World’s fairs, international expositions, or World Expos, are large, internationally attended fairs that usually last three to six months. They are hosted every few years by different cities across the world. These fairs exhibit new technologies, scientific innovations, art, architecture, food, and attractions of cultural significance.

The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was also called the World’s Columbian Exposition because it was intended to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. As such, although people traveled from across the world as both exhibitors and tourists, the World’s Columbian Exposition strongly foregrounded American innovations, materials, and national pride. The Fair also introduced many new culinary technologies, exhibits, and foods, including the dishwasher (invented by Josephine Cochrane), The Rumford Kitchen (an exhibit by Ellen Swallow Richards), and food products including Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix, Quaker Oats, and Wrigley Company’s fruit chewing gum (Galvan, 2023).

Richards named the Rumford Kitchen after Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. Count Rumford (1753-1814) was an inventor and scientist who studied heat and invented many household appliances including kitchen stoves and coffee percolators (Kleppner 1992). 

The Rumford Kitchen was an educational exhibit and restaurant. It included an open kitchen, visible to guests, where affordable lunches were prepared. Richards created posters for the walls and pamphlets that were handed out to guests along with their lunches; these posters and pamphlets were extremely detailed and included nutritional information including the calorie, protein, fat, and carbohydrate contents of the available lunches. In her pamphlets, Richards also included a biography of Count Rumford, studies on the positive effects of providing balanced meals to children and students, essays on affordable foods, hygiene, and much more (Richards, 1899).

In the 21st Century, we often take it for granted that commercially sold foods are labeled with their calories and other nutrition facts. But in 1893, this field of science was still relatively new. Many of the visitors of the Rumford Kitchen would have been unfamiliar with the concepts of calorie, protein, fat, and carbohydrate contents in the way that we are today.

Approximately 10,000 people were served lunch at the Rumford Kitchen during the two months that it was open (Lippincott 2003, 157). Through her educational demonstrations and pamphlets, Richards introduced all of these people to nutritional science.

Shown to the left is a FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) nutrition fact label guide. Just like Richard's pamphlet, this label shows calorie, protein, fat, and carbohydrate contents. Today, many people rely on these labels to make healthy dietary and environmental choices. Organizations like the United Nations Climate Change Learning Partnership offer online courses on how to read these labels, such as the lesson included in the "Sustainable Diet" course. 

Nutrition science is also utilized in anthropological research today, such as in Daniela Schlettwein-Gsell's dietary nutrition theories that elaborate on Sidney Mintz's core-fringe-legume hypothesis. In many ways, Richards was ahead of her time, educating people on nutrition and health over a hundred years ago.

Many food products made their debut at the World's Columbian Exposition, including Aunt Jemima brand self-rising pancake flour. The first woman to ever portray the trademarked character of Aunt Jemima was named Nancy Green. Green was a former slave born in Kentucky. She first played Aunt Jemima at the Chicago World's Fair, under the employ of the then called R.T. Davis Milling Company, cooking pancakes, singing, and telling semi-mythologized stories of her childhood as a slave. Her booth, located in the Agricultural Building at the fair, was shaped like a giant flour-barrel (Manring 1995, 24-25).

Aunt Jemima quickly became extraordinarily popular. She was based on the racist "mammy" caricature: a motherly and submissive African American slave or servant who cooks, cleans, and takes care of her master's white children. This stereotype, heavily romanticized in the South, was combined with Aunt Jemima's fictional history of developing a perfect pancake recipe while living on a plantation. This fiction made her an iconic and beloved character, often described as the first living trademark. Electricity and the new culinary technologies of the Industrial Revolution led to advertising that encouraged women–especially white, middle-class housewives–to cook on their own, without the assistance of servants. In this context, the nostalgic fantasy of Aunt Jemima as a Black mammy servant was appealing to white housewives (Manring 1995). Maurice Manring (1995) wrote that "Aunt Jemima was a pawn in a game white on white, male on female." In other words, she was used in advertising by white men to appeal to white women.

Aunt Jemima became so mythologized that even long after Green had sadly passed away in a car accident in 1923, reporters sometimes still referred to Aunt Jemima as a real person, blending the fictional life of Aunt Jemima with the real life of Nancy Green. For example, a report from Gannett News Service wrote in 1989: "In 1923, Aunt Jemima, 89, and jolly as ever, died in a car accident" (Manring 1995, 27). 

In spite of her character's fame, Green was buried in an unmarked grave. She was not given a headstone until 2020, thanks to the efforts of Sherry Williams, the president of The Bronzeville Historical Society, an organization dedicated to the preservation of African American history in Chicago (Roberts). 

The character of Aunt Jemima continued to be used in advertising until 2021, appearing on pancake mixes and syrup bottles across American grocery stores. In response to protests against police brutality and systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020, Aunt Jemima was officially rebranded to the Pearl Milling Company by PepsiCo, with an acknowledgment that she was based on racist archetypes (Diaz, 2021).

Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist and activist who advocated for the civil rights of African Americans. She investigated and wrote extensively on the murders and lynching of African Americans. In 1893, Wells collaborated with several other social reformers, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, to write and distribute a pamphlet titled, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition . The pamphlet was available not only in English, but also French, German, and Spanish, so as to be given out to visiting international tourists. It included extensive data on lynching, drawing attention to the continued violence and discrimination directed towards African Americans even after the abolition of slavery. It also criticized the lack of representation of Black men or women in almost any executive position in the Exposition, in spite of many petitions and proposals by African American societies to participate.

The question of how to exhibit and market the scientific and social achievements of women is still very relevant today. On the one hand, organizations and places that are devoted specifically to women, such as the Woman’s Building of Chicago's World Fair, may promote solidarity between women and create environments that encourage and celebrate them in their own right. On the other hand, as was a concern of Ellen Swallow Richards, separating female scientists can reinforce gender biases, such as the idea that culinary science is exclusively feminine. Furthermore, the exclusion of non-white women from equal and respectful representation in the Woman's Building prevented it from being a truly welcoming place for all women. Ethnic minority participants of the Exposition often had to weigh the costs of taking up the opportunity to represent themselves–at the risk of facing discrimination–or not participating at all, at the risk of loosing the chance to advocate for and celebrate themselves. Some minority groups took advantage of the Exposition as an opportunity to represent themselves as authentically as they could to the rest of the world, such as the indigenous Sámi people of Norway, many of whom made livings sharing their culture at the Exposition (Berg 2012), or African American rights activists like Frederick Douglass, who participated in the Exposition as means of criticizing it. And others chose to reject aspects of the fair outright, such as Richards, who refused to participate unless she could have complete control over her scientific exhibit, or Ida B. Wells, who boycotted much of the fair in protest. Food and cooking is one important facet of how people represent or advertise their identities–their gender, ethnicity, nationality, political belief, and so on.

The rapid innovations in culinary science and technology that were being introduced during the Industrial Revolution didn't only change food and cooking, but also the societal expectations of women. Some more conservative women, like Bertha Honore Palmer, saw the "modern woman" as someone who could be well-educated and "freed" by domestic technologies, but who still embodied the traditional virtues and domestic occupations expected of her. Some women, like Ellen Swallow Richards, advocated for sciences to not be gendered at all and for women to be welcomed into laboratories and scientific institutions alongside their male peers. In a similar vein, some women identified with the New Woman movement, feminists that emerged in the late 19th century advocating for women's suffrage and equal worker's rights as men. Some women, like Nancy Green, became the faces of modern culinary advertising. Women like Ida B. Wells stood for the rights of African Americans, protesting and documenting racism and violence. Visions of the modern woman at the World's Fair were as diverse as the women in attendance. And although all of these women lived over a hundred years ago, the ideologies that they upheld and challenged are still present to this day.