Food

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, changes in the food Americans ate and where they ate it reflected the increasingly mobile lifestyle and suburban culture of the postwar United States.

As with other material goods, the economic boom following the war led to increased spending on food. As American incomes steadily rose from 1941 onward, the proportion of the average family’s income spent on food increased as well, totaling 26 percent in 1953. By and large, this increase was attributed to the growing market for prepared and processed foods, which tapped into the postwar focus on convenience, variety, and abundance. To create a continued market for wartime culinary innovations, the food industry heralded manufactured products like Spam and Pyequick as evidence of American superiority and triumphs of ingenuity that reduced housewives’ kitchen work. With the growing array of products and brands available to young families settling in the suburbs, supermarkets were seen as symbols of the success of capitalism and its high standard of living, sentiments famously expressed by Vice President Richard M. Nixon during his visit to Moscow’s American National Exhibition in 1959. While viewing the range of domestic conveniences displayed at the United States exhibit, Nixon praised consumer goods as the essence of American freedom, making a crucial connection between consumption and national identity in what became known as the “kitchen debate.”

Mobility was also central to the American way of life in this era. The growing dominance of the automobile indisputably affected trends in eating, particularly the rise of fast food. While New York City’s Automat, where customers used coin-operated slots to retrieve food from behind small glass windows, popularized the notion of convenience dining, modern fast food was truly a product of the automobile age. As Americans increasingly took to the road, restaurants distinctly designed to fit automobility emerged. Whether through unique facades intended to catch the motorist’s eye, as in Howard Johnson’s bright orange roof, or drive-ins where customers were served in their cars, restaurateurs catered to a roadside market that increasingly included middle-class families in contrast to the traditional working-class clientele.

As more eating occurred on the go, no restaurant matched McDonald’s in terms of fast food innovations that reflected how Americans ate in an age devoted to speed, consistency, and convenience. Opening in San Bernardino in 1948, Maurice and Richard McDonald’s walk-up with a simple menu of hamburgers, French fries, and shakes and a streamlined “Speedee Service System” attracted the attention of milkshake salesman Ray Kroc. Amid the growing market for convenience food, Kroc saw potential for extending McDonald’s concept of a cheap, ready-to-go menu nationwide and opened the first franchised chain in Des Plaines, Illinois, on April 15, 1955. Focusing on the ideas of quality, service, cleanliness, and value, Kroc marketed McDonald’s to suburban families who, by virtue of standardized methods that included the amount of meat in each hamburger, found their dining experience dependable and familiar. Through such consistency McDonald’s, more than any other fast food chain of the era, built a brand identity that led to 200 franchises by 1960 and $37 million in profits that same year. By 1967, yearly profits had reached $226 million, and the term “fast food” was arguably synonymous with McDonald’s.

As with fast food, expediency was also the watchword when Americans ate at home in these years. Even as women largely resumed the supposedly natural roles of housewife and mother in the postwar decades, convenience products were marketed as time-savers that spared women from arduous and tedious work. Debuting in 1946, the Tupper-ware storage container was heralded as the mark of the modern kitchen, an efficient and well-organized space that eliminated open containers and extended food’s shelf life. In addition, inventor Earl Tupper’s products also became a staple of suburban social life, as Tupper marketed his products through home demonstrations beginning in 1948.

In the postwar kitchen, frozen foods were equally revolutionary, with yearly sales reaching $2.7 billion by 1959 due in large part to the invention of the TV dinner. Tapping into public excitement for the new medium of TELEVISION, the product’s name was originally coined for the brand of meal developed by C. A. Swanson and Sons in 1953. While the idea’s origin is disputed, Swanson’s was the first to become a nationally recognized name brand through the product, which initially featured a giving-themed meal of turkey, cornbread dressing, frozen peas, and sweet potatoes. Packaged in a tray similar to those used on airlines, Swanson’s meal was priced at 98 cents, and the company exceeded expectations by selling approximately 10 million in the first year. In the 1960s, First Lady jAcquELiNE Kennedy’s reputed love of TV dinners was credited with improving sales, as Swanson and other companies expanded into the production of frozen breakfasts and desserts.

Even as the convenience of fast and frozen foods dominated the postwar palate, culinary figures like julia Child still inspired trends in more refined cooking. As coauthor of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), Child demystified French cuisine for American audiences and helped introduce its techniques into the mainstream. Through her television series The French Chef (1963), Child continued to make fine cuisine accessible to the masses, attracting a popular following with her unaffected manner. In 1966, Child graced the cover of Time magazine under the headline “Our Lady of the Ladle,” a title that captured her status as America’s favorite cook and yet another inspiration for what Americans ate in the postwar years.

Further reading: John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

—Hillary S. Kativa