”Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, and Rudolf Valentino, the era’s movie idols, promoted the idea of being thin. This replaced the “plump” image of the previous decade, exemplified by Diamond Jim or Lillian Russell, a couple of decades ago.
Home economic classes and a plethora of women’s magazines helped America on its new ideal of body image – the war against fat.
“American women were ready to cut their hair, step out into jobs, and have a good time.” But, at the same time, American women were becoming dependent on their own cooking and household skills. The result was that between 1921 and 1929, the home appliance industry tripled its output. The kitchen was considered the workstation whereas; eating was almost always done in an adjoining breakfast room or dining room.
“The May issue of Women’s Home Companion publishes an article that includes the lines, “with the revolution in clothes has come a revolution in our attitude toward avoirdupois (weight). Once weight was an asset: Now it’s a liability, both physical and esthetic.” This reflects a new attitude of women with a new body image.
In January 1920, Prohibition goes into effect, although drinking will continue and will lead to underground establishments known as “speakeasies”. Prohibition leads to an increase in sales of coffee, soft drinks, and ice cream sodas. Many bars convert to soda fountains or tearooms to stay in business.
Looks Good Enough to Eat
By 1927, there were 20 million cars cruising over 600,000 miles of roads connecting U.S. cities and towns. All those drivers needed to eat somewhere, and to get their attention on the open road, restaurants took on a whole new shape – literally. Diners and coffee shops were built to look like doughnuts, ice cream cones, coffeepots, hot dogs and yes, pigs. While these establishments provided only mediocre food, they supplied plenty of atmosphere and maybe even more important, offered quick and consistent meals. The whimsically shaped spots would pave the way or the drive-ins and chain restaurants of the future.
Fast Food
The first White Castle hamburger stand opens in 1921 in Wichita, Kan. The white of the stones suggest cleanliness; the castle facade suggests stability. The little burgers cost 5 cents apiece and are marketed with the slogan “Buy ‘em by the sack.” Paper napkins come on the market in 1925, and the White Castle locations follow by developing folding paper hats that can changed often. “Program-mic” hot dog-shape kiosks and cone shape stands architecture becomes the rage in restaurants.”
Flappers
“No one knows how the word flapper entered American slang, but its usage first appeared just following World War I. The classic image of a flapper is that of a stylish young party girl. Flappers smoked in public, drank alcohol, danced at jazz clubs and practiced sexual freedom that shocked the Victorian morality of their parents. Many pictures depict them wearing a tight-fitting cloche.
However, the good times were all about to change – in October, 1929, the stock market crashed and the country was faced with the worst economic trial of its history.
Source:
Beverly Bundy. The Century in Food: America’s Fads and Favorites, Collector’s Press, Inc. 2002
The American Century in Food. Bon Appetit, September, 1999.
The decade reflected high living, high prices, the introduction of income taxes, women’s suffrage, World War 1, an influenza pandemic that killed between 20 million and 50 million people and prohibition. “Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan, a Prohibitionist, served grape juice instead of wine at a 1913 dinner for the British ambassador. By 1919, the Temperance League had won out and the sale and distribution of alcohol was banned. In 1920, saloons were shuttered, and distilleries closed.”
Cooking For Health???
Coca Cola had entered the food market in 1910; at the same time, Nathan franks entered the culture that now included, railroads with deluxe dining, grocery stores, frozen foods and refrigerators.
By 1912 an organic substance (later named vitamin) is discovered by American chemist, Casimer Funk.
In 1894, the USDA published its first food recommendations through a Farmers’ Bulletin, suggesting diets for males based on content of protein, carbohydrate, fat and mineral matter. In 1916, Caroline Hunt, a nutritionist, wrote the first USDA food guide, Food for Young Children. Milk and meat, cereals, vegetables and fruits, fats and fatty foods, and sugars and sugary foods made up five food groups. Then How to Select Foods addressed recommendations for the general public based on those five food groups in 1917. (Can you believe the fat and sugary foods groups ???
Crisco Sandwich?
“Proctor and Gamble introduced Crisco, the first solid vegetable shortening. The product is hard to sell to women who had been taught to cook with lard and/or butter. To promote its produce, the manufacturer suggested glazing sweet potatoes with brown sugar and Crisco and spreading sandwiches with Crisco mixed with an egg yolk.” YUM!!!
Convenience: Self-service Grocery Stores
In 1912, change began to replace the grocery store with self-service “supermarkets”. Previously, a shopper would hand a list to the clerk to retrieve the items from shelves behind the counter – a time-consuming process. George Hartford established the first Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. which he called the A&P “Economy Store”. A clerk still took the orders, but the store did not offer credit or delivery and saved costs with lower prices. In Memphis, Clarence Saunders continued the trend in 1916 when he began the Piggly Wiggly chain. Customers followed a serpentine route past all 600-plus items on shelves (a huge selection for the time) but there were still long lines. Still, this process began the key factors in the emergence of distinctive packaging, advertising, and brand recognition. Everything from pasta to tamales went into cans, the technology for electric refrigeration was developed, and the frozen-food industry got its start.
People Were Talking About….
Clarence Birdseye, who after spending a winter in Newfoundland, noticed that fish caught and left in the frigid air froze immediately and tasted good after being thawed and cooked. This inspired him to pioneer the commercial frozen food industry.
George Washington Carver and the 300-plus products he developed based on peanuts and the 118 products based on sweet potatoes. His research gave southern farmers ruined by boll weevil infestations a reason to plant crops other than cotton.
Luther Burbank and his 12-volume work, Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Applications. Burbank’s extensive cross-breeding of plants led to the development of the Burbank, or russet potato, which would make Idaho famous.
Household Appliances
This decade was the era of household appliances. “Middle-class households were used to having at least one live-in servant. As household help began to leave for better jobs, housewives had to do for themselves – a monumental task. For example, the laundry which was a two-day affair. The arrival of mechanical help is heaven sent. An item as mundane as a porcelain range – no more blackening, no more polishing removed one two-hour chore. By 1911 electric chafing dishes, skillets, grills, toasters, percolators, waffle irons, and stand-up mixers were introduced along with the very welcomed electric ranges, and basic refrigerators, invented in 1915.”
Must have been a very Merry Christmas for these ladies!
COVID-19 strikes with alarming inconsistency. Most recover quickly while others die. The disease devastates some communities and spares others. Understanding why and how COVID-19 preys on some and not others is essential to limiting its spread and mitigating its impact.
Prevention, averting, detecting, and restricting disease, is always better than even the most effective treatment. In the first place, We need answers to verify the findings of any new promising study.
Ever wonder why some places on the globe suffer from the virus so differently than others? Can the Blue Zones populations give us some answers?
Diet culture has a long history of fads and facts. In the U.S., there have been multitudes of “diets” designed for health with more emphasis on weight loss than in other countries over the last century. Why is our national obsession on the relationship of dietary fat been the prominent discourse? A little history may help.
English: “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“ The turkey is certainly one of the most delightful presents which the New World has made to the Old.” Brillat Savarin.
Most of the traditional Thanksgiving foods we now eat on this holiday are foods that originated or were Native to the Americas. The word for turkey in French is dinde, short for poulet d’inde since they thought that the turkey came from the West Indies of Columbus days. The turkey was popular in England before the Pilgrims came in 1620.
Turkeys don’t migrate so they were some of the first Native Americans and were available all year. Turkeys are easy to hunt – when one is shot, the others freeze in place. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t encourage shooting turkeys – we have lots of wild turkeys here in Western North Carolina. Many times I’ve had to stop and wait until they cross the road. I once encountered a few hens walking in the woods, followed by a male who wanted to impress them by making a racket and spreading his tail feathers – of course, the “girls” totally ignored him and went on without a nod – I kind of felt sorry for him
Potatoes had reached Europe early in the Columbian Exchange (thanks to Christopher Columbus). Potatoes had an interesting history – they were native to Peru, a Spanish colony and enemy of England, and went from Peru to Europe and then returned to New Hampshire with Scottish-Irish settlers in 1723. It is thought that the idea of mashing them with butter and milk also came form Scottish-Irish influence.
Cranberries were native to New England. Cranberries and blueberries were mashed with sour milk and used as paint as well as for food. To this day, these colors or variations of these colors are used in New England colonial homes.
Many types of squash had reached Europe, but pumpkin was unknown at that time. Pumpkin was used in the early colonies, but did not appear in cookbooks until Amelia Simmons in 1796 wrote the first printed American cookbook. She referred to it as “pomkin”. You may prefer pecan pie – and these are also of American origin. Originating in central and eastern North America and the river valleys of Mexico, pecans were widely used by pre-colonial residents.
Cornbread and sweet potatoes (both being native to the Americas) round out our traditional Thanksgiving fare. Archaeological studies indicate that corn was cultivated in the Americas at least 5600 years ago and American Indians were growing corn long before Europeans landed here. The probable center off origin is the Central American and Mexico region but since the plant is found only under cultivation, no one can be sure.
The sweet potato has a rich history and interesting origin. It is one of the oldest vegetables known to mankind. Scientists believe that the sweet potato was domesticated thousands of years ago in Central America. Christopher Columbus took sweet potatoes back home to Europe after his first 1492 voyage. Sweet potatoes spread through Asia and Africa after being introduced in China in the late 16th century.
So as you enjoy your Thanksgiving this year, give thanks to the Americas for our traditional foods that are truly “made in America”.
BTW –Many of the foods we find on our Thanksgiving table today, weren’t available back when the colonists celebrated the First Thanksgiving in Plymouth. The first historical descriptions of the first Thanksgiving do not mention turkey – only “wild fowl” (not identified) and five deer. The party was in 1621 with fifty-one Pilgrim men, women, and children hosting ninety men of the Wampanoag tribe and their chief, Massasoit. It was in the fall to celebrate the good harvest of corn (wheat and barley weren’t as successful) and lasted three days.
Have a great Thanksgiving Day from Food, Facts & Fads and STAY SAFE. SJF
October brings thoughts of fall, Halloween, and witches and the witch trials that occurred in 1692 in a fragile Puritan Community, Salem Village, Massachusetts. The theory most often cited was that ergot poisoning from rye bread was to blame – on further evaluation, history “experts” disqualify this theory and others are brought to mind. The following article by Nik DeCosta Klipa explains:
“When the decade started, America was recognized for the first time as a world power. “The Wright Brothers took flight, Henry Ford took to the road, travelers took the rails aboard luxury trains, and those who had one listened to the radio. The first feature film (The Great Train Robbery) provided entertainment, and Einstein provided a relative theory. “
There was not much progress in the home kitchen. Housewives still slaved over a hot stove fueled by wood, coal or petroleum. Restaurants (both low and high end) often segregated their rooms by sex and/or race, and boasted they were fireproof. Restaurants ranged from oyster houses to exclusive dining rooms that offered both French and English cooking that often only included high society gentlemen.
Fine Dining
In 1902, Horn & Hardart, the first automat was introduced as the first “automatic restaurant” concept in the U.S. along with cafeterias and soda fountains that launched the fast-food industry, “a whole new style of “eating out”. Train dining was an elegant affair in its early years. Airline food would only appear three decades later.
Meet Me in St. Louis: The World’s Fair
Peanut butter, ice cream cone, the hamburger, and iced tea had not been on the American Plate in 1904 until introduced at the St. Louis World’s Fair that ushered in a new era in American dining.
Novelist, Upton Sinclair, whose 1905 best seller, The Jungle covered, among other topics, the unsavory practices of American meat-packers. The book was so shocking that Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.
Diamond Jim and Lillian Russell
Financier, Jim Brady, aka Diamond Jim lived a life with food abundance along with his companion, actress Lillian Russell. It was considered at the time that being overweight was a sign of affluence and success. Dinner, his main event featured three dozen oysters, a dozen crabs, six or seven lobsters, terrapin soup, a steak, coffee, a tray of pastries and two pounds of candy. He died at 56, his stomach was said to be six times larger than the average. Lillian was known to match Brady “ forkful for forkful.” The fair Lillian was hefty (considered the ideal for the times.) She was reported to have smoked 500 cigars a month. Grove’s Tasteless Chili Tonic made in St. Louis not only claimed to cure everything, but also adds much-admired heft to the figure.
In 1912 “Immigrants pour into the country ” – between 1910 and 1924, 12 million come through Ellis Island. All are screened for communicable diseases and overall health status. This event began the beginning of a myriad of ethnic restaurants.
The 1950’s brought a renewed hope for the country after two decades of Depression and War. However, food historians deplore the state of the cuisine during this period – it mainly consisted of processed foods which many blame for this anti-gastronomic desert. In addition, the rise of the fast food industry, i.e. hamburger chains that sprouted up along side the newly build national highway system did not offer any better fare. Freeing Mom from the kitchen seemed to be the dominant theme as appliances and prepared foods became the ‘norm”.
TV Dinners
After WWII, America’s economy boomed, women entered the workforce as never before and food got a little strange. Housewives spent less time in the kitchen, so food companies came to the rescue with a buffet of processed foods. Foods were purchased in a can, package or pouch. Soups were available as liquids or in dry form. Tang landed on supermarket shelves and frozen dinners laid on trays in front of TV sets. TV dinners were introduced in 1953 by Swanson and with a flick of a wrist you could turn back the foil to display turkey in gravy, dressing, sweet potatoes and peas ready in about 30 minutes – all with no dishes to wash.
Better Living Through Chemistry
“Better Living through Chemistry” was the slogan of the times along with “I like Ike” referring to the popular Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 5-star general from WWII winning the U.S presidency from 1953 to 1961. This change in processing came from the demand of the Army during WWII to provide needed ready-to-eat meals. The food industry responded by ramping up new technologies in canning and freeze-drying to feed the troops. The marketing of these foods presented a challenge, however. At first, many of them were less than palatable, so food companies hired home economists to develop fancy recipes and flooded magazines, newspapers and TV with ads to broadcast their virtues. Actually the first cake mix was available in 1931, but was met with disdain due to the use of dehydrated eggs, e.g. Women later would respond more favorably if they could crack their own eggs into the batter so they would feel like they were doing something positive in the kitchen.
June Cleaver
People rushed to buy appliances, houses, cars, dishwashers, washing machines, dryers and backyard barbecue grills and new home freezers. They also bought television sets in record numbers and watched shows that represented their new idealized lives like Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. Beaver’s mother, June Cleaver was depicted as a housewife freed from household chores and often was serene and perfectly dressed with pearls and high heels pushing a vacuum cleaner and putting meals on the family table, all before solving the family problems.
Fast Food Nation
The birth rate soared and created what is known as the Baby Boomer Generation. Fifty million babies were born from 1945 to 1960. Food marketing shifted to kids with Tony the Tiger and fish sticks leading the campaign. Fast food had its beginnings strengthened in 1955 when Ray Kroc bought a hamburger stand from the McDonald’s brothers in San Bernadino, California. Disneyland opened in 1955 and was so popular they ran out of food on the first day.
The Seven Countries Study
In 1958, the American scientist, Ancel Keys started a study called the Seven Countries Study, which attempted to establish the association between diet and cardiovascular disease in different countries. The study results indicated that in the countries where fat consumption was the highest also had the most heart disease. This suggested the idea that dietary fat caused heart disease. He initially studied 22 countries, but reported on only seven: Finland, Greece, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, United States, and Yugoslavia.
The problem was that he left out:
Countries where people eat a lot of fat but have little heart disease, such as Holland and Norway and France.
Countries where fat consumption is low but the rate of heart disease is high, such as Chile.
Basically, he only used data from the countries that supported his theory. This flawed observational study gained massive media attention and had a major influence on the dietary guidelines of the next few decades, i.e. cut the fat out of our diets.
The First Artificial Sweetener
In the diet world, Saccharin was manufactured in granules and became a popular sugar substitute for dieters. It was first produced in 1878 by a chemist at Johns Hopkins University, but became popular after sugar shortages in WWI and WWII. In the United States, saccharin is often found in restaurants in pink packets as “Sweet’n Low”. It was banned later but it remains on the market today. The basis for the proposed ban was a study that documented an increase in cancer in rats being fed saccharin. The “Delaney clause” of the Food Additive Amendments to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act states that no substance can be deemed safe if it causes cancer in humans or animals. In suspending the proposed saccharin ban, Congress ordered that products containing the popular sweetener must carry a warning about its potential to cause cancer. The FDA formally lifted its proposal to ban the sweetener in 1991 based on new studies, and the requirement for a label warning was eliminated by the Saccharin Notice Repeal Act in 1996.
TIMELINE:
1951 I Love Lucy debuts on CBS.
1952 The Lipton food company rolls out its dehydrated onion soup that will earn it fame as a base for onion soup mix: 2 envelopes of mix plus 1 cup of sour cream. Lipton eventually prints the recipe, “California Dip” on the package.
1953 Eggo Frozen Waffles are introduced.
1954 Employee Gerry Thomas from the C.A. Swanson Co, has an idea (although fellow workers nearly laughed him out of the Omaha plant): package the left-over turkey, along with some dressing, gravy, cornbread, peas and sweet potatoes into a partitioned metal tray, sell it frozen, and consumers could heat it up for dinner. His name for the leftover meal: TV Dinner.
1954 The first Burger King opens in Miami. A burger is 18 cents, as is a milkshake. The Whopper is introduced in 1957 and sells for 37 cents.
1955 Milkshake-machine salesman, Roy Kroc tries to persuade Dick and Mac McDonald (owner of the original McDonalds in California) to franchise their concept. They aren’t interested but tell Kroc to go ahead and try his hand. Kroc opens his first restaurant in Des Plains, ILL., and eventually buys out the McDonalds.
1956 Jif Peanut Butter is introduced.
1956 More than 80 percent of U.S. households have refrigerators. By contrast, only 8 percent of British households have refrigerators.
1957 Better Homes and Gardens prints its first microwave-cooking article.
1957 Margarine sales take the lead over butter.
1958 Eighteen- year-old Frank Carney sees a story in the Saturday Evening Post about the pizza fad among teenagers and college students. With $600 borrowed from his mother, he and his fellow Wichita State classmate, opens the first Pizza Hut in Wichita, KS.
It’s Pumpkin time!! By the 1800’s, pumpkin pie was a necessity at most Thanksgiving celebrations. If you have ever heard the famous poem about Thanksgiving by Lydia Maria Child in 1842:
“Over the river and through the wood, to grandfather’s house we go” ends with “Hurrah for the pumpkin pie”.
Northeastern Indians used squash more than other Indians in early America and did favor pumpkin the most. They baked them by putting them in the embers of a fire, then moistened them with maple syrup or honey or some type of fat and then turned it into a soup. In 1705, the town of Colchester, Connecticut postponed the holiday for a week due to a molasses shortage to make the pies.
The first known American cookbook was American Cookery by Amelia Simmons in 1796 that included a recipe for “pompkin” pie. Later in 1805, a recipe for pumpkin pie appeared in the Art of Cookery Made Plain and Simple by Mrs. Hannah Glasse.
“Take the pumpkin and peel the rind off, then stew it till is quite soft and put thereto one pint of pumpkin, one pint of milk, one glass of malaga wine one glass of rose-water, if you like, seven eggs, half a pound of fresh butter, one small nutmeg, and sugar and salt to your taste:”
In 1929, Libby’s meat-canning industry made pumpkin preparation easier by offering its famous canned pumpkin with its traditional recipe on the label. My mother would have appreciated the Libby’s version. I remember her talking about making her first pumpkin pie and neglecting to strain the stringy pulp from the pumpkin itself. Next time you open a can, please think kindly of her and in her day, there may not have been canned pumpkin. Her first pie was probably around 1924.
The only problem is the sugar content found in pies – as for my pumpkin disaster, I forgot the sugar one year and it was awful. But who is counting sugar grams on Thanksgiving? For the few that are – 1 serving has 253 cals, 3 grams of fiber, 32 grams of carbohydrate and about 19.7 grams of sugar (5 tsp). Pumpkin is also loaded with vitamin A in the form of beta-carotene (a powerful antioxidant). Happy Holiday!!!
Bone marrow soup and sautéed snails, delicacies in France, passions to many are absolutely disgusting to others. Horsemeat is popular in a large area of North Central Asia, but rigidly avoided by many people in Islamic countries. Sautéed snails eyes are delicacies in France; kidney pie is traditional in England. Dog is a popular food in Borneo, New Guinea, and the Philippines where snake is a delicacy in China. In some countries, People enjoying insects are fit only for animal feed in other cultures. And then there steamed clams and raw oysters, food passions for some, but absolutely disgusting to others. When did you first say Yuck! to the above list?
A 12th century scholar, Maimonides included pigs on his taboo and declared them “unlean” list due to rapid spoilage of pork in in hot climates and in their despicable habit of rooting garbage. However other animals such as goats have the same habit. Pork attained its unique status in 165 B.C as a taboo and enraged the Jews leading to war. As a result, they retook Jerusalem celebrating Hanukkah in the Roman world.
The fledging Christians pointed instead of Roman rules, to the book of Matthew in the New Testament.;” It’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but that what comes out”, the good book says.
“Burger chomping” Americans express incomprehension over the sacred status cattle in India, where the 1947 Constitution spells out the right of cows. Yet those same Americans would never think of eating whale, monkey, dog, cat or parrot that Americans consider companion animals. Many Americans would consider that the deepest food taboo of all.”
“However, hunger still overrides food aversions from any origin. When German armies laid siege to Paris in 1870, cutting off the cities from country farms and gardens, many bourgeois restaurants offered delicacies such as rat ragu and saddle of cat. “Many simply say – “tastes just like chicken”
Sources: Judith E. Brown, Nutrition Now, 7th Edition
Harris, David Lyon, Sue McLaughlin. The Meaning of Food: The Companion to the PBS Television Series Hosted by Marcus, Samuelsson, 2005.
FOOD, FACTS and FADS 