The domestic reformers believed that careful attention to meals and household routine would produce a better society. They held up dishes like cream sauce and long-boiled vegetables as cures for drunkenness, degeneracy, feminism and labor unrest. A movement can load ordinary daily habits with moral missions far larger than the habits could carry.
Cooking by supposedly scientific rules turned American cuisine into a standardized, uniform product. Because flavor was treated as less important than correct method, the result was simply bland food. Optimizing for control and consistency can quietly remove the very qualities that made the original worth having.
When factories took over making cloth and food, homemakers were freed from producing everything their households used, but their standing fell along with the work. Some answered by remaking housework as a full-time scientific job built on new products and technology. A role stripped of its old tasks can recover its status by rebranding what remains as expert work.
Reformers treated the kitchen as a laboratory and cooking as applied chemistry, hoping to turn every home into a little lab. The scientific label gave household work new prestige and spread through cooking schools, magazines, public schools and government nutrition programs. It also made people judge food by method and order more than by taste.
The push to make home cooking efficient and scientific reached its peak in the TV dinner and instant mashed potatoes. By teaching people to trust method over appetite, reformers turned a nation of honest eaters into an obedient market for processed food. Food writing itself ended up written by the food industry or serving it.