Chuck

And if you've ever seen an actual like Neapolitan pizza, it does not resemble the square pizza.

The square pizza at lunch is the Midwestern Americanized, much blander version of it.

Although I agree with you, it's quite good.

And this is where American food, as we think of it today, was founded.

All the ethnic food got pushed out as the immigrants were kind of brought into the home ec world.

And that bland Midwestern American food took over.

That's where that came from.

One of the other examples of what the Bureau of Home Economics was doing that had a huge sweeping impact, in addition to founding the mass-produced food movement, was they came up with the poverty line.

In fact, Molly Orshansky did.

She was a statistician who studied how much a house spent to come up with a basic...

nutritious diet that could keep you alive.

They multiplied that by three and they came up with the federal poverty line that's still in use today.

That's right.

And then one of the other things that struck me, too, that I didn't realize is that a lot of those recipes that you find on like a food label, one of the more famous ones is Campbell's cream of mushroom soup labels have a green bean casserole recipe.

And that was created by a home economist who worked for Campbell's, Dorcas Riley.

And she's a good example of what was happening at this time, starting in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and continuing on.

These companies like General Mills and Campbell's were setting up home economics departments.

And one of the things that these home economists were being paid to do was to figure out new uses for the products themselves.

made by the companies they worked for so that people would buy more of that stuff.

And then they put those recipes on the label.