BECOMING SHOPPERS: NC Food Consumption and Production

According to the U. S. census, 1920 was the first year in the nation's history that most Americans lived in urban areas. Keeping in mind that "urban areas" were defined as areas with more than just 2,500 people—still very much rural by today's standards—it is remarkable that the census recorded the fact that 80% of North Carolinians lived in places with less than 2,500 people. This made it one of the most rural states in the country. Most of these rural farmers did not have access to such fancy contraptions as electric refrigerators or such fine cuisine as Jell-O.

Most of these rural North Carolinians worked either as farmers or farmhands, or as laborers at textile mills and other factories. Few people made much money in such jobs, and North Carolinians were less wealthy than people in the rest of the country. Although the state was a leader in cotton textiles and tobacco, North Carolina families themselves reaped little profit from the industries in which they labored. Many of the state's farmers were tenant farmers or sharecroppers, meaning that they did not own the land they worked. One-third of white farmers and over two-thirds of African American farmers fell into this group. They had very little spare money to buy tools or seeds, so they took loans out at the beginning of the season from local merchants. They used these loans to buy a bit of supplemental food on credit, hoping that their crop yield at the end of the season would be able to cover they money they owed. Many farmers grew only one crop--tobacco, wheat, or cotton, for example--which meant that they could not fulfill their dietary needs with what they grew. As a result, they had to buy food on credit and grow small gardens to supplement what they could not buy. Many families quickly fell into debt. As a result of slavery and ongoing racism, African American families were often legally and economically blocked from owning their own land, which left them much more economically vulnerable. 

Making meals usually fell to the women in the family. While middle- and upper-class families often hired servants to cook meals and relieve the woman of the house of the burden, in lower-class and rural households, wives usually had to spend several hours a day doing hard labor in hot, dark kitchens. Cooking was an incredibly labor intensive job when a family had no running water or electricity. Fuel had to be fed into the oven by hand, water carried in buckets, heavy cast iron kitchenware lifted, food cut and mixed, and meat cured and butchered. With no kitchen sink, no modern stove, and no electric appliances, a single meal could take several hours to prepare. Furthermore, without the means to preserve leftovers in a refrigerator, women had to cook full meals from scratch nearly every day. Even in good economic times, many people suffered from malnutrition and food poisoning.