“I’ve never been able to stomach the food in these joints around here,” the girl replied. “And their prices is something fierce.”
On my inquiring if the food she got in the factory lunch-room was really eatable she very wisely advised me to come and see before putting on my hat and coat. Stepping inside the door of the restaurant I stared in amazement at the food, the helpings, and the service.
It was a cafeteria with the serving-counter shaped like an elongated horseshoe. A squad of men, all in spotless white, stood within the hollow of the horseshoe serving the workers as they passed along, the women on one arm of the shoe, the men on the other. On paying their score the men turned into the men’s dining-room, and the women into that reserved for women workers.
That, my first lunch, as recorded in my diary, consisted of two slices of roast beef, each as large as my hand and almost as thick, on a mound of mashed potatoes with a-plenty of brown gravy; one-eighth of a large apple pie; bread and butter, a cup of coffee with grade A milk and all the sugar I wanted—all for eighteen cents. Everything was deliciously cooked and carefully served. After the atrociously cooked and slovenly served meals of the Belgrave this factory lunch-room seemed to me nothing short of marvellous.
That night I recounted my experience to Alice, the hat-trimmer, and the little organist. They all threatened to give up their jobs and go to packing crackers. Every evening after that they never failed to ask:
“Well, what did you have for lunch to-day?”
The portions were so surprisingly generous that I often found it difficult to eat it all. It may have been that our stern course of appetite suppression had affected me. Be that as it may, there were several days when only shame prevented me from asking permission to take home with me the slice of meat I had not been able to eat. Mrs. Wilkins and Alice would have been glad to get it.
At that time meats of all sorts were so high that none of us women on the top floor thought of having it oftener than once a day. Potatoes were so expensive that Mrs. Wilkins and the organist had stopped buying them—Alice and I were rice-eaters. Milk had gone up a cent a pint, and the loaf of bread for which we were then paying eight cents was decreasing in size so rapidly that each time we bought one we wondered if we would not be forced to use a magnifying-glass to be able to see our next.