In this post, we wander into the Land of Convenience: the history of convenience foods and how they may be incidentally entwined with second wave feminism.
SWINGING DOORS
In the 1960s and 70s, something great and long overdue happened: second-wave feminism. Among other things, the movement sought to dramatically expand a woman’s right to enter areas of the workforce historically constricted to men and began the continuing battle for equal pay.
Tragic as it is that these basic rights seemed so novel such a short time ago, the American woman hardly blinked on her way to claiming these well-deserved opportunities. Doors that had long been closed suddenly swung open and women began to walk through them, emerging out the other side with law degrees and better jobs, hanging up their aprons and replacing them with business attire or long paisley frocks. Women were unmooring from the confines of the home in droves and going out into the world, feeling the wind on their faces. Whether or not they were going to an office, the fact is they were going out. The domino effect of this was palpable — in the forty year stretch starting in 1967, the number of full-time female workers in the US grew from 14.8% to about 45% of the US population, a huge pendulum shift.
GOLDEN ARCHES
Of course, for every action there is a reaction. In this case, the entropy of this moment also opened new doors in product marketing. Suddenly too busy to spend the better part of an afternoon preparing a candlelit Chicken à la King dinner, the working woman became a target for consumer opportunists who wasted no time in seizing this golden moment and filling it with foods designed and advertised around one key quality: convenience. The golden moment called for the golden arches and the golden glow of the Twinkie snack cake. Swanson TV dinners, Oscar Meyer Wieners, Wonder Bread and JELLO pudding flooded the aisles, shouting of convenience, and also a novel, “enriched” version of nutrition.
Almost every domino has one just behind it, and some rows of dominoes, triggered at the same crossroads, both fall at once. This is how I see it that the junk food liberation happened alongside women’s liberation, with the tiles of the second World War, the Depression, the first World War, women’s suffrage, the industrial revolution, and so on fallen over behind them.
To give an idea of how parallel these two movements were: in the same year (1963) that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, giving voice to the widespread discontent of the bored American housewife, McDonald’s served its 1 billionth burger on the “The Art Linkletter Show.” Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny, exposing crooked salaries and treatment. Fruit Loops were invented. Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, enacting a law still fighting for recognition, requiring equal wages for women and men. Chips Ahoy! were introduced. Alice Rossi presented the notorious paper "Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal" to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jello salad became a thing. The Bell Jar was published. Coca Cola came out with TaB, a line of high fructose soda even cheaper than Coke. The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) presented a report to John F. Kennedy documenting discrimination against women. Kennedy accidentally said 'I am a jelly donut' (Ich bin ein Berliner) in a speech to the citizens of Berlin. Ronald McDonald first graced television. Bras burned.
Of course, women’s movements are in no way to be held responsible for the rise of junk food — they just happened to come from the same universe — but there’s no doubt they were entwined. Even as women were starting to enjoy liberation, they were still the primary shoppers. It's not like something crazy like men offering to shop or prepare their own nourishment was sweeping the nation. Also, now many of them were living on their own, because they could finally afford to.
Working women made up an increasingly growing number of bread-winning consumers, while remaining the primary shopper, and naturally, convenience foods were marketed to them. To advertisers, women were more powerful than ever. Oscar Mayer came out with “Sack o’ Sauce in a Can O’ Meat” to “bring you quick meat meals with rich Fresh Cooked flavor!” (literally, just a can of hot dogs with a bag of barbeque sauce). Pop Tarts — “drop ‘em in the toaster!” Heinz tomato ketchup — “still the shortest route to a man’s heart!” Pancho Pantera Chocomilk — “a new super-fortified instant food drink that will make your family TALLER … HEALTHIER … STRONGER!”
THE DAWN OF FORTIFICATION
This brings us to the dawn of fortified foods. Fortified food goes back a little farther than the 1960s, when it gained more popularity. In the 1940s, it had come to light that many Americans seemed to be suffering from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies. This was brought to the government’s attention when men began showing up to the World War II draft with such poor nutritional status that it concerned the draft board. Thus, the government began to decree that certain foods be enriched with the nutrients people were missing and sponsored programs that did things like enrich all-purpose flour with folic acid, iron, and B vitamins.
So begins a very odd time in food history. Not just for fortification, but for the preservation of the growing lines of processed foods. Rice is enriched with carrot genes. Human hair is extracted of its L-Cysteine to preserve commercial bread. Beaver glands flavor ice cream. Fish bladder extract clarifies hazy beer. Silicone bulks up chicken nuggets. Coal tar and boiled beetle shells add color to candy. Food is Frankensteined into so many bizarre amalgamations, it becomes hard to keep track. This experiment continues to this day.
At this time, truth in advertising was an even looser concept than it is today, and it was hard to believe what you read on the packaging. (See: Pancho Pantera). But the fortified foods sold well, and the government seemed to remain pretty lenient about claims, up until the early 1970s when it began to crack down.
AMERICA VS THE TWINKIE
Case in point: in 1971, the Federal Trade Commission accused the maker of Wonder Bread and Hostess Snack Cakes of making false nutritional claims about its products and false weight loss claims about the short-lived brand Profile Bread. These brands were all owned by the Continental Baking Company.
Full disclosure: My great grandfather was a vice president at Continental Baking in Kansas City, KS and some in my family like to claim that he is the “father of the Twinkie” (a fact I’ve never been able to substantiate). I have roots in this problem.
Up against the FTC, Continental Baking Company strongly argued their point that “Hostess Snack Cakes were enriched as a direct response to recommendations made by the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health, which called attention to the growing importance of snacks in the nation's diet.” They were not wrong. The recommendations Continental Baking pointed to when defending itself came from the same flour-enriching program the government sponsored in the 1940s.
LET THEM EAT CAKE
So, was it the snack makers that were the problem, or was the nation to blame for demanding snacks in the first place? Or, was it the government pushing an agenda? Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but you can never be too sure.
Perhaps the government was truly concerned for the citizens and thought they were doing right by throwing up their hands and saying, “well, if they’re going to eat snack cakes, we might as well urge companies to inject them with vitamins.” In other words, let them eat cake. Although it might seem obvious now — a wild idea like pointing out that some nutrient deficiencies might stem from the fact that healthy foods were being replaced by snack cakes — convenience food was a fast moving target and trying to go against the grain would have been not only more difficult than injecting cake with vitamins, but also less lucrative. So instead of going against the grain, they went with it, literally.
WHAT’S THE HARM?
But food fortification is well-meaning, right? It isn’t all that bad if it’s getting people the nutrients they’re missing, one way or another? In some cases, no — it has helped reduce conditions like goiter, anemia, and rickets. But in other cases, yes, it is a problem — as Amy Westervelt put it for The Guardian, food fortification is “a solution that became a problem.”
In 2014, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report that cautioned against purchasing fortified foods. As Renee Sharp, research director for EWG and a co-author of the report, said, “The window between what's good for you and what's potentially toxic is actually quite narrow." In particular, high intakes of zinc, niacin and vitamin A have been found to contribute to liver damage and skeletal abnormalities in children. But on a larger scale, it was the shifting from vegetables to processed grains as the vehicles for obtaining vitamins that was the issue.
Of course we could go on and on digging into the roots of the problem, and of course the story can be traced farther back than the 1960s — like notably, war rations of both world wars and the Depression creating food scarcities that probably left a lot people happy to eat anything at all, and making convenient, high calorie foods especially appealing. It’s easy to see how this could set the stage for the 1960s to be a tipping point for convenience — that is, the manufacturers of convenience — to become mightier than ever before.
WHAT NOW?
So where does that leave us?
On the one hand, we now live in a world where corner stores and drive-thrus dominate certain areas of the country, especially in low income neighborhoods. They call these fringe foods, the unfortunate end road of the convenience movement. A dominance of fringe foods creates problems like food deserts where fresh, healthy food is hard to find and gas station specials for a $2 hot dog with a Big Gulp entice people into the myth of convenience that’s cheap to boot, while what’s really happening is economic inequities becoming inequities in people’s health. Without getting too far into it, this is an issue of social and economic justice.
On the other hand, there is a much more positive side to all of this. Here in the present moment, we seem to be in the middle of a natural pendulum shift back to health thanks partly to an amazing resurgence of people seeking natural food, in some ways a necessity born out of these last few decades where we’ve wandered astray into the spooky Land of Convenience. It’s our society in its current moment not just being drawn back to the land, but to self empowerment, body positivity, and a reclaimed participation in their own health, in itself a radical act against the big business of convenience.
Slowly but surely, more and more people are waking up to the fact that while convenience foods may be easy and cheap in the short term, in the long term they can be extremely inconvenient and expensive when it comes to the health problems that can arise from them. This is of course a pretty foundational concept for those already attuned to or working in the world of nutrition and health, but it’s a start, and the momentum for it is only continuing to grow. As we embrace this, what I’d like to see is the movement be more third wave, more intentional about serving low income neighborhoods where affordable, healthy food is most scarce, and build from these places so that access to healthy options isn’t something reserved only for the more fortunate.
Where do you think things are moving?