Literally, the reason food went to shit in the '50s was because that’s when all the shelf-stable and processed “convenience foods” that had been invented for WWII started getting heavily marketed to the public.
I mean… you have to imagine a world without refrigeration. Now it’s ubiquitous, we have it everywhere, you can even get portable battery-powered refrigeration boxes. But at the time, cold meant icebox… literally a box that you put a big block of ice in to keep other stuff cold.
You say “food went to shit” but all those things were a real change to the previous millennia of salted meats and pickled vegetables because there was no other way to keep food edible until the next harvest. It was new and interesting.
It was also tied up in modernist space-age utopian ideals about freeing housewives from drudgery and whatnot, and from that perspective, it wasn’t a bad thing.
But in retrospect (especially 2020s retrospect, seeing how corporations coopt and enshittify everything), the extent to which it was driven by cynical, gimmicky marketing is pretty darn repulsive. Think about how we have an entire generational set of “traditions” that are basically fake, invented by marketers:
green bean casserole became a thing to sell Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and French’s Crispy Fried Onions.
Betty Crocker was never a real person, but rather the persona of General Mills’ marketing department.
Fuckin’ Santa Claus as we picture him in the US is basically a genericized Coca-Cola trademark.
Basically, every recipe from the '50s, if it says “one can of X” or “one box of Y” instead of having proper quantity measurements, was created as a ploy to sell those convenience foods and there’s something deeply cynical about that.
I dunno, maybe I just find it extra eerie because I understand it as the harbinger of the new gilded-age cyberpunk dystopia that we’ve created since then.
Kraft Heinz (makers of JELL-O) propaganda.
Literally, the reason food went to shit in the '50s was because that’s when all the shelf-stable and processed “convenience foods” that had been invented for WWII started getting heavily marketed to the public.
I mean… you have to imagine a world without refrigeration. Now it’s ubiquitous, we have it everywhere, you can even get portable battery-powered refrigeration boxes. But at the time, cold meant icebox… literally a box that you put a big block of ice in to keep other stuff cold.
You say “food went to shit” but all those things were a real change to the previous millennia of salted meats and pickled vegetables because there was no other way to keep food edible until the next harvest. It was new and interesting.
It was also tied up in modernist space-age utopian ideals about freeing housewives from drudgery and whatnot, and from that perspective, it wasn’t a bad thing.
But in retrospect (especially 2020s retrospect, seeing how corporations coopt and enshittify everything), the extent to which it was driven by cynical, gimmicky marketing is pretty darn repulsive. Think about how we have an entire generational set of “traditions” that are basically fake, invented by marketers:
Basically, every recipe from the '50s, if it says “one can of X” or “one box of Y” instead of having proper quantity measurements, was created as a ploy to sell those convenience foods and there’s something deeply cynical about that.
I dunno, maybe I just find it extra eerie because I understand it as the harbinger of the new gilded-age cyberpunk dystopia that we’ve created since then.