“Nature’s Cupboard”: Nutrition, Food, and Home Gardening in the Health Columns of the Chicago Defender

This paper examines how nutritional health information printed within The Chicago Defender’s pages reached a wide array of working-class audiences across the U.S. South. Given that The Defender was only one of two newspapers in the U.S. to have a full-time health editor in the early twentieth century, this section examines the Black Press’ critical role in informing rural readers about nutrition, diet, and home food preservation techniques. In 1947, The Defender became one of the first major newspapers to introduce a weekly diet and nutrition column, an effort prompted by President Truman’s appointment of the Citizens Food Committee. Dietician Jacqueline Denison Russell, a columnist for the paper and first lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Department, was tasked with creating a food survey for subscribers. The food conservation program received substantial support from readers around the nation who reduced their intake of bread in order to support the shipment of grain to Europe. Drawing upon the weekly nutrition column and letters from subscribers, this paper explores how rural readers viewed The Defender as a source of health information, particularly around the topics of personal nutrition, canning and preservation techniques, and home food and garden cultivation. This paper also explores how readers of The Defender’s weekly nutrition column came to view their everyday choices surrounding local food consumption within the context of national and transnational political movements across the first half of the twentieth century.