Sidney W. Mintz says he always took demand for granted. To study such tropical exports as sugar, cacao,
and rum, the anthropologist of Caribbean societies started in typical anthropological fashion in the early 1980s, by looking at what the production of those foods meant for the people living in the region themselves. But when he started thinking about where the products went and who used them, his focus shifted. How and why had sugar -- once little known in Europe -- become so important a part of the European diet? He began “to puzzle over what ‘demand’ really was, to what extent it could be regarded as ‘natural,’ what is meant by words like ‘taste’ and ‘preference’ and even ‘good,’” he wrote in Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. That widely acclaimed book has become a touchstone for many young scholars working in food studies, who are asking similar questions about other foods. Jane Dusselier, a graduate student at the University of Maryland at College Park, is studying how candy emerged as a commodity in turn-of-the-century America. When it was first made and sold in this country, people considered candy a frivolous luxury for women of means. To reach the middle class, advertisers in the 1890s saturated magazines such as The Ladies’ Home Journal with provocative images of bourgeois women treating themselves to bonbons. “Candy eating by white, middle-class women symbolized that indulgence was becoming increasingly proper,” said Ms. Dusselier in a recent conference presentation. “Candy ads were among the first to utilize the sexuality of women to communicate new, emerging values rooted in the transformation from a production economy to one based on increased consumption.” But real men didn’t eat candy -- or, at least, weren’t likely to admit it, until the second decade of the 20th century, when candy makers started changing the shape of their product. The “era of the delicate, dainty, breast-shaped bonbon,” in Ms. Dusselier’s words, gave way to “the decade of manly candy bars,” which, as one patent application put it, could be “stretched out or pulled down to any desired size.” Eventually, even lemon drops and Life Savers -- which the U.S. government included in war rations -- became associated with men. By the end of World War I, soldiers were eating great quantities of candy, which had been recast from a feminine indulgence to a masculine source of energy. Consumption had become a basic principle of freedom, and candy an expression of that freedom, Ms. Dusselier said. During about the same period, advertisers creating demand for newly mass-produced foods succeeded not only in selling goods but also in helping Americans adjust to the Industrial Age, according to Charlotte Biltekoff, a graduate student at Brown University. In 1891, the American Cereal Company waged a publicity campaign that led to a huge demand for rolled white oats -- a product previously reserved for animal feed. Suddenly, customers began to request Quaker Oats by name from their grocers. Over the next 25 years, said Ms. Biltekoff, “Americans saw a transition from a demand-driven market for basic foodstuffs that were sold in loose form by familiar grocers ... to the mass production of goods, a market that was dependent on the creation of demand,” and an environment that depended more on consumers’ relationships with corporate brand names than with their grocers. Advertisers served a “therapeutic role,” easing consumers’ adjustment to that new world in several ways, said Ms. Biltekoff. To help buyers accept the new distance from the sources of their food, corporations invented characters -- the Quaker Oats Quaker, the Campbell’s Kids -- that put a friendly face on anonymous manufacturers. They also presented their products “emerging from bucolic scenery” -- a can of soup superimposed on a tomato field, for example -- to link mass production with nature. Food companies frequently invited consumers to visit their factories andto mail in requests for samples and cookbooks -- gimmicks that “belied the growing power of manufacturers over consumers even as they contributed to it,” Ms. Biltekoff argued. And almost every ad for mass-produced food stressed that the product was made under the strictest hygienic standards -- a claim that responded not only to real worries about germs, but also to a “desire for control and boundary maintenance in a period of change and fluidity.” Advertisers also reassured white consumers that old social relations and racial hierarchies were in place by depicting maids and servants, like Aunt Jemima, in their ads. In 1916, the nation’s first self-service supermarket, Piggly Wiggly, opened in Memphis. There, as Ms. Biltekoff described it, consumers “walked methodically through aisles that navigated them past every package in the store, chose name-brand products with fixed prices from neat rows on shelves, and paid cash as they exited through narrow checkout lanes that discouraged conversation.” Buying food that way was much different from visiting the local grocer to shop and exchange neighborhood news. Thanks largely to advertising, Ms. Biltekoff argued, American consumers grew to accept the new economic, social, and cultural order. http://chronicle.com |
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