Hull-House Kitchen Rethinking Soup

Jane Addams understood that all the protest in the world would not be enough to bring about a more just world. She knew we also needed to have spaces to imagine, convene, argue, grapple with hard issues, and collectively envision the future of the common good. The Hull-House Settlement was this place for many immigrants, social reformers, writers and others who found a home in this radically democratic and inclusive public space.
As part of the first generation of American women to attend college, Jane Addams understood the importance of breaking boundaries and crossing borders- and she did this in numerous ways. She was a white person working in communities of color; a wealthy, privileged person addressing issues of poverty; and a woman who entered into the male-dominated and defined public sphere.
Hull-House also facilitated this kind of border-crossing for the communities of people who came through its doors. 9,000 immigrants a week came to Hull-House to participate in programs that included music, poetry, art, citizenship, sex education and literature classes, and also lectures and conversations about race, suffrage and economics. But the Hull-House Settlement fed more than their intellectual curiosity and the hunger for community- it also fed their bellies. The Hull-House Coffee House and the public kitchen operated from the 1890’s, and were spaces where people dined, communed, nourished, and sustained themselves and each other.
The Settlement buildings, designed by the architects Allen and Irving Pond, blurred the boundaries and confines of public and private spaces. These buildings contained a day care center, theaters, public baths, a public art gallery, private residences, community dining rooms, and a public kitchen.
The cooperative living structure disrupted the domestic space that made women’s work invisible and called into question the “women’s sphere” and “women’s work.” The Settlement house challenged the physical separation of household space from public space and the separation of the domestic economy from the political economy.
Hull-House history is a reminder that the public sphere is something that is and has always been historically constructed, creatively imagined, and the result of struggle.
The reform work that Hull-House engaged in, such as advocating for public housing and public health, working to end child labor and to shut-down sweat-shops, and establishing the juvenile justice court can be understood as forms of civic housekeeping. They extended the notion of home into the public sphere, demanding the State take responsibility for the basic needs of its people.
Hull-House reformers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Florence Kelley and Julia Lathrop used the language and vision of domesticity as a framework for their social vision and for interpreting their unconventional lives and transgression from the norms.
Throughout history, the excluded have flipped the script and creatively used what has been narrowly prescribed to them as a weapon for taking hold of and grasping cultural apparatuses. The Hull-House reformers placed old forms of domesticity into new frameworks and changed their significance.
On May 6th at 12-1:30pm, to honor this legacy, the Museum will launch one of our most ambitious and curious public programs to date- the re-opening of the Hull-House Kitchen, where the soup and conversation are organic.
We are so excited to be working with executive chef Sam Kass, whom we affectionately refer to as our “Chef in Residence” and his colleague Yoni Levy. Skillfully, through bowls of hot, steaming Carrot-Ginger-Coconut Soup and cool and inspirational Spring Pea and Mint soup, they have awakened our hunger for a better and more just world.
-Lisa Yun Lee

EVERYONE EATS
An IneviTable Project
We believe that people have a stake in each other's health. This link is what binds us together as families, communities and a nation. Nowhere are we more powerfully bound together than in the daily cultivation and preparation of food. Within food lies vast untapped potential to uplift and connect people, to provide a medium for discourse, and an opportunity to taste our common humanity along with our differences. Jane Addams understood this.
As we seek openings to utilize the power of food, we find ourselves in a fight to salvage a food system that has been ravaged by an approach of quantity over quality, of short-term gain over long-term stability. Our sustenance is now inextricably dependent on fossil fuels. The massive injection of this energy into our food system over the past 40 years has doubled the world population, yet left a billion malnourished. Ironically, overabundance now plagues this country witnessed in the excess our community carries on its hips and thighs. Scientists predict that by in 2015, 75% of Americans will be overweight or obese. The next generation now faces the real possibility that they will live a shorter life than that of their parents. Although the ready availability of food is a great achievement, the industry our society has built around food is harmful and unsustainable. It threatens our health today, and imperils the legacy of improving health we wish to pass on.
We are thrilled by the possibility at the Hull-House Kitchen to bring together people from all walks of life, to share visions for the future inspired by lessons from the past. Over delicious soup made with ingredients from local sustainable farmers, we aim to cultivate an exploration into the reservoirs of transformative power yet to be utilized within our food.
-Sam Kass