Chuck

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.

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.