The farmer has assistance in his business. He shares in the accumulated experience of many farmers, before him and about him. There are valuable experiments being made in his behalf by the Bureau of Agriculture. He has trade papers to bring him the fruits of the world's progress in this line. Agriculture is one of the world's great functions, and has made magnificent progress. But humaniculture has no Bureau, no Secretary, no Experiment Stations; unless we count the recent experiments in boric-acid diet. The most valuable livestock on earth are casually fed by the haphazard efforts of any and every kind of ignorant woman; hired servants or married servants, as the case may be; dull, shortsighted, overworked women, far too busy in "doing the cooking" ever to study the science of feeding humanity. No science could ever make progress in such hands. Science must rest on broad observation, on the widest generalisation and deduction, on careful experiment and reconsideration.
This is forever impossible at home. Until the food laboratory entirely supersedes the kitchen there can be no growth. Many of us, struggling to sit fast between two stools, seeing the imperative need of scientific feeding for humanity, yet blindly clinging to the separate wife-mother-cook functionary, exhort "the woman" to study all this matter, and cheerfully to devote her life to scientifically feeding her beloved family.
"The woman"--that is, a woman, any woman, every woman, and that means the deadly Average, the hopelessly Isolated, the handicapped Maternal, with the Lack of Specialisation, the Confusion of other Trades, and the Lack of Incentive. Not until "The woman" in "the home" can everywhere manifest a high degree of skill as a doctor, as an architect, as a barber, as anything, can she manifest that high degree as a cook.
Cooking is an art; cooking is a science; cooking is a handicraft; cooking is a business. None of these can ever grow without following the laws of all industrial progress--specialisation, contact and exchange, legitimate competition, and the stimulus of large world-incentives. When we have these we shall be able to improve our kind of animal as much as we do other kinds. We cannot arbitrarily by breeding, but we can by nutrition and education--to an unknown extent. Nutrition, properly adjusted, nutrition for the human animal, has hardly been thought of by the home cook. The inexorable limit of our Home-cooking is the Home.