Chuck

Did your family make Chex Mix around the holidays?

It must be so high-o then because my family did as well.

But that's a good example of how, like, these companies farmed out the task of coming up with stuff.

Because home ec had become so widespread, the average homemaker out there could do the same thing in a lot of ways that some of the home ec workers working for the company could do, too.

I think that's pretty neat.

For sure.

And that was the point, remember, of home ec is saving time, being more efficient.

And then as food companies were concerned, making tons of money off of this stuff, too.

So that's kind of going on in the corporate world, the government world.

Simultaneously, there's that whole thread of home ec being taught in high school and middle school.

And there was a time in the 20th century, up into the 80s and 90s, and I'm sure beyond.

Again, these classes are still out there, but nothing like they used to be, where you could go into a high school or a middle school and there was a simulated kitchen in one of the rooms with a bunch of different stoves and ovens and refrigerators.

And people would be in there cooking and learning to sew and maybe taking care of a fake baby.

And in some cases, taking care of a real baby, too, because...

This stuff got intense sometimes.

Yeah, apparently at some of the colleges that were teaching home ec, they would borrow babies from orphanages for the students to just basically practice on.

And apparently there's a writer, a historian named Danielle Drellinger, who wrote a book, The Secret History of Home Economics.

And she said that for adoptive parents who would go to a foster home, they'd show up and be like, you got any one of them babies that's been in the home economic classes?

Heck yeah, man.

Because the reasoning is these babies spent some of their earliest days being cared for just with complete attention and care by women who were working in like the cutting edge of child rearing.