The Butter Printer: U.S. Middlebrow Periodicals, Mass Production, and Taste Anxiety

This essay follows the trope of industrial and convenience food in the work of middlebrow periodical humorists Robert Benchley, Margaret Fishback, and Ogden Nash. I argue that this trope reflects authorial anxieties and aspirations about the modern media’s role in shaping consumer appetites and tastes. “Taste” takes on figurative connotations as these humorists meditate on modern foods in order to account for the place of mass production and commercialism within literary culture. Whether addressing chewing gum, soda fountains, or iceberg lettuce, these periodical writers confront the intimacy and ubiquity of modernity’s changes and their professional implication in those changes.