Designs for Living
On the architecture of (commercial) desire
The Weekly Standard , January 19, 2015
When we look back on the late-19th/early-20th century and think of the technological changes that made life “modern,” we usually imagine the conquests of distance: telegraphs and telephones, trains and steamships, automobiles and airplanes. We don’t think about canned goods, cigarettes, soda pop, phonographs, or Kodak cameras. These things might have been new. They might have been ingenious. But they don’t strike us as especially world-shaking.
In
Packaged Pleasures
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a host of often ignored technologies transformed human sensual experience, changing how we eat, drink, see, hear, and feel in ways we still benefit (and suffer) from today. Modern people learned how to capture and intensify sensuality, to preserve it, and to make it portable, durable, and accessible across great reaches of social class and physical space.
Eating canned peaches in the winter, buying a chocolate bar at the corner newsstand, hearing an opera in your living room, and immortalizing baby’s first steps in a snapshot all marked a radical shift in human experience. Replacing scarcity with abundance and capturing the previously ephemeral—these mundane pleasures defied nature as surely as did horseless carriages.
It’s a keen insight and a valuable reminder of the power of seemingly trivial inventions to utterly transform our notion of “normal” life. Cross and Proctor carry their theme through chapters on cigarettes, mass-market sweets (candy, soda, ice cream), recorded sound, photographs and movies, and amusement parks. The somewhat eccentric selection reflects the authors’ scholarly backgrounds. In his previous work, Cross, a historian at Penn State, has focused primarily on childhood and leisure, which presumably explains the amusement parks. Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford, has written extensively on tobacco and cancer, including in his Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (2012).
The authors are at their best when showing how incremental improvements cumulate to create dramatic technological and cultural changes. They start with the packaging itself. “Industrial containerization,” they write, “made it possible to distribute foods throughout the globe; think only of what it would be like to live in a world without tin cans, cardboard cartons, and bottled drinks.” The “tubularization” represented by cylinders such as cigarettes, tin cans, and soda bottles (not to mention lipsticks and bullet shells) transformed manufacturing and marketing as well as distribution, giving producers easily fillable containers that could be labeled, branded, and advertised.
Historians unduly slight packaging technologies, the authors suggest, because “tubing the natural world” developed so gradually. Although the metal can dates back to 1810, it took nearly a century of refinements in stamping, folding, and soldering to achieve the design that changed the world: the “sanitary can,” which used crimped double seams and no interior solder to create an airtight seal. This was the design, Cross and Proctor write, that “allowed a wide range of tinned food to reach urban populations, especially as rival processors introduced ever-cheaper and more attractive foodstuffs festooned with colorful labels and catchy brand names.”
Cigarettes represent a similar, if more problematic, story. Clever inventions made the product so mild, cheap, and convenient that smoking became a deadly and widespread addiction. As the book’s first in-depth example, cigarettes taint by association everything that follows. Twice the authors call them “the quintessential packaged pleasure.” The next chapter, on the sweets responsible for what they term today’s “health and moral crisis,” has some fun details—explaining, for instance, how “moxie” went from a brand-name for a bittersweet tonic to a synonym for gumption—but it, too, is downbeat. Candy bars and colas constitute “an assault on local and regional cuisine and family meals,” they write. “Jell-O replaced local variations in pies and pastries for dessert, just as Coke prevailed over a broader array of local brewing and harvest cultures.”
By the time they’re fretting in the final chapter about the social isolation fostered by video games and the short attention spans created by television, we get the message: What looks like progress is really decline.
Distrustful of both artifice and commerce, Cross and Procter are essentially Rousseauian romantics. They disapprove of packaged pleasures. “Nature’s attractions, after all, are often subtle and diffuse—lots of browns and greens and grays, with here and there a few red raspberries,” they write. “But the package promises us raspberries all the time. And it can easily displace other, more subtle delights and experiences: candy bars drive out carrots, just as the hi-definition screen drives out the low, and convenience trumps toil.”
Rah, toil.
They forget that desire (and commerce) gravitates toward what’s scarce. In the early 1900s, many people had experienced entirely too much nature, whether in the form of rural droughts or urban disease. Claims that factory foods were more “sanitary” were alluring because nature seemed so dangerous and dirty. But nowadays, the natural is glamorous. Have the authors not heard of the environmental movement? Of backpacking and adventure travel? Today’s comfortable urbanites buy off-road vehicles, relish organic Brussels sprouts, and read Modern Farmer.
The authors’ eccentric selection bolsters their gloomy take on history. Writing of cigarettes, they declare that “mechanization dramatically lowered prices while also creating an excess of supply that, when filtered through mass marketing, created addictive overconsumption.” True enough. But the very same economics applies to bar soap, toilet paper, and toothpaste. Such classic consumer packaged goods also relied on advertising to spur demand, largely by altering norms about cleanliness and appearance. These products, too, changed our sensory experience. (Smell is notably the one sense not on the authors’ list.) They, too, were entirely unnatural. But it’s harder to turn Ivory soap and Pepsodent into a warning about “addictive overconsumption.”
More telling still is the omission of penny newspapers, dime novels, and mass-circulation magazines—mass-market publications supported by advertisements for packaged goods and read largely for enjoyment. Aside from a passing swipe at the Harvard Classics, Cross and Proctor have nothing to say about literary pleasures, even lowbrow ones. You can tell academic critics of “addictive overconsumption” aren’t entirely serious when they fail to notice that you can spend way too much time and money—and precious natural resources!—on reading material.
Abundance does, indeed, present new personal and cultural challenges, but Cross and Proctor offer no insights into how to adapt. They just tell us it’s bad: “This seemingly limitless array of commercial goods,” they write in their concluding chapter, “makes Americans appear to be global gluttons, slaves to desire, mocked by friends and despised or even terrorized by adversaries.”
You can blame 9/11 on too many Hershey bars.
In
Candy
The result is not just engaging history but subtle and provocative social criticism.
The story of candy in America is a story of how the processed, the artificial, and the fake came to be embraced as real food. And it’s also the story of how it happened that so much of what we call food today is really candy.
Candy as we know it barely existed before the middle of the 19th century. In “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” written in 1823, the sleeping children dream about sugar plums because, Kawash writes, “it would have been at Christmastime, and only at Christmastime, that most children would have anticipated such a treat.” Within a few decades, though, a series of mechanical inventions made “penny candy” common childhood fare.
In 1857, a class of Ohio fifth-graders gave their teacher a litany of “things to be eaten” that included a long list of candies: “Cream candy, pop-corn, peppermint, molasses, rose, clove, nut, Butterscotch, sugar plums, lemon drops, lemon candy, peppermint drops, French kisses, cinnamon, Ice-cream, wintergreen, sour drops, hoarhound, lavender, gum drops, vanilla, Rock, birch, cats-eyes, orange, cough, kisses.” Kawash, who discovered the list in the Ohio Journal of Education, notes that these antebellum kids already “expect variety, novelty, a certain beguiling sparkle in the candy jar.” Yet they’re still “living in a universe with no jelly beans, caramels, chocolate bars, candy corn, or gummy bears.” Those touchstone candies would come later, with such turn-of-the-century inventions as the starch mogul, the chocolate-dipping machine, and Milton Hershey’s technique for making industrial quantities of milk chocolate.
From the 19th century to the present, Kawash argues, anxie-ties about candy have channeled and expressed concerns about processed foods more generally. “ ‘Candy from strangers’ might be a good metaphor for everything we eat,” she writes. “We don’t really know what most food we buy is, where it came from, or who made it. Is it as good as it looks? Or does the alluring surface hide something harmful?”
In an industrializing America that, like contemporary China, was rife with often-valid fears of adulterated foods, “poison candy” was a favorite story of the sensationalist press. Investigators never turned up evidence of harm from off-the-shelf candy, as opposed to foul play, but the fear persisted. (More recent stories of Halloween poisonings are equally enduring and, Kawash reports, equally baseless.) The tales captured the imagination of a public convinced that “when control of food was given over to the factories and machines and chemists, what came out was candy: fake food, deceitful and deadly.”
Candy’s reputation improved after World War I, when lemon drops, peppermints, and chocolate bars were standard military rations. “By the time the war was over,” writes Kawash, “candy was universally embraced as real food, fit for men, women, and children alike.” Aviators, boxing champions, and long-distance runners extolled candy’s virtues as performance food. Early nutrition science equated calories with “food value,” and wrapped candy bars made that value cheap and portable—the perfect lunch for busy people on a budget. By the 1930s, a trade magazine editor recalled in a 1976 interview, “a quarter pound of Baby Ruth and a glass of milk was considered a very substantial, nourishing meal.” (A standard Baby Ruth bar today weighs half as much.)
Soon, however, people discovered that too many calories could make you fat, and a Swedish study in 1954 suggested that candy could rot your teeth. (The study’s actual result, a dentistry professor wrote in a 1980 article, was: “Don’t feed 24 extra large and extra sticky toffees to mental patients, who can practice no oral hygiene, every day for a period of three years.”) Candy anxiety continued. Today it takes perverse forms, as conscientious parents deny their children jelly beans and Snickers while feeding them “fruit snacks” and granola bars—candy in everything but the packaging. Kawash has little patience with the subterfuge. “Here’s a not-so-radical thought: fruit is not candy, and candy is not fruit,” she writes.
Although Kawash subscribes to Michael Pollan’s trendy distinction between “real foods” and “edible food-like substances,” she defends candy as a legitimate pleasure. It is, she writes, “the one kind of processed food that proclaims its allegiance to the artificial, the processed, the unhealthy. This is something I really like about candy: it’s honest. It says what it is.” Candy may not be “real food,” but neither is it poison. As long as you eat it for what it is, rather than expecting it to replace more nourishing fare, you’ll be fine. “That little jelly bean is just a jelly bean: it won’t rot your teeth, or make you fat, or drive you to drink, or give you cancer,” she says.
An advocate of frank but moderate indulgence, Kawash writes approvingly of the Swedish tradition of lördagsgodis or “Saturday Candy,” whose origins lie in a 1959 government campaign against tooth decay: “All the sweets you like, but only once a week.” Swedes still make weekend shopping trips to load up on candy, feeling free on Saturdays to enjoy these sweets “without any guilt, worry, or remorse.”
It’s a great example. The ritual embodies a wisdom about culture and human nature absent from the romantic, at times apocalyptic, rhetoric of Packaged Pleasures. Saturday Candy at once sanctions and restrains the pleas-ures of abundance. (I once knew a rabbi who took a similar approach to dieting: dessert only on the Sabbath.) The spread of food taboos among America’s educated classes, who increasingly eschew processed foods, embrace veganism, or follow meat-heavy paleo diets, suggests a similar quest for self-imposed limits.
Little by little, our culture will evolve to meet the challenges of abundance. But treating pleasure as poison won’t get us there.