What follows is an expanded abstract for the paper, “‘It’s Always Summer-time in Your Kitchen:’ Food Safety as Depicted in Home Refrigerator Advertising in the Interwar Years.” 

Image and Heading from 1929 General Electric Refrigerator Advertisement

Americans currently live in an age when food safety scares are headline news and an issue of concern for consumers. Take for example the ever-expanding peanut butter salmonella recall. While foodborne illness is a product of a long and complex food supply chain, its effects are often experienced in domestic environments of food consumption, such as the home kitchen. In fact, the evolution of the modern kitchen sits within a larger historical narrative of consumer food safety. Consider the home refrigerator, for example. Several scholars herald household refrigeration as one of the most important food safety achievements of the twentieth century (CDC 1999: 906; FPT 2011: 132; Roberts 2001: 29).

Perhaps not coincidentally, the rise in home refrigerator ownership was coupled with, and fueled by, fervent consumer messaging from refrigerator marketers and home economics specialists alike. In his analysis, Peter Grahame argues that there is great variance among the content of refrigerator advertisements between the wars. He posits that recurring themes are limited to use of the terms “automatic” or “electric,” references to foods to be enjoyed, and mentions of scientific research (Grahame 1994: 293). He concludes that only Frigidaire’s advertisements significantly emphasized health as a recurring theme.

I argue, however, that consumer messaging in interwar refrigerator advertisements and home economics texts often emphasized food safety, frequently using fear-based tactics that targeted women. Furthermore, by placing refrigerator advertising within the larger historical context of the time, analyzing these messages also reveals larger themes within food safety discourse. First, it explores the duality in public perception of women as both “naturally” suited for domestic duties and mothering (including food safety) and inherently unknowledgeable in how to safeguard health. Secondly, it demonstrates how these messages capitalized upon public awareness of science and medicine, particularly infectious diseases, following the Golden Age of Microbiology. And finally, it shows how these messages reinforce the doctrine of personal responsibility for food safety.

Sample 1929 Advertisement: Food Safety and Maternal Anxiety

Domestic science resources and advertisements alike invoked maternal anxiety, which is clearly visible in a 1929 ad for a General Electric All-Steel Refrigerator.

1929 General Electric Refrigerator Advertisement

This advertisement uses scare tactics, appealing to food safety fears, as well as a mother’s concern for her children to grow up healthy and happy. Note the headline, which warns, “The food he eats is the man he’ll be!” with the subheading: “guard his food by safe refrigeration – keep it below 50° always.”

This advertisement maintains that it is a mother’s responsibility to invest in the power of the refrigerator in order to protect her child, invoking the personal responsibility for food safety, which falls on women. By mentioning 50° as a “safe” temperature, this advertisement also reinforces scientific knowledge of the day for fighting bacteria and disease.

The advertisement copy paints images of childhood that resonate with mothers, such as, “A cut finger brought tearfully to you for first aid. The busy sound of small feet clumping down the stairs. A tousled head and one bright eye peeping at you from the bed clothes. He seems so little now – but the years hurry by.” This advertisement quite poignantly pulls at a mother’s heartstrings, warning that her children will grow up quickly. The copy continues, targeting a mother’s anxiety for her child’s future, saying,

What will he be like when he grows up? Will he be tall and strong? Will he be – happy? So much of his future depends upon the food he eats. For, good food builds good health – and health is the foundation of a successful life.

The advertisement argues that if a mother does not feed her children safe food, she will be personally responsible for their failure. Interestingly, this advertisement features a son, harkening back to centuries of pressure on women to not only birth sons, but also ensure that they grow into successful men.

References

• _______ General Electric Refrigerator Advertisement. “The food he eats is the man he’ll be!” 1929. Accessed April 15, 2012.
• _______ General Electric Refrigerator. 1929. “It’s Always Summer-time in Your Kitchen.” Accessed April 15, 2012.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 1999. “Achievements in Public Health, 1900-1999: Safe and Healthier Foods.” MMWR Weekly. 48, 40, October 15. (1999): 905-913. Accessed March 31, 2012.
• FPT Subcommittee of the 100−Year Planning Committee. “Celebrating 100 Years of IAFP, Journals: 1940s.” Food Protection Trends. (February 2011): 132.
• Grahame, Peter R. “Objects, texts, and practices: The refrigerator in consumer discourses between the wars,” in The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects, (ed.) Stephen Harold Riggin. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994).
• Roberts, Cynthia. “History of Food Safety” in Part 1: Overview of Food Safety, in The Food Safety Information Handbook. Westport: Oryx Press, 2001.

In Fresh: A Perishable History, Susanne Freidberg chronicles the fascinating history of how refrigeration expanded the reach of the industrial food system, forever altering not only the world’s food supply, but also how consumers view freshness and conceptualize its meaning. She tells this story through a series of mini-histories focusing on specific foods: beef, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk, and fish. In doing so, she reveals the many meanings of “fresh,” five of which are discussed in the following five images.

1. The Refrigerator

Consumers once got along without refrigeration, shopping frequently and preserving food by canning, drying, and pickling. In fact, consumers were at first wary of refrigeration, though World War I marked a turning point.

While meat and wheat were shipped to the warfront, American civilians were encouraged to consume fresh foods, unsuitable for shipment to soldiers. Consuming fresh produce, eggs, and dairy products were considered acts of both patriotism (as seen in this WWI food poster) and scientifically based health promotion, confirming the new place of these foods in the American diet and the role of the refrigerator to keep them fresh, safe, and tasty.

Refrigerators thus evolved to play a dual role: supplying nature (“the garden in a machine”) at a housewife’s fingertips, but also capable of defeating nature, providing technological protection from decay.

2. Fresh Eggs

While consumers initially questioned the refrigerator itself, they questioned no refrigerated food product more than eggs. Always obscured by protective shells, consumers distrusted claims that refrigerated eggs were indeed fresh, a quality unobservable with the naked eye.

Refrigerated eggs also embodied the transformation of an increasingly industrialized food system. Consumer distrust was rooted in more traditional views of freshness, views formed by consumers’ direct interactions with farmers. For example, this sign depicts “fresh farm eggs” available at the “next right,” implying the consumer’s journey to physically and personally visit the farmer and his or her hens. Refrigeration dramatically rewrote this understanding of freshness, expanding it in new ways and largely disassociating it from the farmer and the land.

3. Fresh Express Salad

In the early twentieth century, American views on health, physical beauty, and eating habits changed, a transformation told through a fresh vegetable — lettuce.

Then and now, consumers desire lettuce for a variety of reasons from its high nutrient density to its relatively convenient preparation. This consumer demand fueled the industrialization of of lettuce growing, picking, shipping, and packaging. (You can see modern day Ocean Mist Farms workers picking, shrink-wrapping, and sealing iceberg lettuce in this video.)

Starting in the mid-1930s, growers began pre-packaging produce, ushering in yet another definition of freshness that was clean, neat, and long lasting. Bagged lettuce remains popular today, from high status organic mesclun (AKA “yuppie chow”) to the comparatively nutritionally empty iceberg lettuce pictured here.

4. Fresh Fish

The story of fish provides yet another definition of freshness, one related to nature’s wild vitality, an ever diminishing resource.

Fish has been preserved in a variety of ways, such as drying, salting, canning, or packing it in ice. Consumers have also desired fish that is fresh, wild, and just-caught, leading to high demands, overfishing, and fish farming.

While fruits and vegetables grow on farms, farmed fish draws an entirely different consumer reaction. Compared to the powerful, rustic vitality of wild fish, environmentalists, fisherman, an consumers alike view farmed fish as “toxic” and distasteful. The politics of the sea continue to write the next chapter in the freshness and wild nature of fish.

5. Buy Fresh Buy Local

As Friedberg so eloquently states in her history of freshness, “Consumers stopped expecting fresh food to be just-picked or just-caught or just-killed. Instead, they expected to find and keep it in the refrigerator.”

The industrial food system that developed over the course of the twentieth century defied geography, defeated seasonality, and redefined freshness.

Consumers now resist the expectations formed by the industrial food system, as endorsed by Buy Fresh Buy Local campaigns, in effect redefining freshness, as more nostalgic and more local. These aims are reflected in the campaign logos, customized and localized to regions, states, and cities, depicting images in a style not unlike early twentieth century fruit and vegetable marketing, such as these produce crate labels.

Freshness has been defined differently throughout time, varying by product. What will “fresh” mean in the future?

A Big Chill refrigerator served with a side of nostalgia

While we may now know less about what the fox says than we did before the autumn months of last year, the fridge has been saying quite a lot ever since it found its place within the home kitchen in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Electric and gas refrigerators became available for domestic use in the United States following World War I, but were at first a luxury item owned by only upper class Americans. Refrigerator ownership was truly scant; in 1923, for example, it’s estimated that only 20,000 households in the United States owned a mechanical refrigerator. As late as 1927, 60 percent of households had no form of refrigeration at all, mechanical or ice-based. This was largely a result of refrigerator cost, which throughout the 1920s would have totaled close to $3,500 today.

The exclusivity of refrigerator ownership is evident in period advertising. Take for example Frigidaire Frozen Delights: Frozen Desserts and Salads Made in Frigidaire (1927)—a resource developed by Jessie M. DeBoth of the DeBoth Home Makers’ Schools of Chicago, Illinois. While some messaging focuses on the more middle class concerns of practicality, reliability, and food safety, this guide also promotes more affluent topics, as it demonstrates the high style entertaining made possible by this chilly appliance. On one page, sandwiched between pages of recipes, the pamphlet features a woman in sparkling eveningwear, welcoming a well-dressed couple into her home.

Image from Frigidaire Frozen Delights: Frozen Desserts and Salads Made in Frigidaire (1927)

The accompanying text reads, “The hostess in whose kitchen Frigidaire is an assistant, greets her guests unworried and with an air of perfect assurance.”

As a result of technological advances, standardization, mass production, and market competition, refrigerator cost declined in the late 1920s and 1930s, and manufacturers began to target the middle class in an effort to increase sales beyond the small market segment of wealthy households. An audience more likely to be focused on the practical concerns of food safety than elegant frozen desserts, advertisements of the time reflect this perspective, casting the refrigerator in a less glittery role.

Prior to home refrigerators, housewives preserved food in a variety of ways. This 1927 ad works to re-educate housewives, promoting the regulated temps of technology as superior to nature.

In the 1950s and 1960s, refrigerators were promoted less for their practical ability to keep food cold and safe, but for the agricultural abundance they so effortlessly provided—as well as their fashionable role within the kitchen as a design space. Take for example these individualized Kelvinator Originals:

Kelvinator Originals advertisement from the 1960s; which one is your style?

Starting around the 1980s, however, the refrigerator emerges in a staring role within the burgeoning trend of the trophy kitchen. While fashionable at times to be hidden within custom cabinetry…

Are those wall-to-wall cupboards? No! It’s a fridge—and a truly massive one at that.

…the leading trend in today’s kitchen continues to be the stainless steel fridge, proudly put on display.

A stylish kitchen featured on the Sub-Zero and Wolf website.

In luxury homes across the nation, high-end refrigerators continue to serve as significant status symbols, as well as intriguing economic indicators. In a New York Times article this week on the erosion of the middle class, G.E. shares how sales of their Café line of refrigerators—which boast features like hot water dispensers to the tune of a $1,700 to $3,000 price tag—outpace mass-market fridge sales.

Whether a reflection of one’s style and taste, a status symbol, or an appliance simply beloved for its frigid capabilities, the fridge certainly has something to say.

References

• Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. “Chapter 15: How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum,” in The Social Shaping of Technology,” eds. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Majcman (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1985), 202-218. 
• Grahame, Peter R. “Objects, texts, and practices: The refrigerator in consumer discourses between the wars,” in The Socialness of Things: Essays on the Socio-Semiotics of Objects, (ed.) Stephen Harold Riggin. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994). 
• Isenstadt, Sandy. “Visions of Plenty: Refrigerators in America around 1950.” Journal of Design History 11, 4 (1998): 311-321. 
• Nickles, Shelley. “’Preserving Women’: Refrigerator Design as Social Process in the 1930s.” Technology and Culture 43, 4 (2002): 693-727. 
• Young, William H. and Nancy K. Young. American Popular Culture Through History: The 1930s. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002.