Bridging the Gap between Home Ec and Dietetics

Shift your frames!

In this course, we've taken an in-depth look at the need for 'making connections' among different elements of society for making various changes. For instance, we've examined the importance of linking research with practice (i.e. 'praxis'), health promotion with healthcare, and community needs with government planning. In Amber's presentation last week, we also looked at the importance of linking professionals from across different disciplines. This last example is what I would like to focus on today... Though many of us as aspiring dietitians recognize the importance of working with physicians, nurses, diet techs and the like, we often neglect one group of professionals who actually founded and gave rise to the profession we now call 'dietetics'. Have you guessed who they are yet? Why, they're none other than home economists! (Okay, maybe the title of this post was a slight giveaway...)

Now, before I get started on the reasons why I believe it is important for dietitians and home economists to work together, let me ask you, what came to mind when you read the words 'home economists'? Crock-pots and ironing boards? Aprons and infants? Sewing and laundry? Well, I don't blame you if that's the case, because unfortunately, that's a rather widespread view of home ec today. But as many of you may already know, I happen to be the Ryerson student liaison to the Toronto Home Economics Association, so I'd like to debunk this myth for you and show you that home ec was actually an integral part of the women's suffrage movement. That's right. Home economics did not develop out of some misogynistic desire to 'keep women in their place,' but was in fact a feminist undertaking, as it gave birth to the scholarly and professional involvement of women. Indeed, home economics represented the professionalization of women's work; it shed light on the importance of what women did and elevated the home's critical role in founding and maintaining health.

The reason I have all this in mind is that I attended the Ontario Home Economics Association's (OHEA) annual conference yesterday, which was held at Brescia this year. The conference's keynote speaker, a history professor at Western called Monda Halpern, discussed just how the early twentieth-century home economics movement actually supported and nurtured the evolution of women's rights. In Ontario, the home ec movement began with a woman by the name of Adelaide Hoodless, who lost an infant son in the late nineteenth century to a foodborne illness from some spoilt milk. The incident prompted Hoodless to begin educating new mothers and campaigning for pasteurization. She went on to teach home economics (domestic science) and to found an international organization called the Women's Institute. Around this same time, 'women's' programs in universities began to flourish. (And actually, Brescia itself was formed right in the middle of all this in 1919.) And with education comes empowerment. Furthermore, without the introduction of home economics programs in university, it would have taken a great deal longer for women to become accepted into sciency programs or for women's disciplines (like food) to develop into scientific programs (like nutritional science). As an example of discrimination of women in academia, perhaps you are familiar with the sexism that Rosalind Franklin faced from James Watson and Frances Crick, in spite of her ground-breaking work in x-ray crystallography which eventually became the key in determining the structure of DNA.

Alright, now that we have the whole women's rights bit out of the way, let me move on to why I think home economics is an essential facet of dietetics. First of all, as I already mentioned, home ec laid down the groundwork for what we know as dietetics today. Without women's advocacy for the importance of the home to become recognized, food would have not become an academic discipline and thus neither would have nutrition.

Secondly, how do you help someone make the right food choices if you can't counsel them on how to prepare said foods? How do you develop meal plans if you don't know how to put a meal together? Home ec connects the knowing aspect of nutrition with the doing aspect. A home economist at yesterday's OHEA conference, Mairlyn Smith, spoke to the relationship between nutrition and food preparation, and, to highlight a beautiful marriage between dietetics and cooking, has actually written a book with a dietitian that looks at just that. This book, Ultimate Foods for Ultimate Health: And Don't Forget the Chocolate educates readers on the best sorts of foods to eat as part of a healthy lifestyle, and then actually shows you how to make these foods into meals! Mairlyn also happens to be a stand-up comic, so as you can imagine, this was quite the speech.

Apart from showing you how to cook healthy meals, home ec is also a very broad and fundamental discipline that speaks to a number of other important health-related behaviours. It not only looks at nutrition, but at issues of sustainability, food security, housing, parenting, clothing and textiles, budgeting finances, food safety... Indeed, anything that has to do with educating people on how to raise healthy homes. Because present knowledge in healthcare and health education drives home the need for interdisciplinary cooperation, I believe that dietetics needs to appreciate home ec for its relatedness to it and for the fact that home ec takes a highly holistic approach to helping people. It looks at how to help people from every angle, starting from the ground up: starting in the home.