THE MODERNIST FUTURE OF FOOD - THE AGE OF POPULUXE

During the early 1940s, much of the World of Tomorrow remained a distant fantasy—except perhaps for the ultramodernist military rations designed according to reductionist principles of nutritional adequacy and unpalatability. But the ensuing economic boom did embed much more of the modernist vision into the real landscape, albeit in an eclectic, superficial, and sometimes frivolous way. In the age of “Populuxe,” Thomas Hine writes, “progress was not merely an abstraction, but an array of goods that could be touched, switched on, photographed, improved, and fantasized about.” Befitting the heavy dose of amnesia that accompanies modernism, “never before,” Hine observes, was the operative slogan for the apparently unprecedented wonders of cornucopian apitalism.48

Trumpeted loudly in the popular media, this upbeat message did offset—or at least contradict—the gloomy neo-Malthusianism of postwar think tank and dystopian discourse. Needless to say, the more disruptive utopian socialist aspects of modernism were almost completely buried beneath a heavy layer of Cold War conformism and complacency. “With all its faults and perils, this is a marvelous era,” Life’s editor concluded in “Sunny Side of the Street,” a review of the American Chemical Society’s 1951 convention. Who could think otherwise, given the predictions made in the Society’s Chemical Engineering News? In seventy five years:

"Starvation, another ancient enemy, will be a curiosity in the history books. Mankind will be producing synthetic foods from sunlight, water, ammonia, and the carbon dioxide in the air. Fertilizer substitutes will be sprayed right on the leaves of plants, producing yields beyond anything ever seen before. We will feed cattle on treated sawdust, to a sleek and tender fatness unknown today, and will even farm today’s wasted salt marshes by using chemical plant foods and vegetables that thrive in a briny medium. Drought will be licked by water from the ocean. The jungle and the polar regions will be the new frontiers, made comfortable to live in by air conditioning. We will have rain or dry weather at our will. Our houses will be powered by atomic energy, and the telephone will have given way to two-way radio communication with any other house in the world."

Reviewing the same gathering, Business Week found a “future that seemed to be straight out of Buck Rogers”—the embodiment of apolitical, adolescent techno-enthusiasm.49

If there was a unifying cornucopian icon, it was the steel shopping cart—a piece of technology from the 1930s that reached full usage in the 1950s. The cover of Life’s 1955 “Special Food Issue” combined two symbols of American fertility—a young child sitting in an overflowing shopping cart—with the subhead: “Mass Luxury: A $73 Billion Market Basket.” That Americans were feeding so many babies so well seemed to refute the doomsayers. And the landscape of highways, subdivisions, and parking lots was increasingly resembling the decentralized future predicted by GM in 1939. Thanks to motorization, supermarkets mushroomed from ten thousand in 1946 to seventeen thousand in 1953—and that was just the beginning. These stores had so much food to sell because American agriculture was indeed moving toward McMillen’s industrialized, corporate future. In 1950, farmers grew 20 percent more wheat and 75 percent more potatoes per acre than in 1925. Similarly, thanks to advanced genetic selection, Holsteins produced 20 percent more butterfat in 1949 than in 1918. A 1949 Popular Mechanics article titled “Engineering Better Meat” invoked automotive streamlining to describe the genetic redesign of the nation’s food supply: “The animal engineers now are copying the revolutionary process that transformed yesterday’s tall, top-heavy automobile into a long, low car with built-in running boards and smoothly streamlined body.... Tomorrow’s farmer would no more want to turn out a runty, rawboned pig or scrawny, thin-wooled sheep than a Detroit motor manufacturer would let an automobile leave his production line minus radiator grille or steering wheel.”50

Ironically perhaps, this cornucopian bounty was achieved largely through a drastic reduction in biodiversity. Homogenization fit the need of mass marketers, as evidenced by A&P’s “Chicken of Tomorrow” contests, which encouraged poultry scientists to produce a large-breasted broiler that would sell as prepackaged cuts in supermarket refrigerator cases. By the early ’50s, William Boyd writes, more than two-thirds of all commercial chickens carried the winning breed’s genes. While not quite as simplified as the headless, wingless bird envisioned in 1932 by Winston Churchill (and parodied in 1952 as Chicken Little in Pohl and Kornbluh’s The Space Merchants), this was clearly a “designer chicken” attuned to industrial “performance” standards. Vulnerable to numerous maladies and very expensive to feed, house, and maintain, these hybrids required a lot of chemicals, drugs, and machinery. These higher input costs favored further concentration of production, which in turn increased biological and economic vulnerability—a feedback loop resulting, almost literally, from putting too many eggs in too few baskets.51 Such negative consequences had not quite been expected by futurists who, conditioned perhaps by the 1939 fair’s Rotolactor and Elsie’s Boudoir, had assumed that the new, modern chicken would live a life of spoiled ease. For example, a 1955 Science Digest article on “Streamlining the Henhouse” depicted a happy hen fanning herself while lounging in front of a television, cold drink nearby. Because confined hens supposedly fed and drank “at will” from conveyor belts carrying feed and water, they did not have to scrounge in dirty barnyards. “In some hen factories soft music plays to keep the birds in a contented egg-laying mood.”52 The realities in egg and broiler production were not so nice. But lower prices did move chicken from Sunday specialty to daily staple. In a major cornucopian triumph, the per capita consumption of chicken almost tripled (from 15 pounds to 43.3 pounds a year per person) between 1938 and 1976.53

The same intensification dynamic—a reduction in genetic diversity and in the number of producers, at the cost of increased biological and social fragility—was widely duplicated. As chain supermarkets and restaurants extended their reach across the land they standardized cuisine— and fostered a greater incidence of diet-related “diseases of affluence.” Aspiring to feed the exploding world population through advanced genetics, the Green Revolution reduced the world’s food problems to daily calorie deficits and then offered Third World countries shorter plants that would yield more grain—more calories—without “lodging,” or falling over. However, such specialized plants required more water, fertilizer, pesticides, and tractors—in short, the same technological treadmill that was displacing small farmers while producing such gluts in the First World. That these displaced peasants would then serve as industrial laborers was another welcomed ingredient in the whole “development” equation—a model that took on special urgency as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for Third World allies.54 While the Cold War context was new, the elements of the basic modernization package would not have surprised the cornucopian visionaries of thirty years earlier.

Likewise, earlier advocates of scientific eating, household engineering, and streamlining would not have been amazed by the proliferation of value-added convenience products and appliances that promised to liberate women and simplify family life. In 1953, food writer Poppy Cannon dubbed the can opener an “open sesame” to “the four freedoms from tedium, space, work, and your own inexperience.” Extending the pre-war fascination with automated cooking, the dream kitchen’s myriad push buttons promised to reduce all human effort to “the tiniest flick of a finger.” The push-button utopia coupled new refrigeration, microwave, and cybernetic technologies with Ford-era images of continuous, conveyor-belt mass production. In 1957, Campbell Soup’s president observed that packaged foods were turning the kitchen into “the point for assembling the menu.” Victor Cohn’s 1956 version of the typical kitchen of 1999 spared housewives from having to expend a single calorie stooping, mixing, stretching, or even thinking: the push of a button would eject precrushed ice cubes from a wall dispenser, raise an electronic oven to waist height, or fry foods without burning. The housewife of 1999 would not even need to know how to read, as she could simply choose meals from computerized photo cards, which could then be popped into the slot to do the rest. Such images of instantaneous, effortless command also accompanied predictions of “push-button farming” aided by “push-button weather” (automated irrigation) and other domesticated versions of push-button rocketry. After all, if politicians could destroy the world in a few minutes by simply pressing “the button,” then certainly housewives should be able to prepare a full dinner in even less time. It was perhaps no coincidence that the same manufacturers of push-button dishwashers, television sets, vacuum cleaners, and ovens—Westinghouse, General Electric, Chrysler, and so on—were also heavily involved in building America’s “push-button defense.”55

As the Space Race straddled agendas that were both military and civilian, international and domestic, aerospace symbols abounded. Extending the streamlining conceits of Gaudi, Le Corbusier, and the Bauhaus style, parabolas soared everywhere—from the arches of Ray Kroc’s Mc-Donald’s and Eero Saarinen’s St. Louis gateway to the “butterfly chairs” and rounded coffee tables of suburban split-level homes. According to architectural historian Philip Langdon, the parabolas suggested “a feeling of skyward momentum, symbolic of an aerospace age in which man could hurtle himself into the heavens.” Thomas Hine even detects such symbolism in the popular California dip of the 1950s, especially when scooped with the parabolic potato chip—“a thoroughly modern food” that suggested an informal spontaneity somewhat akin to the gravity defying rocket-shaped tailfins also popular in the 1950s. The period’s “buoyant spirit” also dressed up postwar diners, motels, drive-ins, and supermarkets with boomerangs, wings, fins, handlebars, kites, A-frames, soaring folded-plate roofs, and starbursts. According to Langdon, many of these touches came together in the “Googie” style of Southern California’s coffee shops, whose well-padded bucket seats, pastel Formica counters, and rocketing rooflines suggested “an architecture of superabundance. From its extravagant gestures and its lack of inhibition sprang a sense of exhilaration.” The same gleaming artificiality, Fordist automation, and rapid turnover likewise underlay the emerging fast food system. To spread his Golden Arches across the land, Ray Kroc perfected the ultra-Taylorist principles of KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), which also guided the convenience food cuisine that would supposedly free women from effort and stress.56

While we may question whether many women in fact felt liberated by their canned goods and appliances, the processed meal certainly came of age in the 1950s and early 1960s. Culinary historians differ on whether the most iconic representative of quick-and-easy cuisine was Miracle Whip, Crisp Vegetable Salad made with Jell-O, Cherry Coke Salad (also with Jell-O), California dip (made with dried onion soup mix), the TV dinner, or Eight-Can Casserole (don’t ask). Underlying all such dishes was impatience with traditional, labor-intensive cooking. Yet forecasts fell short if they overdid the hype. Few supermarket products were quite as revolutionary as claimed. People still ate meats, starches, and vegetables that looked more or less like those of the 1920s, the 1880s, and even the 1820s—and, automated-synthetic fantasies notwithstanding, they still do. Inspired by modernism, futurists expected even more artificial wonders to come, but they also assumed that underlying social and economic parameters would endure. In this, their predictions fell prey to two of the basic fallacies highlighted by historian of the future Joseph Corn: total revolution and social continuity.57

Much as earlier predictions had assumed that hot technological innovations like pneumatic tubes, “air nitrogen,” electricity, radio, and airplanes would eventually “change everything,” postwar cornucopians expected the latest breakthroughs to invade and transform virtually every material sphere, from farming down to the most mundane domestic activities. If we had nuclear bombs and reactors, then why not nuclear wristwatches, tractors, and stoves, too? At the same time, even as they extrapolated a complete technological revolution, they wrongly assumed the unchallenged social continuity of patriarchy, the nuclear family, capitalism, and white hegemony. And they also wrongly assumed that people would love modernism forever.

Total revolution presupposes “mission creep” and infinite linear improvement. Take, for example, the popular image of the fully automated farm. If, as The Wall Street Journal reported in 1945, the number of machines on farms had increased 50 percent during the war, why not extrapolate total mechanization in a few more years? With surplus military planes being used to spray crops with new pesticides, it seemed logical that “aerial farming” might soon expand to include seeding, plowing, and, why not, weather control too? With air-conditioning, helicopters, combines, electronic controls, and airborne crop dusting already well-established technologies, it made sense to speculate that all these might come together in the “push-button farm” of the future as described in a 1954 ad for National Oil and Grease Seals: “Some day soon, in the air-conditioned comfort of his helicopter ‘control tower,’ the farmer will flip a switch and send teams of ingenious machines out to till his fields. In a single integrated operation, the robot gangs will pulverize, condition, and furrow the soil, drill seed and fertilize, perhaps implant soluble water capsules and transmit a pest-killing electronic bath.”58 Interestingly, despite the “superb achievement in engineering,” this ultracomplex machine would still need old-fashioned grease and O-rings—an assumption of continuity that obviously benefited the sponsoring company. And the operator would still be a white male operating his own personal farm. Modernization was good to a point—as long as it did not threaten established industries, social patterns, and yeoman farmer myths. Similarly, in the 2000 foreseen in the 1950s, personal helicopters would still transport breadwinning fathers home to private suburban homes where housekeeping wives would employ push-button automation to cook traditional meat-and-potato family meals.

Given the priority accorded animal foods, it was inevitable that new “wonder drugs” (total revolution) would be enlisted in the service of conservative meat preferences (social continuity). Soon after penicillin was first used to fight human infections (in the 1940s), scientists found that antibiotics accelerated the weight gain of farm animals subjected to factory-farm crowding and stresses. Here, then, in apparent repudiation of those inefficient feed-to-meat conversion ratios, was a way to grow more meat on less grain. Science News Letter enthused that pigs raised on “synthetic milk” laced with terramycin “were happier (if getting fat faster is an index of pig happiness) than piglets who were fed by Mamma Sow in the old-fashioned suckling way.” If animals grew better dosed with antibiotics, why not humans? Taking that leap, Science News Letter extrapolated: “A pinch of penicillin or aureomycin added [as a growth stimulant] to the rice bowl in China, India, and other rice-eating regions might solve a large part of the world’s food problem and through this contribute to world peace.” Defeating Malthus was still the goal, but the “fix” was to be technological, not social or political—an example of Corn’s third basic fallacy of prediction. Better to spike poor people’s rice with questionable drugs than address the underlying causes of malnutrition.59

Moreover, following the “better living through chemistry” dicta of DuPont’s traveling exhibits, it seemed logical to extend one “wonder drug” application to other cornucopian uses. If antibiotics could defeat microbes in living animals, why not add them to refrigerated meats and canned goods as a preservative? Likewise, wartime successes with organochlorine pesticides like DDT encouraged fantasies of total eradication of bugs and weeds. Noting that the common house fly was “an insult to the human race,” Science News Letter asked whether DDT would allow a future historian to look back at the United States of 1950–2000 and call it the “Fly-Free Half Century.” Since some pesticides were by-products of chemical warfare research, the story seemed a particularly satisfying example of the “swords into ploughshares” archetype. Science News Letter, for instance, reported that “chemicals now being investigated at the Army’s wartime biological warfare laboratories hold the possibility of increasing the food production of the world so that a population suicide of civilization can be averted.”60 In the transgressive, category-defying rhetoric of modernism, war was indeed peace, Orwell notwithstanding.

No technology invited more extravagant “swords into plowshares” hyperbole than irradiation, the application of a deadly force to now save lives by staving off microbial contamination. In a clear example of what historian Paul Boyer calls the “search for a silver lining” inside the mushroom cloud, the Arthur D. Little consulting firm reported in 1949 that “The power of the atom may give the final knockout to the tiny agents that spoil the flavor and goodness of processed foods.” The Wall Street Journal enthused that “three-week-old hamburger, four-month-old bread and two-year-old potatoes may be typical fare at tomorrow’s table.” Marshaling the same iconoclastic bravado, journalist Victor Cohn extolled the University of Michigan scientist walking around with a year-old hamburger in his pocket, “its bacteria killed by atomic waste-material radiation.” By 1975, Cohn predicted in 1956, “we may have replaced the refrigerator and freezer . . . with an ordinary storage cabinet filled with atomic-ray-preserved food.”61

While fewer than half of American households actually had mechanical refrigerators as late as 1941, and deep freezers were not even available commercially until the early 1950s, boosters of irradiation found hopeful precedents in such recent progress. If frozen foods could come of age in just twenty years, they reasoned, irradiated foods could easily become commonplace in the next twenty. And by 1985 nuclear-generated electricity would no doubt operate many household gadgets, including a garbage disposal, dishwasher, air-conditioner, kitchen mixer, phonograph, and, perhaps most remarkable, “an automatic coffee maker” that will brew your first cup while you shower (with water heated, to be sure, by atomic power). In the modernist future, less was more; a uranium pellet the size of a vitamin pill might fuel a house for a year. Streamlining agriculture, uranium would run tractors, irrigation pumps, and combines. Similarly, cheap atomic energy would desalinize oceans, irrigate deserts, cool tropical plantations, warm arctic soils, and power the “artificial suns” of indoor cornfields.62

To boost yields indefinitely, some speculated, radiation might displace or supplement the newly introduced petrochemical fertilizers. Citing evidence of “increased plant growth at Nagasaki as a result of the atomic bomb explosion,” Progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace hoped that the “by-products” of the nuclear research at Oak Ridge would provide “material sufficient to fertilize all the crops of the US,” and he applauded Russian research on the direct application of radioactive “rays” to increase plant growth. In a sensationalistic article about how agricultural research’s “brave new world” was, yes, beating “swords into plowshares,” two USDA engineers extended Wallace’s idea to include a whole array of “barnyard death rays” that would simultaneously boost plant yields; kill insects, rodents, and bacteria; sterilize milk; and, as if that were not enough, accelerate beneficial mutations “that would enable science to get new varieties much more quickly than heretofore.” One particularly sublime mutation would be “beef cattle the size of dogs” that could graze “in the average man’s backyard, eating especially thick grass and producing especially tender steaks.” With suburban ranch lawns thus converted to mini-ranges for mini-steers, how could there ever be a meat shortage? Conversely, another article pondered the promotion of genetic mutations that would make humans smaller while increasing the size of animals. “Half-size humans would then be able to dine on double-size animals!”63

While this desire to streamline evolution had predated the nuclear age, the goal now seemed more achievable. For example, radioactive isotopes might make it easier to improve photosynthesis. The New York Times’ William Laurence observed that after using “tagged elements” to learn how plants build food from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water, “we would no longer be dependent exclusively on the soil to give us our daily bread. Man at least may be able to produce enough food to provide abundantly for the world’s population.” According to a Scientific American article, the application of nuclear power to cell research promised “to emancipate us all some day from our bondage to chlorophyll.”64 Such liberationist rhetoric echoed prewar dissatisfaction with natural photosynthesis, which, as we have seen, was deemed inefficient by many modernizers. And unlike the more far-fetched fantasies of atomic cars, toasters, and lawnmowers, work on photosynthesis was already underway. Particularly exciting was new research concerning Chlorella pyrenoidosa, a high-protein algae that grew rapidly using two inexhaustible resources: sunlight and carbon dioxide. In many ways, the enthusiasm about chlorella cuisine represented the peak of modernism—and also exposed its underlying flaws and limitations.

NOTES

48. For an official history of military rations, see the Quartermaster Foundation, accessed May 26, 2004, at www.qmfound.com/; Thomas Hine, Populuxe: The Look and Life of America in the ’50s and ’60s, from Tailfins and TV Dinners to Barbie Dolls and Fallout Shelters (New York: Knopf, 1990), 60, 15.

49. “Sunny Side of the Street,” Life, September 10, 1951, 3; “Chemists Look into a Bright New World,” Business Week, September 15, 1951, 19.

50. Richard Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 232; Liebs, Main Street to Miracle Mile, 131; E. C. Stakman, “Science in the Service of Agriculture,” Scientific Monthly, February 1949, 78; “Go Deep for Food,” Science News Letter, November 4, 1950, 291; Maxwell Reid Grant, “Engineering Better Meat,” Science Digest, April1949, 59–60. According to Harvey Levenstein, by 1974 there were 50 percent fewer dairy cows and 85 percent fewer dairy farms than in 1950, but they produced just as much milk—and they did so even without the Rotolactor! Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 110.

51. William Boyd, “Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production,” Technology and Culture 42:4 (2001): 657.

52. Ross Holman, “Streamlining the Henhouse,” Science Digest, May 1955, 53–56.

53. Letitia Brewster and Michael Jacobson, The Changing American Diet: A Chronicle of American Eating Habits from 1910–1980 (Washington, DC: Center for Science in the Public Interest, 1980), 43.

54. John H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also part I on the Green Revolution.

55. Hine, Populuxe, 24, 125, 128; “Revolution in the Kitchen,” U.S. News and World Report, February 15, 1957, 60; Victor Cohn, “Your Wonderful Future Home,” Science Digest, January 1957, 39–43; Millard S. Purdy, “Farm Wonders of Today,” Science Digest, August 1949, 35; Ross Holman, “Push-button Rain,” Science Digest, May 1955, 61–65.

56. Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches, 85–95, 119, 100–101; Hine, Populuxe, 26–27. On domestic Cold War culture, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 162–82; Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 242–83; McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination.

57. Marling, As Seen on TV, 202–40; Jane Stern and Michael Stern, Square Meals (New York: Knopf, 1984), 246–319; Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (New York: Viking, 2004); Joseph J. Corn, epilogue in Imagining Tomorrow, ed. Joseph J. Corn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 219–29.

58. John A. McWethy, “More Food with Power Farming,” Science Digest, July 1945, 87–90; A. C. Monahan, “Farming from the Sky,” Science News Letter, September 15, 1951, 170–71; “When ‘Push-Button’ Farm Machines Are a Reality,” ad in Fortune, February 1954, 41.

59. Orville Schell, Modern Meat: Antibiotics, Hormones, and the Pharmaceutical Farm (New York: Random House, 1984), 3–27; Ann Ewing, “Chemical Team Spurs Growth,” Science News Letter, April 14, 1951, 234–35; “Antibiotics for the Starving,” Science News Letter, November 1, 1952, 275; “Pigs Raised Like Chicks,” Science News Letter, December 1, 1951, 341; Corn, epilogue in Imagining Tomorrow, 221.

60. “Life on the Chemical Newsfront,” Scientific American, February 1956, 14; Sam Matthews, “Fight Flies for Fly-Free World,” Science News Letter, July 1, 1950, 10–11; “Weed-Killers Aid Crops,” Science News Letter, September 11, 1948, 166.

61. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985); Ray Vicker,“Next: Radiated Foods,” Science Digest, October 1954, 31; Cohn, Our Hopeful Future, 128, 39.

62. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 139; Gerry Schremp, Kitchen Culture: Fifty Years of Food Fads (New York: Pharos Books, 1991), 57; Ashton J. O’Donnell, “Soon: Irradiated Foods,” Science Digest, December 1957, 1; Michael Amrine, “Your Life in 1985,” Science Digest, October 1955, 23–27; Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 109, 111; David Dietz, Atomic Energy in the Coming Era (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1945), 13, 17.

63. Henry Wallace, “Radioactivity and Plant Growth,” New Republic, October 13, 1947, 11; Lowell E. Campbell and Leonard G. Schoenleber, “Barnyard Death Rays,” Science Digest, April 1949, 61; Amrine, “Your Life in 1985,” 26; Albert Abarbanel, “Out of the Test Tube,” Science Digest, June 1952, 5. Perhaps this was the inspiration for Robert Bloch’s 1968 dystopian novel, This Crowded Earth, in which humans are bioengineered to stand under three feet tall. See Harold L. Berger, Science Fiction and the New Dark Age (Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1976), 158–59.

64. William L. Laurence, Dawn over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Knopf, 1946), 267–68; Gordon Dean, “Atomic Energy for Peace,” Science Digest, March 1952, 57–61; Edward S. Deevey, Jr., “The Human Crop,” Scientific American, April 1956, 110.


By Warren Belasco in "Meals to Come : A History of the Future of Food", University of California Press, USA,2006, excerpts p. 193-201. Adapted and illustrated do be posted by Leopoldo Costa.