Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry
264
Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry
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Overview
A century and a half ago, when the food industry was first taking root, few consumers trusted packaged foods. Americans had just begun to shift away from eating foods that they grew themselves or purchased from neighbors. With the advent of canning, consumers were introduced to foods produced by unknown hands and packed in corrodible metal that seemed to defy the laws of nature by resisting decay.
Since that unpromising beginning, the American food supply has undergone a revolution, moving away from a system based on fresh, locally grown goods to one dominated by packaged foods. How did this come to be? How did we learn to trust that food preserved within an opaque can was safe and desirable to eat? Anna Zeide reveals the answers through the story of the canning industry, taking us on a journey to understand how food industry leaders leveraged the powers of science, marketing, and politics to win over a reluctant public, even as consumers resisted at every turn.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520964754 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 03/06/2018 |
| Series: | California Studies in Food and Culture , #68 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Condensed Milk
The Development of the Early Canning Industry
In July 1864, David Coon, a member of the Thirty-Sixth Wisconsin Infantry Regiment, wrote a letter home to his wife and children. Such letters from soldiers were common during the Civil War, but this one was a little different: Coon had written it on the back of a label peeled from a can of Borden's Condensed Milk. Perhaps he was short on paper, or maybe Coon had just reached for the nearest writing surface available, peeling back the label from an empty can of milk to find a clean writing space. Either way, Coon's letter documents the presence of canned milk in the life of Union army camps.
The Civil War (1861–65) brought staggering changes to the United States. With over six hundred thousand casualties, it forced Americans to confront death and loss as never before. There were deep and lasting effects to economies, landscapes, and families — in both the North and the South, among blacks and whites. But amid the abolition of slavery and other colossal upheavals, one seemingly insignificant change resulted from the war: Americans of many stripes had tasted their first canned food. Like David Coon, most soldiers encountered canned foods — whether condensed milk, blueberries, or peaches — during the war, often for the first time in their lives. And when they came home, they brought with them an inclination to trust commercially canned food and to pass that familiarity on to their families. This change in taste and trust among soldiers would have a substantial impact on the ensuing rise of the food industry in the United States. Wartime encounters like Coon's began to pave the path for exposure that became crucial for the building of consumer confidence in formerly unknown processed foods.
Before the Civil War, canned foods had been used mostly in exceptional situations, rather than as part of regular meals. Although canning technology had existed for more than fifty years, canned food fed those who were on expeditions or at war, disconnected from sites of agricultural production. The average American consumer had limited experience with this new packaged product, and many feared the opacity of the unknown. To build an industry, canners had to turn their simple invention into a trustworthy commodity. In the years after the Civil War, canners built trust in their products through the projects of technical improvement, trade organization, federal regulation, and laboratory science. All of these served to increase production and dissemination of commercially canned goods. Although large-scale projects were carried out on the production side, they were explicitly a means toward the end of increased consumption and trust, remaining central to the growth of a processed-food market over the next 150 years.
A much wider world beyond the cannery office shaped the acceptance of processed food and felt the cascading effects of industrialization. Canners were involved in complex relationships with scientists, government officials, consumers, advertisers, and others. And the concerns that drove canners' decisions emerged from the cultural and consumer responses to this technology, as Americans negotiated how canned food affected their relationships with nature, health, and labor.
Along with the growth of the canning industry over the nineteenth century came a broader industrial revolution, of which canning was a part. The American Industrial Revolution saw a dramatic shift in people's relationships to nature and technology. Economic growth depended on abundant natural resources, and the exploitation of those natural resources in turn depended on a powerful technological infrastructure. As self-sufficient rural Americans shifted from using their own land and labor to buying factory-produced goods — from milking a family dairy cow to purchasing Borden's Condensed Milk, for example — their dependencies also shifted. They still relied on forces larger than themselves, but the forces of nature became less important than the forces of technological systems and networks. As historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan has written, Americans exchanged "nature for technology." Of course, the production of canned food was still intimately connected with the natural world, but the tin can's ability to transcend the bounds of geography and season embodied a conquest of nature through advanced technology.
Between 1810 and 1910, commercially canned food went from being totally unknown to being an increasingly familiar product. How did that transition happen? Before the rise of an organized industry, canned food served people who were away from home — at sea, in the wild, or at war. In the Civil War, American soldiers came to know canned food and to bring that knowledge home to their families. Between 1865 and 1905, canners developed numerous technologies that boosted production and lowered prices, making canned food more abundant and recognizable to average consumers. By 1910, the industry began to move away from the fragmentary structure of nineteenth century and to benefit from trade organization, as canning leaders came together to lobby for pure food legislation and to establish a national laboratory. With strength in numbers, canners began to use the language of science to build consumer trust and taste. By the second decade of the twentieth century, canners believed they had overcome the initial problems that held back their industry, laying the groundwork for deepened consumer confidence in the years to come.
FOOD ON THE MOVE: SERVING EXPLORERS AND SOLDIERS (1795–1865)
Before canners even began thinking about building trust among ordinary consumers, they got their start by catering to not-so-ordinary consumers. Commercial canning best served people who could not access fresh food products. The major canning centers of the first half of the nineteenth century — France, England, and the United States — were also countries with a mission of expansion during this same time. Canned food enabled imperial conquest, the exploration and settlement of new lands, and the provisioning of armies fighting for national unity. French and British colonialists, gold seekers in the American West, and Civil War soldiers all ate canned goods for the sustenance that fueled their ventures. For these people, canned food was more of a necessity than it was for average Americans in their homes, making a lack of trust in the unfamiliar canned product less of a barrier.
Seventy years before the Civil War, across the Atlantic Ocean, another military venture gave canned food its start. In 1795, much of Europe was caught up in the French Revolutionary Wars, as French armies took up arms to replace monarchic governments with liberal democracies across the continent. Frustrated by the difficulty of efficiently feeding soldiers on the march, the French government offered a prize of 12,000 francs (roughly $40,000 in the modern United States) to anyone who could devise a better method for provisioning troops. Soon-to-be emperor Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with saying, "An army marches on its stomach," capturing how important to successful military campaigns it was to provide wholesome food to soldiers. Among those who submitted proposals to the prize committee was Frenchman Nicolas Appert, who began as a confectioner and chef and ended up the "father of the canning industry." After experimenting with food preservation methods for years, he struck upon a technique of canning, or, in the words of his 1810 publication title, "The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years." Believing that heat held the key to food preservation, Appert turned to his stove. He packed a variety of foods in sealed containers and subjected them to different temperatures until he finally struck upon the right combination. He found that when he sealed foods — vegetables or fruit or meat — in airtight containers and cooked them in boiling water, the items would stay edible for long stretches of time afterward, though he did not understand the mechanism.
Appert proved his method by putting some of his preserved-food articles on ships that sailed around the world. When the ships returned to France, the food was still edible. Napoleon granted Appert the 12,000-franc prize in 1809. The modern method of canning, or "Appertizing," was born. One French newspaper commented, "M. Appert has discovered the art of fixing the seasons. With him spring, summer and autumn exist in bottles like delicate plants that are protected by the gardener under a dome of glass against the intemperance of the seasons." This highlighted the most revolutionary aspect of Appert's new method: the ability of humans to use technology in the fight against seasonal limitations and natural decay.
Canning was invented in France, but the canning industry soon flourished in England and later the United States. Several English firms that had given Appert financial assistance began production soon after 1810. One Englishman coined the term can to refer to the metal "canister" he preferred over the glass and ceramic crocks that Appert used. Tin-plated canisters largely replaced glass by the mid-nineteenth century, as steel lined with tin was both cheaper and less prone to breakage. The canning process came to the United States through several English immigrants, beginning around 1817, buoyed by the new country's surplus of meat and agricultural products and its rapid urbanization. Still, early American canners largely worked through a haphazard system, producing mostly delicacies like turtle soup that they sent abroad, as there was not yet a domestic consumer base. As one early observer commented, canned food was "a mere vehicle for pandering to the luxurious appetites of the wealthy."
The other major consumers were travelers on military or exploring expeditions. As one contemporary put it, canned food "rob[bed] scurvy of its dread, on the high seas, in the burning desert, or in the frozen polar regions." Typical provisions before the mid-nineteenth century consisted of beef, pork, beer, dried bread, cheese, oatmeal, peas, and flour. Stories of hungry sailors, rotten meat, insect-infested grains, and overall bad food run throughout records from the age of exploration. Cans not only provided variety but also helped preserve the health of sailors. Even after the discovery of vitamin C led sailors to eat limes to prevent scurvy, the wide adoption of canned food markedly improved nutrition. Still, many risks were involved in eating early canned goods — everything from the mild concern of food that tasted bad to the significant fear of lethal food poisoning. Those who encountered canned foods in this early phase may not have understood the bacterial cause of spoilage or the toxicity of leaching metals, but they saw enough swollen or rusted cans with rancid contents to understand that canned food was often limited by the same laws of decay that could spoil any food.
One case that vividly illustrates some of these early risks is that of Sir John Franklin's mid-nineteenth-century Arctic expedition. Franklin was a British explorer who famously mapped great swaths of North America's unexplored Arctic coast but met a premature end around 1845. For his final voyage, Franklin decided to bring along an extra ship loaded with enough canned food — a newly available item — to last three years. Instead, Franklin and his men were last seen in July 1845 in the Arctic, early in their expedition. Years later, the bones of expedition members were analyzed, and autopsies were performed on a few bodies that had been frozen solid and preserved. The investigation showed evidence of scurvy, pneumonia, and tuberculosis in some of the men. But the entire party also had elevated blood lead levels — an average of 228 parts per million (ppm) compared with 22 to 36 ppm in the bones of the Inuit who lived in the same area. One young man had lead levels of 600 ppm in his hair. Although the definitive cause of death is still not clear, forensic analysis offers lead poisoning as a central possibility, with the lead likely coming straight from the soldering of those tin cans on the extra ship.
At the time of Franklin's expedition, the technology for canning meat was less than forty years old, and cans were sealed with a solder of tin with a high lead content. This solder could have seeped into the contents of the can, causing classic lead poisoning symptoms: lack of appetite, fatigue, intestinal discomfort, and paranoia. The canned food, the very product that was intended to prevent the starvation that had ruined earlier expeditions, could have poisoned the men of the Franklin expedition. Here, taking Franklin's British case as a contrast with Napoleon's French one, we see how sustenance affected the success or failure of colonial interventions of the early nineteenth century. Simple imperial ambition was not enough to conquer foreign lands and develop new trade routes. Explorers and soldiers had to find a way to eat, even when they were far away from agricultural lands.
The story of these explorers and their deaths was widely publicized in England in the years after 1847. In the absence of a clear cause, speculation touched on all aspects of the expedition, with some wondering whether the unfamiliar canned food had poisoned the sailors. But this was idle speculation, because the canning industry was just getting started, both in England and in the United States, and had no organized way of responding. Further, no government structures existed for oversight or regulation of food during this time. Finally, even if canned food, when improperly soldered, could lead to death, it was still better than the alternative of starvation for explorers, making the gamble worth it. Even though the canning industry's reach had expanded significantly by the time an 1886 New York Times article commented on this gamble, the sentiment also applied to the earlier expeditions: "[This industry] is now a world's necessity. [Any shipmaster] would take the risk of poisoning his men, and they would prefer that he should. Of course, without the universal tins, exploration either of the desert or the poles would come to a full stop." For the average consumer, the risk calculus was understandably different, as the threat of starvation loomed less large at home.
Many settlers moving west in the United States also made use of canned foods. In the mid-nineteenth century, nearly half a million Americans made their way west to find land to settle, mine, farm, or ranch. Traveling by wagon along primitive trails, the travelers had to carry the majority of their food for the four- to six-month trip with them. They relied on foods that did not spoil easily and that were relatively lightweight: flour, cornmeal, bacon, sugar, coffee, dried vegetables and fruit, jerky, sugar. Some herded livestock along with their caravans or brought caged chickens aboard. But as the canning industry developed, some settlers decided to bring along foods canned in the East. Although they were heavier and their risk uncertain, canned foods offered exciting variety and "fresher" flavors. One 1848 advertisement in the New York Herald, titled "Good Living on the Way to California," marketed preserved food "such as roasted meats, poultry, soup, vegetables, fish, lobsters, oysters, clams, &c," which were "put up in canisters holding one and two pounds each, and retain perfectly their natural flavor and nutritious qualities for twenty-one years in any climate." Rusted tin cans often littered recently abandoned campsites along western trails. Massive western migration following the Gold Rush fueled the growth of the canning industry, helping to launch many new canning firms between 1850 and 1860. Historian Walter Prescott Webb described how tin cans could tell a story about a traveler's direction: "If he is going west, the camp is surrounded by tin cans and paper sacks, if he is going east it is littered with fieldlark feathers and rabbit-fur." Because canning production was centered in the eastern part of the United States, travelers who had made it to the West Coast and were returning home were unlikely to carry canned goods with them, instead having to rely on hunting and trapping.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ixIntroduction 1
1. Condensed Milk: The Development of the Early Canning Industry 10
2. Growing a Better Pea: Canners, Farmers, and Agricultural Scientists in the 1910s and 1920s 41
3. Poisoned Olives: Consumer Fear and Expert Collaboration 74
4. Grade A Tomatoes: Labeling Debates and Consumers in the New Deal 103
5. Fighting for Safe Tuna: Postwar Challenges to Processed Food 135
6. BPA in Campbell’s Soup: New Threats to an Entrenched Food System 163
Conclusion 186
Acknowledgments 195
Notes 199
Selected Bibliography 251
Index 261