Infant, Child, & Family Nutrition Resources

The Cookbook and Home Economics Collection includes books from the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, The Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. These fascinating books take us back to an America in the early decades of the 20th century covering topics on cookery, textiles, family and home, budgeting, domestic sciences, and many other delightful topics.

The Cornell University, “Making of America” site includes many 19th and 20th century periodicals that will include some history of food/food science content

The History of Food and Drink collecting area includes more than 200 books in the public domain which have been digitized and are available at Special Collections Online, our digital platform. Many of these books relate to household (and family) management, dietetics, and nutrition.

The Feeding America project has created an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes page images of 76 cookbooks from the MSU Library's collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions. This site also features a glossary of cookery terms and multidimensional images of antique cooking implements from the collections of the MSU Museum.

American domestic advice or homemaking manuals emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and served to advise the housewife in the care and upkeep of the home and its contents and occupants. While most of these manuals were written to assist the “woman of the house”, others aimed at educating young girls, the homemakers of the future. This collection includes digitized versions of books from the UW-Madison collections spanning 1877 to the 1930’s. These books provide instruction on a wide range of topics including cooking, cleaning, laundry, household management and occupational training for young maids. Through them, young girls could learn among other things, the proper way to make a bed, polish the silver, decorate a table, and prepare and serve a nice meal.

This site includes more than 1,800 books and pamphlets published by the USDA between the 1880s and 1980s. They related to foods, home economics, and agriculture.

This site includes a list of agencies, organizations. and programs involved in nutrition research.

The Food Timeline was created by Lynne Olver, reference librarian with a passion for food history. Information is checked against standard reference tools for accuracy. All sources are cited for research purposes. As with most historical topics, there are some conflicting stories in the field of food history.

As of 2021, this resource is managed by Virginia Tech University Libraries.

Cookbook Finder is an experimental, works-based application that provides access to thousands of cookbooks and other works about food and nutrition described in library records. You can search by person, place, topic, course, ingredient, method, Dewey and more.

School food service programs such as we have in 1971 did not just happen overnight nor even during the past decade. Preceding today's programs is a long history of more than a hundred years of development, of testing and evaluating, and of constant research to provide the best in nutrition, nutrition education, and food service for the nation's millions of children in school.