BECOMING SHOPPERS: NC Food Consumption and Production

It is difficult for us to imagine today the lengths to which people once had to go to put food on the table. This 1915 video The Home Electrical shows just how new and exciting home electricity seemed a century ago, when most families relied on coal and wood to fuel their cooking. Between the 1910s and 1960s, the possibilities of cooking and eating changed as new technologies were introduced to homes across the country. Many people were left out of these changes, particularly rural people who lived far away from water and power lines and for whom a trip to the supermarket might have meant a multi-hour wagon ride, and people who had little spare money to spend on store-bought food.

Although many people remember the 1950s and 1960s as decades of TV dinners and fancy kitchens of the future, for many North Carolinians these remained decades of wooden ice boxes and backyard chickens. The story of North Carolina food and the Extension Service during these years is as much about stability as it is about change.