The Institute of Technology lunch room is also supplied from this place, making in all about sixteen hundred people who are daily supplied with standard foods as defined by Mrs. Richards and Mrs. Abel, while those who buy from the counter and eat at the lunch room of the kitchen will easily make the number two thousand.
Other kitchens have already been started upon the plan of the New England Kitchen—Chicago, Philadelphia, and Xew York each having similar ones.
It is not too much to expect to see in a few years such kitchens in every large city in our Union, all the outcome of the practical application of the scientific training of two college women to the betterment of, primarily, the physical condition of their fellow-creatures, and, secondarily, their mental and moral condition.
In October, 1890, while yet busy with the development of scientific principles in connection with the New England Kitchen, Mrs. Richards wrote a forceful paper urging upon college women the study of domestic science. In this paper, which was published for the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, she says: What is our education worth to us if we can not order our houses in peace and comfort? You say, 'Modern life makes so many demands upon us.' True; but no demand can supersede that of home. . . . Let each young college graduate begin her housekeeping in a simple way, feeling keenly that all her future happiness and the welfare of her family depend on the thoroughness with which she masters at the very beginning the essentials of a home.
"But not only in her own home is there a call for this knowledge of the fundamental principles of healthful living and domestic economy. In all work for the amelioration of the condition of mankind, philanthropic and practical, there must be a basis of knowledge of the laws and forces which science has discovered and harnessed for our use."
In alluding to the New England Kitchen she says: "In this experiment the training of the college woman showed. No mere enthusiasm would have patiently waited, understanding that success is reached only through failure and after a most careful study of every detail, and is maintained only by constant vigilance."
Urging the study of domestic science in colleges, she says: "First, the subject should be put in the college curriculum on a par with the other sciences, and as a summing up of all the science teaching of the course, for chemistry, physics, physiology, biology, and especially bacteriology, are all only the stepping-stones of sanitary science.
"Therefore, in the junior or senior year, after the student has a good groundwork of these sciences, there should be given a course of at least two lectures a week, and four hours of practical work.
