is you can't do economics without that now.

But that's what one of the things Homek introduced.

They dropped the old timey mic at this point.

Yep.

So you want to take a break and come back and talk about how, like you said, home ec starts to take off?

Let's do it.

Dad had the strong belief that the devil was attacking us.

Okay, so when we left off, home ec was starting to take off.

And by the 1920s, the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, had created the Bureau of Home Economics.

And when you create a bureau dedicated to a new field, that's when the field has arrived.

If you're a band and Weird Al has done a cover of your song, that's how you know you've arrived.

If you're a field of study and someone opens a bureau dedicated to it, that's how you know your field's arrived.

But it became the country's biggest employer of women scientists, which is pretty significant at the time.

Yeah, this is where the square pizza was invented, I suspect.

Well, I agree.

One of the other things about that, though, in addition to the square pizza, the square pizza is actually an excellent example of this.

The pizza, it comes from Italy.