A Matter of Convenience: The Food Industry in Postwar America

20世纪50年代和60年代美国加工食品工业的非凡增长和发展是本世纪最令人惊叹和最重要的变革之一。这个行业从根本上改变了美国人吃什么，如何吃，在哪里吃，改变了人们的习惯，从购买生的，未加工的食品在家里准备，到购买预煮，预包装的食品。食品杂货店的大多数商品，包括新鲜农产品，都是经过高度加工的“方便”食品，这在短短50年内发生了急剧变化。正如最近几本书所强调的，美国人的饮食从来没有如此集中地含有糖、“坏”脂肪和快餐。 尽管如此，关于美国食品工业的起源，以及现代科学技术如何从根本上重塑其使命的学术研究却很少。 本计画将探讨这些议题，探讨联邦政府、食品加工业者、大学食品科技系在定义与形成战后食品工业时所扮演的协同作用。该项目将采用“方便”的概念，这是食品工业在战后时期对加工食品营销的一个想法，作为探索这些组织、战略和目标的一种手段。打开便利的黑盒子，我们可以看到大量关于大规模生产、大规模营销和大规模消费的技术不仅使生产工具标准化，而且使全世界人民的日常生活标准化。 该项目需要一个为期两年的研究课程，检查政府，大学和商业档案中的材料，并阅读大量的流行和贸易文献。 该项目将汇集军事史，性别研究，消费者研究，商业史以及技术和科学史方面的奖学金，以回答有关现代食品生产系统性质的问题：加工食品旨在解决什么问题，以及随着时间的推移，这是如何变化的？联邦政府和商业公司在塑造美国人的饮食中扮演了什么角色？食品工业与其他工业有何相似之处，又有何不同之处？究竟是什么样的“方便”，让工业食品和大众接受了工业食品？更广泛的影响，像这样的历史研究将把在食品行业出现问题时，该行业发出的危言耸听的呼喊和油嘴滑舌的安抚。此外，该项目将围绕“便利”和进步的问题开辟一系列新的学术和大众关注，并可能鼓励其他学者从世俗中寻找关于现代性及其后果的更大、根深蒂固的问题的答案。

PROJECT SUMMARY The extraordinary growth and development of the American processed food industry in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the most stunning and important transformations in this century. This industry changed fundamentally what, how, and where Americans eat, shifting people's habits from buying raw, unprocessed foods to be prepared at home, towards buying precooked, pre-packaged foods. Most of what grocery stores carry, including fresh produce, is highly processed "convenience" food, a sharp change in just fifty years. As several recent books have emphasized, the diets of Americans have never been so concentrated with sugars, "bad" fats, and fast food. Despite all this, there is little scholarship on the origins of the food industry in America, and the ways in which modern science and technology have fundamentally reshaped its mission. This project will explore those issues by examining the synergistic role of the federal government, food processors, and university departments of food science and technology in defining and forming the post-war food industry. The project will employ the notion of "convenience," an idea that the food industry attached to the marketing of processed foods in the post-war era, as a vehicle for exploring those organizations, strategies and goals. Opening the black box of convenience reveals a great deal about how the technologies of mass-production,mass-marketing, and mass consumption have standardized not only the tools of production, but also the daily routines of people worldwide. The project calls for a two-year course of research to examine materials in government, university, and business archives, and to read the vast amount of popular and trade literature on the subject. INTELLECTUAL MERIT This project will draw together scholarship in military history, gender studies, consumer studies, business history, and the history of technology and science to answer questions about the nature of the modern food production system: what problems were processed foods designed to solve,and how did this change over time? what has been the role of the federal government and commercial firms in shaping the American diet? in what ways is the food industry similar to, and in what ways different from, other industries? how has a desire for "convenience," however defined, led the industry and the public to embrace industrial foods? BROADER IMPACTS A historical study such as this will put in perspective both the alarmist outcries and the glib reassurances of the industry that are issued when trouble appears in the food sector. In addition, the project will open up a new set of scholarly as well as popular concerns around the issue of "convenience" and progress, and may encourage other scholars to look to the mundane for answers to the larger, entrenched questions regarding modernity and its ramifications.