Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (California Studies in Food and Culture, Band 68) - Hardcover

Zeide, Anna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520290682 ISBN 13: 9780520290686

Verlag: University of California Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

2019 James Beard Foundation Book Award winner: Reference, History, and Scholarship

A century and a half ago, when the food industry was first taking root, few consumers trusted packaged foods. Americans had just begun to shift away from eating foods that they grew themselves or purchased from neighbors. With the advent of canning, consumers were introduced to foods produced by unknown hands and packed in corrodible metal that seemed to defy the laws of nature by resisting decay.
 
Since that unpromising beginning, the American food supply has undergone a revolution, moving away from a system based on fresh, locally grown goods to one dominated by packaged foods. How did this come to be? How did we learn to trust that food preserved within an opaque can was safe and desirable to eat? Anna Zeide reveals the answers through the story of the canning industry, taking us on a journey to understand how food industry leaders leveraged the powers of science, marketing, and politics to win over a reluctant public, even as consumers resisted at every turn.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anna Zeide is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice at Oklahoma State University, where her research, teaching, and community activism focus on food and food systems.

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“From the miracle of canned milk to the troubling presence of BPA in tomato soup, Anna Zeide’s revealing history shows how the ever-increasing power of the processed food industry has profoundly shaped policies that affect what all Americans eat. This important book is useful food for thought for anyone interested in reforming our modern food system for the better.”—Ann Vileisis, author of Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back
 
“Canned serves up food history at its finest, but its implications extend far beyond the pantry. Zeide persuasively demonstrates how the canning industry’s rise owed as much to skillful manipulation of science and politics as to technological savvy. Readily digestible by undergraduates, Canned should have a long shelf life.”—Kendra Smith-Howard, author of Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900
 
“This is a nuanced, robust, elegantly written history. Zeide establishes canning’s importance to consumers, food systems, and business history. It will stay in your mind long after you put it down.”—Tracey Deutsch, author of Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century
 
“Canned looks inside a seemingly unassuming device to reveal an unseen world of complex relations between people, food, technology, and their environments. With grace and clarity, Zeide has written a fascinating and important history showing how canning’s ‘food engineering, marketing, and politicking’ led to the processed and packaged foods of today’s kitchens.”—Benjamin R. Cohen, author of Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside
 
“In Canned, Zeide treats us to a savory history of how canned food, on its journey from the farm to the supermarket shelf, reshaped American food and life. It is a story of changing agricultural production, marketing science, public health, consumer confidence, and food habits. After reading this book, you will never open a can of peas, tomatoes, or tuna and take for granted the history contained inside.”—Gregg Mitman, author of Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes

Aus dem Klappentext

&;From the miracle of canned milk to the troubling presence of BPA in tomato soup, Anna Zeide&;s revealing history shows how the ever-increasing power of the processed food industry has profoundly shaped policies that affect what all Americans eat. This important book is useful food for thought for anyone interested in reforming our modern food system for the better.&;&;Ann Vileisis, author of Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back
 
&;Canned serves up food history at its finest, but its implications extend far beyond the pantry. Zeide persuasively demonstrates how the canning industry&;s rise owed as much to skillful manipulation of science and politics as to technological savvy. Readily digestible by undergraduates, Canned should have a long shelf life.&;&;Kendra Smith-Howard, author of Pure and Modern Milk: An Environmental History since 1900
 
&;This is a nuanced, robust, elegantly written history. Zeide establishes canning&;s importance to consumers, food systems, and business history. It will stay in your mind long after you put it down.&;&;Tracey Deutsch, author of Building a Housewife&;s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century
 
&;Canned looks inside a seemingly unassuming device to reveal an unseen world of complex relations between people, food, technology, and their environments. With grace and clarity, Zeide has written a fascinating and important history showing how canning&;s &;food engineering, marketing, and politicking&; led to the processed and packaged foods of today&;s kitchens.&;&;Benjamin R. Cohen, author of Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside
 
&;In Canned, Zeide treats us to a savory history of how canned food, on its journey from the farm to the supermarket shelf, reshaped American food and life. It is a story of changing agricultural production, marketing science, public health, consumer confidence, and food habits. After reading this book, you will never open a can of peas, tomatoes, or tuna and take for granted the history contained inside.&;&;Gregg Mitman, author of Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes

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Canned

The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry

By Anna Zeide

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29068-6

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Introduction, 
1. Condensed Milk: The Development of the Early Canning Industry, 
2. Growing a Better Pea: Canners, Farmers, and Agricultural Scientists in the 1910s and 1920s, 
3. Poisoned Olives: Consumer Fear and Expert Collaboration, 
4. Grade A Tomatoes: Labeling Debates and Consumers in the New Deal, 
5. Fighting for Safe Tuna: Postwar Challenges to Processed Food, 
6. BPA in Campbell's Soup: New Threats to an Entrenched Food System, 
Conclusion, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Condensed Milk

The Development of the Early Canning Industry

In July 1864, David Coon, a member of the Thirty-Sixth Wisconsin Infantry Regiment, wrote a letter home to his wife and children. Such letters from soldiers were common during the Civil War, but this one was a little different: Coon had written it on the back of a label peeled from a can of Borden's Condensed Milk. Perhaps he was short on paper, or maybe Coon had just reached for the nearest writing surface available, peeling back the label from an empty can of milk to find a clean writing space. Either way, Coon's letter documents the presence of canned milk in the life of Union army camps.

The Civil War (1861–65) brought staggering changes to the United States. With over six hundred thousand casualties, it forced Americans to confront death and loss as never before. There were deep and lasting effects to economies, landscapes, and families — in both the North and the South, among blacks and whites. But amid the abolition of slavery and other colossal upheavals, one seemingly insignificant change resulted from the war: Americans of many stripes had tasted their first canned food. Like David Coon, most soldiers encountered canned foods — whether condensed milk, blueberries, or peaches — during the war, often for the first time in their lives. And when they came home, they brought with them an inclination to trust commercially canned food and to pass that familiarity on to their families. This change in taste and trust among soldiers would have a substantial impact on the ensuing rise of the food industry in the United States. Wartime encounters like Coon's began to pave the path for exposure that became crucial for the building of consumer confidence in formerly unknown processed foods.

Before the Civil War, canned foods had been used mostly in exceptional situations, rather than as part of regular meals. Although canning technology had existed for more than fifty years, canned food fed those who were on expeditions or at war, disconnected from sites of agricultural production. The average American consumer had limited experience with this new packaged product, and many feared the opacity of the unknown. To build an industry, canners had to turn their simple invention into a trustworthy commodity. In the years after the Civil War, canners built trust in their products through the projects of technical improvement, trade organization, federal regulation, and laboratory science. All of these served to increase production and dissemination of commercially canned goods. Although large-scale projects were carried out on the production side, they were explicitly a means toward the end of increased consumption and trust, remaining central to the growth of a processed-food market over the next 150 years.

A much wider world beyond the cannery office shaped the acceptance of processed food and felt the cascading effects of industrialization. Canners were involved in complex relationships with scientists, government officials, consumers, advertisers, and others. And the concerns that drove canners' decisions emerged from the cultural and consumer responses to this technology, as Americans negotiated how canned food affected their relationships with nature, health, and labor.

Along with the growth of the canning industry over the nineteenth century came a broader industrial revolution, of which canning was a part. The American Industrial Revolution saw a dramatic shift in people's relationships to nature and technology. Economic growth depended on abundant natural resources, and the exploitation of those natural resources in turn depended on a powerful technological infrastructure. As self-sufficient rural Americans shifted from using their own land and labor to buying factory-produced goods — from milking a family dairy cow to purchasing Borden's Condensed Milk, for example — their dependencies also shifted. They still relied on forces larger than themselves, but the forces of nature became less important than the forces of technological systems and networks. As historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan has written, Americans exchanged "nature for technology." Of course, the production of canned food was still intimately connected with the natural world, but the tin can's ability to transcend the bounds of geography and season embodied a conquest of nature through advanced technology.

Between 1810 and 1910, commercially canned food went from being totally unknown to being an increasingly familiar product. How did that transition happen? Before the rise of an organized industry, canned food served people who were away from home — at sea, in the wild, or at war. In the Civil War, American soldiers came to know canned food and to bring that knowledge home to their families. Between 1865 and 1905, canners developed numerous technologies that boosted production and lowered prices, making canned food more abundant and recognizable to average consumers. By 1910, the industry began to move away from the fragmentary structure of nineteenth century and to benefit from trade organization, as canning leaders came together to lobby for pure food legislation and to establish a national laboratory. With strength in numbers, canners began to use the language of science to build consumer trust and taste. By the second decade of the twentieth century, canners believed they had overcome the initial problems that held back their industry, laying the groundwork for deepened consumer confidence in the years to come.

FOOD ON THE MOVE: SERVING EXPLORERS AND SOLDIERS (1795–1865)

Before canners even began thinking about building trust among ordinary consumers, they got their start by catering to not-so-ordinary consumers. Commercial canning best served people who could not access fresh food products. The major canning centers of the first half of the nineteenth century — France, England, and the United States — were also countries with a mission of expansion during this same time. Canned food enabled imperial conquest, the exploration and settlement of new lands, and the provisioning of armies fighting for national unity. French and British colonialists, gold seekers in the American West, and Civil War soldiers all ate canned goods for the sustenance that fueled their ventures. For these people, canned food was more of a necessity than it was for average Americans in their homes, making a lack of trust in the unfamiliar canned product less of a barrier.

Seventy years before the Civil War, across the Atlantic Ocean, another military venture gave canned food its start. In 1795, much of Europe was caught up in the French Revolutionary Wars, as French armies took up arms...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520290682
• ISBN 13: 9780520290686
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar