A Matter of Convenience: The Food Industry in Postwar America

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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.