One thing that interests me as much as the nutritional components of food is the food industry. With that, food history and how these packaged items so many people now consider staples came to be.
One of my favorite books covering this top is Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America by Laura Shapiro.
This book goes back in history to a time when the woman’s role was all about entertaining. At the same time, there was a great need for convenience.
As always, the food industry was quick to meet the needs of consumers. So here we have the introduction of things like tv dinners, pudding desserts and cake mixes. It is a really interesting read about how these things were both welcomed and scrutinized by many housewives.
My favorite part is about the development of the cake mix. Market research during that time showed there needed to be a balance in the instructions where it was quick, but the baker also felt like she was putting enough into it to call it homemade. Hence, the adding of the eggs, oil and water to current day mixes.
It is just intriguing to discover where we came from to create this world of fake foods we now rely on so heavily. There were struggles to accept it back then, just as some of us are struggling today to get back to a place that existed prior to that time.
