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Thumbs Book Reviews
Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America
By Laura Shapiro
Viking, 2004
Reviewed by Katherine Czapp
Laura Shapiro's graceful, well-researched, and delightfully entertaining
social history of American post-war home cooking and the commercial
food industry is revealing in some unexpected ways regarding the progress
of this history. Inspired by the connection between women and cooking,
an association, she suggests, that is "tantamount to a sex-linked
characteristic, less definitive than pregnancy, but just as difficult
to deflect," Shapiro asks whether women actually like to cook,
and whether it is important that they do cook. Furthermore, she casts
a discerning eye on how the relationship between the cook and the food
has changed over the past 50 years.
The commercial food industry had been making steady headway into American
kitchens and pantries in the decades before World War II with such familiar
and accepted products as canned meats, soups, factory-made fluffy white
bread, powdered gelatin mixes and ketchup. Because of the limitations
of factory production, however, such considerations as flavor, texture
and authenticity fell by the wayside, and were even deemed irrelevant
compared to qualities at which the industry excelled: sanitation, uniformity
and blandness. The more these factory qualities found their way into
home cooking, the more accepted they became, and "millions of American
palates adjusted to artificial flavors and then welcomed them; and consumers
started to let the food industry make a great many decisions on matters
of taste that people in the past had always made for themselves."
Immediately after the end of the war, the food industry set its sights
squarely on home cooking, determined finally to separate the cook from
any connection at all to the raw ingredients of dinner. Much of the
impetus for the great surge in packaged and highly processed foods that
followed World War II came from the wartime momentum of the industries
that had been created to provide field rations for US soldiers. The
industry was confident that it had ready and waiting customers for the
barrage of frozen, canned, dehydrated, powdered, and reconstituted food
items that it could so easily mass produce.
The excitement of the industry as evidenced by its endless, bewildering
innovations was palpable, but the products themselves were often hilarious
duds. Dehydrated orange juice, coffee, and potatoes had led to the novel,
but failed innovation of dehydrated wine, and, inexplicably, dehydrated
mineral water (just add water?). Meanwhile, the prototype of the TV
dinner was the airline meal, featuring a divided metal tray and lumps
of barely recognizable animal and vegetable.
What the food industry had not anticipated, however, was that its advertising
spin on ease of preparation ("You don't cook it!") might put
off home cooks who, although not averse to labor-saving devices, nevertheless
considered it a matter of pride and self-identity that they indeed did
actually cook the meals that they placed before their families. "Cooking,"
notes Shapiro, "had roots so deep and stubborn that even the mighty
fist of the food industry couldn't yank all of them up." Further,
many of the new products hurried to market were just too peculiar for
homemakers to embrace, such as deep-fried hamburgers in a can.
A long, strategic and largely behind-the-scenes battle ensued, as the
food industry schemers, abetted by marketing psychologists and magazine
and newspaper journalists devoted to their industry advertisers, devised
more and more insidious ways to break down the resistance of the American
homemaker to their products.
It comes almost as a shock to learn that at the same moment that Spam
and frozen fish sticks were becoming fixtures in the American diet,
such icons as Julia Child and James Beard were publishing their books
on authentic European cuisine to a ready and enthusiastic audience here
at home. Shapiro charts the careers of some of the best cooks in the
nation as they wrote books and hosted television programs with the intention
of introducing American home cooks to the simple secrets of traditional
European cuisine: fresh, honest raw ingredients, spices, wine, butter
and cream. In short order, though, most of them found it economically
expedient to bend to the influence of the packaged-food sponsors of
the programs that provided their paychecks. "Quick" meals
and menu shortcuts with brand name references to these packaged and
"ready mix" foods found their odious way into even "gourmet"
recipes. Meanwhile, in home economics classes in public schools, the
industry provided teaching materials and course syllabi for students.
"These mixes eliminate much of the tedious, uninteresting part
of the work for students," explained a 1955 magazine article. "Then,
too, mixes are in keeping with our speed era."
Food industry advertisers kept up a relentless assault on the homemaker,
as the foundations of traditional American home cooking began to erode.
At the same time, farming methods in this country were undergoing a
similar assault from "scientific" academic quarters. Small,
mixed farms were giving way to the industrial model of chemical-dependent
monocultures. The homemaker no longer would choose foods because of
season, climate or the regional produce of her hometown. Frozen, canned
and boxed foods were available year round, and by the 1960s even fresh
vegetables, fruits, meat and poultry had been so rigorously standardized
by factory farming that their blandness and disappointing texture would
defeat the technique of the most accomplished cook.
It looked as though the food industry finally had what it had always
wanted: a captive generation of consumers separated from both the origins
of fresh food and its traditional preparation, with no taste memory
of authentic produce. Raw food had been conquered. The home cooks who
had originally been deeply suspicious of the newfangled packaged foods
were now unfamiliar with anything else and had found their role as food
preparers for their families diminished and marginalized in the bargain.
It had been a tough struggle, though, and pockets of resistance remained.
Shapiro brings into focus two important events that occurred in February,
1963: Julia Child's television cooking program "The French Chef"
aired for the first time, and Betty Friedan's landmark book The Feminine
Mystique was published. Avid audiences were ready for both, and although
Child's viewer and Friedan's reader might not have been the same woman,
Shapiro points out that they were both "hearing the same words:
You can do this yourself, with your brains and your own two hands. You
don't need to get it from a package. You can take charge. You can stand
at the center of your own world and create something very good, from
scratch."
About the Reviewer
 Katherine Czapp was raised on a three-generation,
self-sufficient mixed family farm in rural Michigan. After studying Russian language
and literature at the University of Michigan, she is gratified to discover that the
skills and experiences of her anachronistic upbringing are useful tools in the 21st
century. She works independently as a three-season organic gardener and WAPF staff
editor. She and her husband Garrick live the slow life in Ann Arbor, Michigan. To
learn more about authentic sourdough bread recipes and to obtain a live culture
starter, visit www.realsourdoughbreadrecipe.com.
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