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In 1883, a physician named Charles Seltzer published a paper in the Medical and Surgical Reporter describing what he had learned from a Philadelphia cooking school director named Sarah Tyson Rorer. In her, he wrote, were combined the practical attributes of cook, chemist, physiologist, and nurse. He told the Philadelphia Medical Society her teaching had increased his success and self-satisfaction in the practice of medicine many fold. She had taught him something medical school had not: that a proper diet is as essential to the recovery of an invalid as medicine.
One hundred forty years later, we call this nutritional medicine. We call its practitioners registered dietitians. We embed the principle in hospital protocols, athletic training programs, and public health curricula. We have only lately begun to understand what Sarah Tyson Rorer, born in 1849 and declared by the American Dietetic Association as the first American dietitian, was teaching from her model kitchen in Philadelphia in the 1880s.
I teach history at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a few miles from the Lebanon County community of Mount Gretna where Rorer spent the last decades of her life. My recently published biography of Rorer, commissioned by the Mount Gretna Area Historical Society and the Lebanon County Historical Society, has occupied me for years. The closer I look at her career, the more I am struck not by how distant her world is from ours, but by how precisely she anticipated our own.
Rorer grew up in a Quaker family, descended from Philadelphia Quaker abolitionist Elisha Tyson, formed by a tradition insisting on the dignity of every person regardless of station. She carried those values into everything she built. She founded the Philadelphia Cooking School in 1882, the third such institution in the United States, and ran it for two decades. She established a Normal School within it, training the teachers who would go on to build the home economics curriculum in public schools, colleges, and universities across the country. At least ten charter members of the American Home Economics Association were Philadelphia Cooking School graduates.
Her work extended far beyond Philadelphia. At the Pennsylvania Chautauqua in Mount Gretna, she served simultaneously as Director of the Pennsylvania Chautauqua School of Domestic Science, where she taught nutrition, therapeutic dietetics, and cooking during the summer seasons, and as President of the Pennsylvania Chautauqua Women’s Auxiliary to the Board of Managers, the leadership role through which she raised funds, directed the demolition of Rorer Hall of Cookery, the building erected in her honor in 1897 to house her cooking demonstrations and model kitchen, and oversaw its replacement with the Hall of Philosophy, publicly presented in 1910 and still standing today on the Pennsylvania Chautauqua grounds. President Theodore Roosevelt, who called the Chautauqua movement the most American thing in America, would have recognized in Rorer the living embodiment of its mission: the advancement of literary, scientific, intellectual, physical, and social welfare in a democratic community open to all.
Her classrooms admitted men and women, rich and poor, immigrants, and people of all races and ethnicities at a time when such a thing required deliberate intention. She sponsored one scholarship a year to an African American female student. She taught cooking to immigrant women at Philadelphia’s Bedford Street Mission, learning their recipes in return. She gave classes to working-class men at the Workingman’s Club of Germantown. She ran a model home experiment in a working-class neighborhood near the Baldwin Locomotive Works to understand what a dinner on forty cents actually required. She believed everyone, not only the wealthy, not only women, not only the educated, deserved to understand the relationship between food and health.
She also understood food as a political matter long before that language became commonplace. She worked alongside Harvey Wiley and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to advise the Theodore Roosevelt administration on consumer protection, contributing to what became the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. She challenged adulterated products, demanded transparency in food labeling, insisted ingredients be locally sourced and of the highest quality, and told audiences repeatedly the food industry could not regulate itself. She wrote to the Knox Company suggesting they invent powdered gelatin to replace gelatin sheets, and they did. She produced the first gas stove with temperature regulation in 1902. She authored fifty-four cookbooks and wrote 780 articles for Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. James Beard, in 1972, dedicated his authoritative American Cookery to her.
She said the kitchen was the laboratory of the household. She wore a silk black dress to her cooking demonstrations to prove cooking need not be dirty work. She declared she had never seen a piece of pastry made from lard worth eating. She told audiences fish was not brain food because no fisherman of her acquaintance was overly brilliant. She warned the properly fed person had no need of alcohol, and the properly fed nation had little use for doctors. She was right about nearly everything, and almost no one knows her name.
The ideas Rorer spent her career advancing are not historical curiosities. Every contemporary argument about ultra-processed food, food deserts, sugar in the American diet, the relationship between nutrition and mental health, the science of therapeutic diets, and the place of home economics in public education runs on the rails she laid. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again initiative, whatever one makes of its politics, is conducting an argument about food adulteration, processed ingredients, and the relationship between diet and chronic disease Rorer was conducting in the pages of the Dietetic Gazette in 1890. She was not simply ahead of her time. She was doing the work, in public, at scale, for fifty years, and the institutions she built outlasted her by a century.
She died on December 27, 1937, two days after falling out of bed on Christmas Eve at the age of eighty-eight, blind, and nearly destitute. The Pennsylvania Dietetic Association had been paying her a pension of forty dollars a month since 1933. Her last public appearance was at the Lebanon Chapter of Quota International’s Christmas party. Her last professional engagement, earlier in 1937, was an address to the Pennsylvania Dietetic Association in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, tracing the history of dietetics in American hospitals from its beginning in her Philadelphia kitchen fifty years before.
She went to Bethlehem to tell the next generation what she had built. Then she went home to her cottage and died two days after Christmas.
The field she founded now employs more than 70,000 registered dietitians in the United States. The home economics curriculum she designed, contested and revised across a century, persists in various forms in schools and colleges nationwide. The pure food movement she helped lead produced the regulatory apparatus governing every label on every package in every American grocery store.
She asked the right questions before anyone else asked them. She built the institutions to answer them. She deserves to be remembered by name.
Jean-Paul Benowitz is a member of the faculty in the School of Arts and Humanities at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, where he has taught history since 1993. His biography Sarah Tyson Rorer: The Pure Food Movement and Mount Gretna’s Rorer Hall of Cookery is available from the Mount Gretna Area Historical Society at mtgretnahistory.org/shop/.
