Food for Better Living

Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co, 1949. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good: There is a large stamped notice on the front and back endpages and on one page in the middle that says, "This Book Belongs to Harwell Public Schools, Harwell, GA," but there are no date-due pockets or other library indicators. There is some shelf wear on the lower edges of the cover, especially at the spine, and less at the upper spine, but there is much less than generally seen in library books. There is a 5/8-inch closed tear at the bottom of page 3, but it does not reach as far as the text. Besides the stamps already noted, several of the recipes have brief penciled comments from a previous owner, but otherwise there are no markings or stains, and the pages and printing are clean and bright. It is unclear if this edition was originally published with a dust jacket or not. It is bound in red cloth. There is a large white stamped pictorial title on the front cover and white stamped author/title/publisher information on the spine.. Though there are a good number of recipes in Food for Better Living, it's not a cookbook. Instead, it's a home economics text book for high school students, one that was apparently considered so useful that it went through three American editions and ended in a Canadian edition in 1968, according to WorldCat. Our copy is apparently the teacher's edition, with such clues as a list of class activities at the end of each chapter and a "List of Audio-Visual Aids" at the end of the book. The authors state in their preface that they assume students are much more interested in food itself than in the principals of nutrition and preparation, so they organized the book first by what were considered the "seven food groups" when the book was first published in 1949, slipping in such information as why Vitamin C is good for you in the citrus section and why some cuts of meat are more tender than others in the protein section. The book then goes on to chapters about how to put these individual foods and recipes together into meals, and from there how to shop for food, how to store it, and how to entertain. The book is loaded with black and white pictures (and a couple of color ones) of everything from groceries to how to put out a stovetop fire to modern breakfast nooks. Though some of the scientific information may be out of date, there really is some useful information here, as well as a lot of stuff that any social historian would love.