The sixth track of this video from the New School addresses the role of food journalism and the women’s pages. While Craig Claiborne certainly had a significant role, giving him such credit for the “invention of food journalism” devalues the work of the women who came before him. Food writer Betty Fussell noted that Claiborne became in 1957: “the first male food editor in a journalistic world dominated by women.” Yet, in 1950, the industry publication Editor & Publisher reported that the number of newspaper food editors had grown from 240 to 561 in one year. While most of these sections appear to have run in the women’s pages only…

I have been reading this book about the history of Milwaukee (my hometown) television. It features a page on Breta Griem. She was a home economist who had a cooking show on WTMJ-TV and wrote about food for the women’s pages of the Milwaukee Journal in the 1940s and 1950s. Griem’s WTMJ show was called “What’s New in the Kitchen” and was part of a block of daytime shows that were aimed at women and children beginning in 1949. Her show lasted 13 years and led to numerous awards. Here is a passage (pg 60) about Griem’s unscripted, live show:“I remember we had a kitchen program – as almost every…

I came across this interesting blog post about women’s page food editor Jeanne Voltz. The blogger wrote:“I first became aware of Jeanne Voltz when she was a food editor of the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s, when we first moved to California. The food section of the Los Angeles Times was, in my estimation, unequaled in the 1960s-1970s. (I’ve been vocal in my disappointment with the current food sections of the two local newspapers, today. They’ve gone way too high brow for my taste. I find a lot more interesting recipes to clip from the food sections that my penpals send to me from various other parts of the…