In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Technology and Culture 44.2 (2003) 419-421



[Access article in PDF]
Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies. Edited by Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. viii+288. $85/ $24.95.

Those skeptical of "food studies" will find the essays collected in Food Nations an eye opener. They instruct us on taste, on technological change, and on culture. The food we think tastes so good reflects public relations as much as it does the palate. Kolleen Guy explains why the French feel more French by drinking wine, Steve Penfold why Canadians feel more authentic eating a Tim Horton donut. Sylvia Ferrero tells us the difference between "authentic Mexican food" and the "staged authenticity" of the upscale Mexican restaurant. In the book's introduction, Sidney Mintz notes how prone Americans are to "infuse their food habits with moral considerations." So too the scholars; they can fight over food with all the moral self-righteousness of Puritan divines.

The authors of Food Nations largely avoid the sermons. Tracey Deutsch asks why Chicagoans of the 1920s abandoned their local grocery stores for chains like Safeway and A&P. Evidently, customers liked the standardized products and the self-service system. They could pick out their own produce, brands, and sausages rather than settle for what the neighborhood grocer put in their sack. Prices were marked; thus, a chain store could not play favorites—everybody got the same deal. Donna Gabaccia reminds us that food processing was once at the forefront of technological change. A century ago, milling, brewing, and meatpacking ranked among the top ten industries in the United States. Canning likewise became big business, for by the 1920s the chain stores provided a mass market for brand names. [End Page 419]

As Amy Bentley shows, since the 1890s urban women had substituted infant formulas for breast feeding, relying on such canned products as Borden's Eagle Brand condensed milk or Nestle's Milk Food. According to Bentley, Gerber's was the first company to market baby food, introducing a line of pureed vegetables and fruits for infants in 1927. Its advertising in the Ladies Home Journal urged readers to try its "scientifically prepared" products—"for baby's sake." Gerber's promised mom less drudgery in the kitchen and more freedom "for herself, her baby, and her husband." Between 1930 and 1932, sales increased from 842,000 cans to more than 2.2 million. Gerber's success, Bentley shows, was not just its advertising but its timing. More urban women worked outside the home, and, within the home, electrification had altered women's work.

Innovations need a receptive social context to spread. Consider Martin Bruegel's study of canned food in France. Food sterilization—boiling comestibles in completely sealed containers—was invented in Paris by Nicolas Appert in 1810. "Appertizing" promised to eliminate famine, as one year's surplus could be preserved against another year's shortfall. By the 1890s, canning was entrenched in the United States, Britain, and Germany—but not in France. For canning to take hold there, it took another generation and the state's intervention. For the ladies, the change agent was the French public school and its classes in home economics; for the men, it was the army, which taught them how to properly open and "unmold" the canned beef.

Can advertising open up a new niche for products? According to Jeffrey Charles, it did not help California's avocado industry. Despite sixty years of media hype, it is still folks in California and the Southwest who eat three-quarters of all the country's avocados. Outside that cultural enclave, the "aristocrat of salad vegetables" is largely confined to guacamole. Along the same lines, Jeffrey Pilcher shows how traditional culture can sidetrack technological change. In Mexico, it took years for the mechanical nixtamal corn mill to replace hard labor by hand at the metate. Grinding corn into massa, rolling out tortillas, and then cooking them was almost exclusively women's work. To women, abandoning the metate threatened their role in the household; for their part, men felt...

pdf

Share