At the Kids’ Table

NOTE: The following transcript corresponds to an earlier version of this show. Some passages may not match the rebroadcast audio above.

BRIAN BALOGH: In the first part of our show, we talked a little bit about the moment in the middle of the 19th century when people here stopped eating off their knives and started using forks. Well, wouldn’t you know it? It didn’t take long before Americans started worrying if this whole manners thing was getting, well, a little out of control.

ABBY VAN SLYCK: There’s a critique that boys are not growing up into the kind of manly men that they need to be.

BRIAN: This is Abby Van Slyck, an historian at Connecticut College.

ABBY VAN SLYCK: Not only sort of a little bit of background homophobia there, but I think a concern– sort of what we would call a national security concern– that boys are not growing up into the kinds of soldiers that the country needs.

BRIAN: This is happening in the 1880, which, as it happens, is precisely when the first summer camps for boys come along. Van Slyck has written about the history of summer camps, and so we invited her on to share her thoughts about the importance of what, and how, summer campers have eaten.

ABBY VAN SLYCK: Part of what’s going on at summer camps is that they’re trying to get boys away from the influence of their mothers. In the imaginings of the time, mothers were keeping their boys in the parlor, keeping them clean, not allowing them to have any kind of rough and tumble play. So camp was the antidote to that. And one of the most common environments for camps to model themselves on in the late 19th century was the army encampment, the military encampment. And so mess hall, the military term, was the one that they picked up.

BRIAN: And with the boys help out in the kitchen? Would they help out with the cooking?

ABBY VAN SLYCK: Definitely. Often they’ve got a professional cook, either someone who has worked at a lumber camp, or come from another venue, and is cooking either in a tent or in a very rudimentary kitchen. Cooking over an open flame, so boys are collecting firewood, they’re peeling potatoes, they’re serving, and they’re doing their own dishes. So that the mealtime becomes sort of a major event.

BRIAN: So I understand the camps started admitting girls. There were girls camps when? Would that be the beginning of the 20th century?

ABBY VAN SLYCK: Exactly.

BRIAN: I presume they didn’t call them mess halls for the girls camps. Did they morph into dining rooms, or did they call them mess halls?

ABBY VAN SLYCK: They did call them mess halls, and I think particularly in the years around World War I, there was the notion that women, too, could contribute to the war effort. And so there was a tendency to still use that mess hall nomenclature. There was still, though, a very strong sense that, for girls, cooking and eating at summer camp was very much related to preparing them for their future roles as women.

So in the late 19th century, when boys did the kitchen labor, it was understood as just pitching into part of the adventure of camping. Whereas in the early 20th century, particularly the Girl Scouts articulated very clearly that this was about preparing girl campers to be more effective wives and mothers.

BRIAN: And when I think about my days at summer camp, I really don’t remember the kitchen. I remember a window opening into the kitchen, and the food would just come out of it. That’s a little different than what you’ve been describing in the first decades of the 20th century.

ABBY VAN SLYCK: Yeah. No, you are putting your finger right on the very nub of a really important change. So one of the things that happens there is that we have a shift over to a new building type called a dining lodge, moving away from the military analogy, and thinking more about the dining as an experience. A shift to round tables, smaller tables, so that now we have younger campers, and they’re sitting in their tent units, or their cabin units.

In some camps there were curtains in the windows. There was this notion that maybe you’re coming a little bit back around to the domestic dining room as the model there. But then the relationship between the dining room and the kitchen changes entirely.

So in the early 20th century, even back in the late 19th century, cooking had been very visible to campers. It had be

en either out in the open, or it had been at one end of the mess hall. By the 1930s, and then into the post-war period, when I assume you were a camper, you have now a very high-tech kitchen. And they are set up precisely so that it minimizes the campers’ involvement with a kitchen. In the ’30s and beyond, that the dining lodge, where you’re actually taking your meals, that room it’s very rustic, and in some places sort of exaggerated in its rusticity.

BRIAN: We had exaggerated rustic. That’s a good way to describe it.

ABBY VAN SLYCK: And then you’d go into the kitchen. It would be completely different world. You’d probably have a polished concrete floor. You’d have stainless steel fixtures. All the equipment could have come right out of an urban hotel.

BRIAN: Aside from just developments in kitchen technology, what was going on culturally?

ABBY VAN SLYCK: I think that what we’re looking at here is a tendency to try to create childhood as its own particular moment, and to really make sure the childhood is insulated from the adult world. So that in the late 19th century we had older campers, and camp was really envisioned and used as a way to help them bridge into adulthood. They were learning skills, they were learning self-reliance, in the 19th century, that would help take them into the adult world.

Beginning in the 1930s, and then really ramping up as the baby boom took on full flower after World War II, the notion is that camp is now for a much younger crowd, and that the activities there should be very, very distinct from what happens in the world of adults. And that one way of doing that at camp is to insulate kids from the work of adults. That kids play at camp, adults work camp.

BRIAN: Just to bring things up to these days, when I think of the evolution of meals in general, I think of the evolution, even in my own lifetime, from three pretty fixed mealtimes a day the power bar. There’s really not that many places left in American society where large groups of people can be expected to sit down. I guess the cruise ship is the other last–

ABBY VAN SLYCK: Or a prison.

BRIAN: Or prison, that’s right. So why do you think summer camps hold on to that? Is it that bonding experience?

ABBY VAN SLYCK: I think that’s a huge part of it. I think at most camps, it’s of the one time when the whole camp gets together. I think at most meal times, there’s a ritual beyond the meal, right? It’s the time for announcements, it’s a time for song, and it is really a time to reinforce really the collective identity of the camp.

Particularly the more conventional, more traditional, summer camps really think an important part of what they’re doing is helping people learn how to get along with one another. And I think in some ways they are bulwarks for the mealtime– understanding that mealtime is always more than just food.

BRIAN: Well, I want to thank you for joining us today. You’ve whetted my appetite, and it’s been very instructive.

ABBY VAN SLYCK: Thank you, Brian. I really enjoyed it.

BRIAN: Abby Van Slyck is a professor at Connecticut College, and author of “A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth.”