Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (12 page)

In the days after Charles Mortimer’s exhortation to be more imaginative, the company’s cereal executives out in Battle Creek, Michigan, showed their own flair for thinking grandly. In 1961, they came up with an invention that could take the place of an entire real breakfast. It was another powdered drink, initially called Brim, and it was promoted as “breakfast in a glass.” The popularity of this new “instant breakfast” was guaranteed by its sweetness. Then, two years later, the Post inventors came closest of all to replicating the cake that Mortimer’s daughter ate for breakfast. They tooled their production plant to turn out two ribbons of pastry dough. A sweet fruity mash was smeared on the top of one, which was then covered by the other to make a sandwich that was cut into squares with edges crimped and then baked. These were called Pop-ups, and they met all of Mortimer’s criteria for convenience: They came in a box, could stay on the shelf for months, could be eaten on the go, and could be served hot without even needing to light the stove. The toaster would do. As with most food inventions, the sure sign of success was the speed with which it was copied. A few months after the squares were introduced, Post’s rival, Kellogg, executed an even more successful version of this breakfast pastry, which had scant amounts of actual fruit but loads of sugar,
as much as 19 grams—more than four teaspoons—each. Called Pop-Tarts, some of the twenty-nine varieties make no pretense of being anything other than cake for breakfast, or cookies at least. Among the flavors: Chocolate Chip, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Chocolate Fudge, Cookies and Creme, and S’mores.

The real beauty of this convenience was its elasticity.
When sales flattened out forty years later, Pop-Tarts would be promoted not as a warm breakfast food, but as a “cold afternoon treat.” Sales shot up 25 percent, according to Kellogg’s account of its 2003 marketing campaign, when it found a rich snacking target:
“The 30 million tweens aged 9–14 who possess an estimated $38 billion in spending power.”

E
very year in New York City, the top executives of companies that sold a wide range of goods gathered together under the auspices of the Conference Board, an august association best known today for conducting the “consumer confidence” survey. In 1955, the dinner speaker was Charles Mortimer, and he got right to the point. Food, clothing, and shelter were still important, he told the crowd. But now there was a fourth essential element of life that could be “expressed in a single word—convenience—spelled out with a capital ‘C.’ ”

“Convenience is the great additive which must be designed, built in, combined, blended, interwoven, injected, inserted, or otherwise added to or incorporated in products or services if they are to satisfy today’s demanding public. It is the new and controlling denominator of consumer acceptance or demand.”

There is convenience of form, he said, citing the Gaines-Burger dog food patties that Clausi had invented to be as soft as hamburger but so durable that they could sit on the pantry shelf until needed. There is convenience of time, like the grocery stores throughout America that were starting to stay open in the evenings to accommodate increasing numbers of women who worked outside the home. And there is convenience of packaging, like beer in bottles that used to have to be hauled back to the store but were now disposable, and the aluminum foil pie pans that were showing up on the grocery shelves.

“Modern Americans are willing to pay well for this additive to the products they purchase,” Mortimer told the executives. “Not because of
any native laziness but because we are willing to use our greater wealth to buy fuller lives and we have, therefore, better things to do with our time than mixing, blending, sorting, trimming, measuring, cooking, serving, and all the other actions that have gone into the routine of living.”

As if on cue, time-saving gadgets and gizmos started arriving in the grocery store that year that helped the modern homemaker trade a little more of her new wealth for some extra time away from the kitchen. Ready-to-bake biscuits appeared in tubes that could be opened by merely tugging a string. Special detergents came out for electric dishwashers that had special compounds to get off the water spots. One entrepreneurial firm even made plastic lids with spouts that snapped on cans of milk or syrup for easier pouring.

As more food companies followed his lead and conveniences arrived in every last aisle in the supermarket, there was only one real obstacle to the social transmutation that Mortimer had envisioned: the army of school teachers and federal outreach workers who insisted on promoting home-cooked meals, prepared the old-fashioned way. These educators numbered in the tens of thousands, and they were spread throughout the country, teaching kids and young homemakers not only how to cook from scratch but also how to shop to avoid processed food. Those preaching this ideal included a few thousand government employees known as extension agents, who worked for the federal and state departments of agriculture and who made house calls to teach young homemakers the ins and outs of gardening, canning, and meal planning with nutrition in mind. The main force of this army, however, was the twenty-five thousand teachers who taught the high school classes known as home economics. Home Ec was the field of formal study that taught how to manage a home and community.

If there was anyone who epitomized the Home Ec teacher, it was a thirty-year-old former farmgirl named Betty Dickson. She had been raised in York County, South Carolina, a heavily wooded and historic part of the Piedmont region just to the south and west of Charlotte, which had been developed by Scotch-Irish settlers in 1750. The main crop on her parent’s
farm was cotton, but they also grew their own vegetables. Dickson learned to cook from her mother, without even the convenience of a freezer. She made it to college and earned her teaching credentials, but it was these practical, low-tech skills from the farm that she passed on to her high school students.
“It was teaching the basics,” Dickson recalled. “They knew how to boil water, or maybe not all of them. But we did the basic skills in preparing and making biscuits, or meat, vegetables, and desserts.” Part of the class work was simply learning how to shop. The town had a small grocery, where she could immerse the students in dos and don’ts. She had them prepare shopping lists to avoid buying those things they didn’t need and “to compare prices, because money was not as free as it would be.”

Dickson belonged to the American Home Economics Association, whose founder, Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards, had parlayed her training in chemistry at MIT into a career as a consumer activist. Richards tested commercial foods for toxic contaminants; lobbied for nutritious, inexpensive cooked food in the home and at school; and pushed back on the notion that “convenience” should be owned and controlled by the processed food companies. Homemakers could do convenience, too, and even better, the association argued. To help make its case, the association conducted a two-layer cake experiment in 1957 that pitted a commercial mix against a homemade batter. As reported in the association’s journal, the homemade cake not only cost less and tasted better, it took only five minutes more than the commercial mix to prepare, cook, and serve. Moreover, for extra convenience, the homemade mix could be made and stored in big batches, for quick parceling out when a cake was needed.

But the world that Dickson and the other home economics teachers were fighting for, a society that valued home cooking, was already showing substantial signs of stress in 1955. Even then, nearly 38 percent of American women were leaving the home to work. When they returned in the evening, it was to cope with a second, even more demanding job: caring for their husbands and kids.

As food manufacturers saw it, these women needed help. They
couldn’t cook meals from scratch, even if they felt that would be more nutritious for their family. Evenings became rushed. More households were getting TVs, too, which added another distraction. Who wanted to be still eating dinner or doing the dishes when
Lassie
and
Gunsmoke
were on? If the teachers of home economics couldn’t see that society was changing, and quickly, then the processed food companies saw it as their mission to change the nature of home economics.

In the mid-1950s,
the food industry undertook two cunning maneuvers to draw these working women into its fold. The first was to create its own army of home economics teachers. Bright and fashionable, these women worked for the companies, held their own cooking contests, set up popular demonstration kitchens, and conducted cooking classes for moms and their daughters in direct competition with the home economics teachers who taught in the schools. By 1957, General Foods had sixty of these home economists on its payroll, promoting its products and working with the company’s technologists to create more convenience foods. They had glamour, and they had style, as Al Clausi, the General Foods inventor, well knew. He married one of them.

The second move by the industry was perhaps the most influential of all. To compete with the home-cooking skills being taught by Betty Dickson and the other home economics teachers, the industry wielded its very own Betty to preach the creed of convenience. Her name was Betty Crocker, and she quickly became one of the most famous women in America, notwithstanding the fact that she was entirely fake. Betty Crocker had been invented by the manager of the advertising department at Washburn Crosby, which later became General Mills, and this Betty never slept. She started out as the friendly signature on the advertising department’s letters to customers, and soon she was responding to as many as five thousand adoring fans a day, like the Mrs. Springer who wrote to her in 1950 to say how much she enjoyed the company’s Party Cake mix.
“You will find that the PARTYCAKE Mix, DEVILS FOOD CAKE Mix and the GINGER-CAKE and Cooky Mix are all grand time savers,” Betty Crocker replied.

Her catchy slogans, like “I guarantee a perfect cake, every time you
bake—cake after cake after cake,” rang out in radio, magazine, and television advertisements. She opened a set of show rooms, known as Betty’s Kitchens, where women were taught quick ’n easy, heat-and-serve cooking with Bisquick and other General Mills products. These kitchens became so famous that Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 held their famous “Kitchen Debate” in a copy of the Betty Crocker kitchen that General Mills had set up at the U.S. Trade and Cultural Fair in Moscow to epitomize the modern American kitchen. Betty Crocker also unleashed the Big Red, a string of bestselling cookbooks that went far beyond hawking desserts. As Susan Marks writes in her book
Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food
, the recipes and advice in these cookbooks helped to drive “the fundamental shift in American diets toward the factory-processed convenience foods that were becoming fixtures in the grocery aisles.”

But even Betty Crocker wasn’t enough to totally undermine the teachings of Betty Dickson. To do that, the processed food industry had to come up with another, more insidious strategy. Like the Hoover-era FBI pursuing its enemies list, the industry infiltrated the association of home economics teachers. This operation started with money and advertising, an archive of the association’s journal reveals.
In 1957 alone, General Foods funneled $288,250 into the grants and fellowship program of the home economics association, winning the gratitude of a generation of teachers. The association then devoted a special section of its journal to publicizing all the convenient products, from Stove Top Stuffing to nine-serving cake mixes. And General Foods and other manufacturers took out big ads for the hospitality booths they set up at the association fairs.

Then the food industry began sending people to further reshape the association to its own designs. It sponsored candidates for the organization’s top leadership posts, candidates who would bring a decidedly pro-industrial view to home economics. Marcia Copeland, a General Mills executive who became the home economics association’s president in 1987, told me that the decline of scratch cooking wasn’t a corporate plot as much as it was a foregone conclusion when women acquired greater
roles in American society.
“When I joined General Mills in 1963, it was evident that people weren’t having the time or interest in preparing meals from scratch,” she said. “They would do one meal from scratch, like a pot roast, and they developed a specialty if they were entertaining, like they would do the bread or the dessert, one spectacular thing. We tried to make people at General Mills look at food to be more fun.”

In the meantime, teachers like Betty Dickson were forced to alter their curriculum to deal with all of the pressing problems that came to bear on the modern housewife. It would be foolish to call her the last home economics teacher in America. They do still exist. But the focus of home economics changed dramatically through the 1970s and 1980s. Each year, the association chose a home economics teacher of the year, and when Dickson won in 1980,
she was praised for having a curriculum that still included cooking and shopping. In the years that followed, however, the winning teachers were cited for teaching their students not how to produce their own things like meals but how to get jobs and be consumers.

Dickson was still only in her sixth year of teaching in 1959 when it might be said her fight was lost.
Time
did a long article on convenience foods, and after casting about for a person who would illustrate all that was new and great about cooking, the magazine chose someone else to put on the cover about convenience foods: Charles Mortimer, CEO of General Foods and the man who coined the phrase. “Modern Living,” read the headline of the article. “Just Heat and Serve.” Inside was a profile of a Hollywood secretary who’d thrown together a dinner party for fourteen guests, on a weeknight, after coming home from her job. She served hors d’oeuvres, shrimp cocktail, lobster Newberg, fresh salad, asparagus tips in Hollandaise sauce, rice, rolls, white cake, and ice cream.
“Almost every bite of the appetizing meal she placed before her guests had been washed, cut, peeled, shelled, precooked, mixed and apportioned by ‘factory maids’ long before it reached her hands,” the writer gushed. “Such jiffy cooking would have made Grandma shudder, but today it brings smiles of delight to millions of U.S. housewives. The remarkable rise of ‘convenience’ or processed foods—heralded by slogans ‘instant,’ ‘ready to cook’ and ‘heat and
serve’—has set off a revolution in U.S. eating habits, brought a bit of magic into the U.S. kitchen.