HOW AMERICAN FOOD GOT BAD

Colonial Cookery

The trajectory of food in America had a long arc through some big black spots. We have a Cheez Whiz culture. Bad food from McDonald’s and Hostess Twinkies to Velveeta and Lucky Charms seems to be everywhere. Good & Plenty has always been more about the Plenty than the Good. In the early 1960s, Holiday Inn served 80 percent of its food from frozen packages, shipped out from a central Chicago commissary. Most of its restaurants required only a single cook and a single dishwasher. Tad’s, a well-known steak chain at the time, started a new branch of restaurants called Tad’s 30 Varieties of Meals. They served frozen dinners of chicken, scallops, steak, and potatoes. The dinners were wrapped in plastic and diners would defrost them in microwave ovens next to each table, without shame. Or much taste. There’s a standard explanation for why American food became so bad, and you will hear it from foodies, you will find it in a lot of food histories, and it is cited by Michael Pollan. This story, quite simply, is that American food got commercialized. More precisely, this country commercialized its food supply network so rapidly and so thoroughly that taste got lost in all the efficiencies. We became the country of shipped food, frozen food, canned food, and the large agricultural corporation. We lost our earlier and purer food ways in the quest for profit and ease. Agribusiness corrupted our chance to buy everything in cozy, local markets and to chat with nearby farmers, like a good locavore should. I’d like to set the record straight. Any objective observer will find plenty of excess and low quality in American agribusiness and indeed that is what you would expect from such a ubiquitous commercial force. But a closer look at the history shows that commercialization wasn’t nearly as much at fault for the low quality of a lot of American food as most people believe. The biggest reasons American food turned out so bad have been overlooked. The commercial success of, say, Doritos doesn’t explain how things got so bad overall. Politicians and legislators are much more central to the story of our culinary problems than is usually let on. The political war on alcohol in the early decades of the twentieth century shut down legions of top-quality restaurants for decades. Then, wham, World War II shoved America into a trough of high-volume, low-quality junk. This historic one-two punch stunted the growth of quality restaurants when the rest of the U.S. culture was booming. Perhaps even more important, the war against immigration, which started in the 1920s, kept American food away from its best and most fruitful innovators for decades, precisely at the time when commercialization was gathering momentum. Given the power of these three social forces, it’s no wonder that a lot of our food was so bad. Later in the century, it took decades for American food habits to adapt to the two-income family and the dominance of television as a way of spending time. At first those trends were bad for food quality, at least until we learned how to turn them to our advantage; the frozen TV dinner came long before The Food Network. Americans thus experienced a century-long perfect storm of bad news for good food. That storm came at the time when refrigeration and trucking were becoming more important and American food supply chains—the distance, time, and number of steps between harvest and consumption—were growing longer. The rise of mass transportation, mass marketing, and mass food preservation techniques helped American food markets expand at a rapid clip through the twentieth century. Farmers could grow lettuce in southern California and sell it in Maine. Yet the mix was biased—unnecessarily biased—against good and diverse foodstuffs. In large part that bias stemmed from unwise laws and in large part it stemmed from some accidental social forces, which required some time for us to adjust to. It could have been different. The commercialization of food markets isn’t the big villain because the mediocre American food phenomenon was highly contingent on particular circumstances of time and place—and also on some pretty stupid laws. But there is an even bigger misunderstanding of what happened in the twentieth century based on two oversights. First, more people ate well than ever before. Today the American poor are more likely to be obese than starving. Even the mass mobilization of the Second World War, and the accompanying constraints on resources, did not prevent most Americans from eating meat, albeit lower quality meat, on a regular basis. In practical terms, these gains were far more important than the ugliness of junk food. Second, we exaggerate how bad American food is, just as was done with British food a generation or so ago. The twentieth-century U.S. culinary scene was by no means totally dim. The French appreciated our salads and our better hamburgers. The Midwest and the South were full of fresh vegetables, and California agriculture ushered in year-round produce. Texas beef and barbecue flourished, and New Orleans extended its signature Creole and Cajun cuisines. The United States was one of the best places in the world to eat a steak, and on the coasts fresh seafood was plentiful. Foreigners have had a skewed picture. The further away a foreign country, the less likely they will see the fresh foods of the United States. The less likely they will see the barbecue or taste the fresh corn of the Midwest or sample the vegetables that are commonplace throughout much of the year in Alabama. The foreigners will, however, be familiar with our canned, prepackaged, and frozen items, namely everything we are good at shipping. Americans see less of the prepackaged foods of Europe, if only because Europe has less expertise in transporting food for long distances. Our European food memories are of wine, cured ham, and fresh strawberries; the Europeans get from us McDonald’s and frozen pizza. So while some of their criticisms of American food culture are correct, those criticisms also are not balanced. And when European tourists show up in the United States, a lot of them don’t have cars, don’t sample the suburbs, don’t understand a lot of our ethnic foods, and in general they are pretty clueless about how to find good food here. They wander around cities such as Boston and San Francisco and expect that good food, in the forms they are used to finding in their European homes, will simply bite them in the ankle. That isn’t how it works. That said, I do accept that there has been a lot more low-quality food in this country than ever should have been the case. Let’s now turn to why, looking at our rather unique history, starting with the legal prohibition of alcohol.

The Prohibition Tsunami 

After numerous false starts, it’s pretty clear that the wine bar is here to stay. Customers like the idea of tasting before they drink, they like the idea of wine as something casual, and they
like the appetizer-size portions of food that most wine bars serve. Wine bars feel like cozy, nice places to socialize. My favorite local wine bar is a Moroccan tapas place in McLean, Virginia, and I don’t think it would be there if not for the profits from the drinks. The wine bar also has boosted tapas. The link between good wine and good food runs deep. A lot of restaurants, especially of the fancy kind, make more than half of their profits from selling drinks. That political war on alcohol I mentioned above culminated in the banning of public sales of alcohol in 1920. The era of Prohibition that followed forced a lot of good restaurants either to break the law or go out of business. The puritanical American attitudes toward alcohol, as codified in the law, are a major reason why our food and our dining stayed backward for so long. While the Eighteenth Amendment outlawed the public consumption and sale of alcohol across the United States, the stingy legal tolerance of alcohol has a much longer history in this country. Before World War I, twenty-six states already had enacted restrictions on its public sale, mostly in the South and in the West. Prohibition in Kansas began as early as 1881. Even if a state was not dry, particular localities often were. In California by 1914, dry towns included Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Long Beach, Pasadena, Pomona, Redlands, Riverside, and much of Los Angeles County. The dry movement also won victories in the Northeast; for instance, by 1908, 90 out of the 168 towns in Connecticut were dry. Prohibition of alcohol was a bigger and longer experiment than many people realize. National Prohibition brought catastrophe to most good restaurants, especially the fancy and the expensive ones. One commentator of the time referred to a “gastronomic holocaust.” A British visitor noted “the wholesale assassination of the charm and pleasure of dining… practically every restaurant is a sepulcher.” The Saturday Evening Post argued that American gastronomy had been destroyed. These problems, which already happened in the dry states, now infested the entire country, including America’s dining capital, New York City. Journalist Herbert Asbury wrote: “For a long time dining in New York was a grim business.” In New York, the famous Delmonico’s shut its doors in 1924, unable to make money without alcohol sales. Other notable restaurants to close—for similar reasons—included Rector’s, Shanley’s, the Ted Lewis Club, the Boardwalk, the Little Club, the Monte Carlo Club, Murray’s Roman Gardens, Thomas Healy’s Golden Glades, Reisenweber’s, Jack’s, Sherry’s, and Mouquin’s, considered the best French restaurant in New York at the time. Many of these establishments were raided and busted for having alcohol on the premises. In other cases top hotels shut down (their bars had been important sources of income), taking their restaurants with them, or the hotels discontinued or neglected their restaurants. Part of the problem was government corruption. Formerly legitimate restaurants that decided to serve alcohol suddenly had to operate outside the law and compete with mob-run rivals. The less reputable establishments used the law, and corrupt police, to close up their competitors. If a restaurant drew too many of your customers, you, as a competitor, could report it for breaching Prohibition. The surviving places were the best at bribery, corruption, and legal connections, not good cooking. The more profitable the restaurant, the higher the bribe one would be expected to pay. A typical New York City speakeasy had regular bribery costs of about four hundred dollars a month, which if we adjust for inflation would be roughly equal to about ten times that sum today. This did not include periodic payments, in terms of food, drink, or otherwise to visiting policemen. Expensive, high-quality food was hurt the most. In addition to the loss of profits on drinks, no public restaurant could use a sauce with wine. French restaurants were almost completely abandoned, as this was before nouvelle cuisine and related movements made wine-based sauces less central to fine cooking. Most French chefs in the United States were walking the streets, looking for work, or they took a steamship back home. From 1919 to 1929 the number of restaurants in the United States tripled, most of all to meet the demands of a rapidly growing consumer society. After all, these were boom years. But most of these locales emphasized speed and convenience more than the quality of the food. Diners—which do not rely on alcohol sales for their profitability—became more popular. Soda fountains, ice cream parlors, and candy shops also flourished. For instance, Broadway in New York City changed from a theater and restaurant center to cheap food and retail outlets. Suddenly it was full of hot-dog and hamburger shops, chop suey restaurants, candy stores and drugstores, penny arcades, and speakeasies, all harbingers of the new food world to come. Prohibition also made restaurants more child-friendly. Family life became more convenient, but the quality of food suffered. Most children prefer bland, predictable food, and, as I’ll discuss in more detail below, American adults have been especially willing to cater to the food preferences of their kids. Prohibition, by letting more kids into restaurants, gave them greater influence over American restaurant food. To this day, the United States has a higher drinking age than does most of Europe and those restrictions are usually enforced in restaurants. This encourages restaurants to supply food that does not require the accompaniment of wine. In Europe it is far more common to serve some wine or beer to a sixteen-year-old at the table and then expect the kid to eat like an adult. Americans ratcheted their standards down while the Europeans kept theirs high. Returning to the 1920s, alcohol consumption was driven underground to the speakeasy or to private homes. Often the speakeasies served food, but observers have reported the quality as poor and the prices as high. The incentives militated against good food. A speakeasy was keen to keep a low public profile, which made it hard to develop a long-term reputation for culinary innovation. Restricting the clientele to known persons limited the incentive to draw others in with good food, and instead emphasized social or business ties. Furthermore speakeasies faced a risk of being prosecuted and shut down. Short-time horizons meant that the owners had little incentive to make long-term investments in quality products. Why build up a top (illegal) restaurant when you could be put out of business any moment? One study of New York City remarked that “these raids… did serve the purpose of closing most of the places where good food could be bought.” Illegal drinking also tended to avoid wine, which is hard to transport, store, and market. Instead drinkers chose cheap spirits, but those drinks do less to enhance the taste of quality food. Furthermore, these drink preferences persisted after the end of Prohibition. Even through the 1940s, it was common for Americans to drink whiskey, not wine, with fine food. Per capita alcohol consumption did not reattain its pre-Prohibition levels until 1973, and so Prohibition cast a long historical shadow. Prohibition ended in 1933, but that was in the middle of the Great Depression. It was not an auspicious time for restaurant openings. One estimate from the time suggests that culinary recovery began in New York City six years after Prohibition ended. Another estimate cites 1941 for the first great post-Prohibition restaurant, Le Pavillon in New York City. At this time, 1939, the United States was shortly to enter the Second World War, which dealt another blow to quality food. World War II pushed America further along the spectrum of convenient, low-quality food by encouraging prepackaged foods and fast food restaurants. Restaurant openings boomed during the war, but they were of a particular sort. The war put six million women into the work force for the first time and most of these women were married and had children. Many husbands were off fighting the war and over 10 percent of the U.S. population enlisted in the armed services. When it came to food, speed and convenience were at a premium. Families demanded foodstuffs that were cheap and could be eaten on the go. This gave an additional push to diners, malt shops, fast food, burger joints, and cafeterias. The roots of 1950s and 1960s food can be found during the earlier wartime experience and the destruction of fine dining during Prohibition. Wartime rationing and scarcity made high-quality ingredients and careful cooking distant priorities. For instance, 60 percent of U.S. Choice grade cuts of beef were reserved for wartime use, so more and more people ate mass-produced chicken. Canned Spam, which became especially popular, typified the American response to the war. Spam was easy to store, quick to serve, and offered plenty of fat and salt. Fresh vegetables and fruits were often not available, given the diversion of labor, resources, and transportation facilities into the war effort. Coffee, butter, cheese, fats, oils, and most of all sugar were all extremely restricted. During the war, Americans ate less sugar and less pork, but calorie consumption remained robust. In fact beef consumption rose and reached a new peak in 1943. After all the adjustments were made to the new scarcities, quality suffered more readily than quantity. Maintaining high levels of meat consumption became a status symbol during the war and Americans thought of themselves as the land that never had to do without, even during a titanic struggle. Yet the adjustments required to maintain this posture pushed America further down the road of readily available but low-quality foodstuffs. Unlike Europe, the United States had an intact industrial and agricultural base and also greater distances between farms and cities. Industrially canned goods were an important way of adjusting to the war. The shipment of foodstuffs abroad—whether to soldiers or for wartime foreign aid—gave a big boost to the American canning industry and it was then simple to direct the new canning facilities to serve the home market too. So, while the quality of American meat went down, Americans were able to get through the war maintaining high levels of meat consumption, at least compared to most of Europe. The responses to the Second World War show how differently food transport networks had evolved in the United States and Europe. Most European economies were deeply affected by the war, more so than the United States. Throughout much of Europe, war meant that many foodstuffs simply were not to be had. People ate less. They also resorted more to local production, garden production, barter with local farmers, and home preservation of foods. In extreme cases people would eat the family pets or stray animals. These responses lowered the quality of European food, but they did not shunt Europe onto a convenience-oriented, quantity-emphasizing, low-quality food track during the postwar period. Europe did not have the factory capacity to shift into mass food production; if anything, the wartime responses to crisis solidified the European tendency to resort to local ingredients, at the same time the United States was turning to long-distance transportation. Ironically, because Europe suffered more, its food tasted better. Even after the negative shocks of war and national Prohibition were over, American dining still was not left free to grow and improve. Many state and county liquor laws continued for decades after these events. Texas allowed the sale of alcohol in restaurants only in 1971. A restaurant boom followed. Many counties still have dry laws. While the exact numbers fluctuate, of the 120 counties of Kentucky, 55 are dry and 35 more have partial restrictions on alcohol. Of the 254 counties in Texas, 74 are completely dry; more than half of the counties in Arkansas are dry. It is estimated that about eighteen million Americans live in dry areas. This overregulation has shackled innovation and also reflects broader and anti-alcohol attitudes. The United States did not really focus on wine, or wine as a complement to good food, until the 1970s or later.

Manna from Immigrants 

Everyone is heartened by stories of immigrants who come to America and make good, but I am especially delighted by stories of immigrants who improve our food culture. There is a new restaurant, about twenty minutes from my home, and the sign-in Korean only—says Pyongyang Soondae. That’s right, Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. The proprietor is Ma Young-Ae, a charming North Korean woman who wears an apron, decorated with cats and hearts, and greets all of her customers with a big smile and a hello. She was delighted to see me, even if her English was not up to all of my questions about the food. Like many Korean-American success stories, her workday stretches from about 9:30 in the morning to 10:30 at night, and most of that time is dedicated to keeping up the quality in her restaurant. Yet only ten years ago she was working for North Korea’s Ministry of Public Security, busting drug smugglers, namely those who were trading with China without the approval of the government (the government itself is involved in the trade). Today she’s a devout Christian with Bible quotations on the wall of her restaurant and an implacable political opponent of the North Korean regime; sometimes she travels to the United Nations to lead protests against it. She once spent a month in a North Korean prison and was interrogated for filing false reports and for possibly being a Christian. She was released but shortly thereafter found herself in political trouble again. She fled the country, crossing the Chinese border and leaving behind her husband, but she was caught, put in prison again, tortured, and beaten repeatedly with an ashtray, the scars from which are still visible. Finally she was able to flee the country with forged papers, and she made her way to South Korea, backed by bribes along the way and aided by some family and political connections. She later came to the United States on the grounds of political asylum and now she is cooking in northern Virginia to the delight and acclaim of the region’s foodies. Her restaurant serves pork liver and intestines, but also some of the best sausage, with some of the freshest pepper, have had. There is a cold soup of buckwheat noodles with cucumbers, and there are dumplings of pheasant meat. There are at least forty Korean restaurants in the general area, but this isn’t like the others. It’s usually better and at the very least it’s always different. In addition to cooking, Ma plays music (piano, accordion, and yanggeum, a stringed instrument with bamboo sticks), sings Korean folktales, speaks and sings at Korean churches, and watches TV shows about the FBI. She donates part of the revenue of the restaurant to refugee aid and ongoing efforts against the North Korean regime. She also still receives death threats. I call Ma’s cooking North Korean food but I also call it American food. Without Ma, my culinary life would be poorer and so would America’s. What’s striking is that cuisines rely on immigration to varying degrees. French food has drawn upon international influences, but it has not in recent times been much influenced by immigrants to France. Paris has many good North African restaurants, but had there been no Algerian immigrants, Parisian food still would be a world leader, and probably it would have taken a broadly similar path up through the current day. French cooks have focused on refining preexisting national and regional ideas, or in the case of nouvelle cuisine, they have thinned sauces and focused on pure ingredients. There hasn’t been that much of a mingling of ideas, at least not in recent times. If anything, the evolution of classic French cuisine was originally a reaction against earlier Arabic influences, most of all by taking sugar, cinnamon, and honey out of their prominent place in the main courses and segregating them into the desserts. You won’t often see Moroccan bistillah pie in French haute cuisine. Italy had low levels of immigration for much of the twentieth century, but like France it has focused on refining preexisting materials, techniques, and recipes. Immigration to Italy has been rising more recently, but an Italy without recent immigration still would have excellent food. It would be harder to hire restaurant waiters, and thus harder to keep a restaurant going, but the content of the food wouldn’t be so different. Sicilian food is often North African in its inspirations and in its prominent use of orange, mint, and other herbs. But those influences are from centuries ago, not from recent arrivals. In contrast, American food is immigrant food. Many of our best food ideas came from immigrants or in some cases from African slaves. The New York deli blended numerous influences from Eastern Europe, the hamburger evolved from German meat cooking, American pizza is a remixed Italian idea, and barbecue probably came from the Caribbean and Mexico. The so-called “ethnic” cuisines now dominate our cities and suburbs. Fusion cuisines draw on European, Latin, Asian, and now African influences. California “Napa Valley” cooking is one of the most international styles that can be found. American food is immigrant food translated into a new physical, economic, and agricultural environment. As such, it is continually moving in new directions and bubbling over with innovative and sometimes improbable ideas. Only in America would you find a Cajun-Thai restaurant or dozens of New York City restaurants blending Cuban and Chinese food. American food was never based on refining the quality of static recipes and thus it is potentially vulnerable to losing its sources of ongoing inspiration, namely if immigration dries up, as it did for the middle part of the twentieth century. When it comes to food, the United States is extremely good at supplying cheap raw materials, cheap transportation, cheap marketing, and access to a large market of wealthy customers. In most parts of the country, land is plentiful. American food is, in part, what results when we explore many combinations of these inputs, including ethnically diverse cooks from around the world. I would even say this: Our long supply chains—usually thought of in terms of cross-country trucking hauls—also include our ability to attract immigrants from far away. Chinese food in America is not as good as in Sichuan province, but Sichuan province does not offer comparably diverse food options across the board. American food, and much of the trade-oriented, market-oriented Anglo world, is moving toward this “next best” status for many ethnic cuisines. No one of these cuisines is American food, but there is something strongly American about the combination of all those food choices in one locale. In many areas of life, America has been about perfecting diversity and choice, rather than about perfecting any single style. So if immigration restrictions limit the number of food choices, they are striking at the greatest qualities of American food. Up through the 1920s, the United States was largely an open nation for immigrant arrivals. Land was to be had, it was easy to find a job, the class system was open and flexible (for most whites), and American cities absorbed millions of newcomers. It’s not surprising that recent immigrants formed so much of the U.S. population. From 1820 to 1920, the United States took in about thirty million Europeans. Yet this source of ideas and experimentation was choked off by immigration policy. In 1921, the Emergency Quota Act enacted the first ceiling on the number of immigrants admitted per year; restrictions were tightened in 1924 and for the next forty years the United States was largely closed to legal foreign immigration on a large scale. These immigration restrictions hurt American food and they came at broadly the same time as Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War II. To consider the suffocating effect of immigration limits alone, imagine how your current dining scene would suffer if you were cut off from the food products of Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Thai, and Mexican immigrants, not to mention all the other groups, from Bolivians to Ethiopians, depending of course on where you live. Not only would these varied and delicious foods be much harder to find, but the competitive pressures on mainstream American restaurants would be weaker. By the middle of the twentieth century, eaters in the United States had lived in that world for about fifty years. The effect was inferior and blander food. Stopping the flow of new immigrants also damaged the culinary value of older, already established immigrants. Earlier immigrants were cut off from the food ideas from back home. Chinatowns dried up, Italian districts turned mainstream, and Greek immigrants opened diners with only a moderate Greek influence; you’ll see souvlaki on these menus but not much more from the homeland. Previous immigrants lost touch with their roots and moved closer to mainstream American eating habits. Social identification with one’s ethnic group made less sense when that group was shrinking in numbers. While this may have been good for national unity, it was bad for American food. Immigrants sought normality and acculturation. Spicy or garlicky foods were seen as signs of lower-class status and habits to be overcome. Cut off from their roots, isolated pockets of immigrants were seduced by the promise of American household ease. They started buying canned goods, bottled ketchup, and later frozen dinners and microwaves. Sometimes they pursued these trends in excess, to show they were “real Americans.” Cooking from the “home country” was limited to special holidays or large Sunday family dinners. Some ethnic styles persisted but they ossified in form: If you visit an old-style German restaurant in Pennsylvania you’ll find plenty of heavy meat dishes, with lots on the plate, but few of the flavorful subtleties you can find if you visit southern Germany. The American dining scene was insular. Duncan Hines was arguably the leading restaurant critic in the United States in the 1940s. He made his first trip to Europe only in 1948, reporting back that the United States enjoyed the world’s finest cuisine. In his view, the only competitors for this designation were the English, who had excellent roast beef. Immigration restrictions were not relaxed until 1965, when the Hart-Cellar Act abolished national-origin quotas; the Act went into formal effect in 1968 and there was further delay in getting people to come and to open up successful restaurants. Nonetheless, over the next ten years, 4.7 million immigrants were admitted. This was much larger than the 2.5 million admitted in the 1950s, nearly five times the one million of the 1940s, and a full order of magnitude greater than the half million of the 1930s. The coming of age of food in the United States, in the 1970s and 1980s, owed much to this change in immigration policy.
The American restaurant scene responded to the wave of newcomers, albeit with a lag. In 1960 the United States had over six thousand Chinese restaurants. In the 1960s, the Chinese population of the United States increased by 84 percent, largely through immigration. The number of Chinese restaurants rose steadily, and eventually their quality and diversity grew too. The American Southwest shows just how much immigration restrictions damaged American food. Despite all the immigration restrictions enacted into law, Mexican immigration to the Southwest was largely uncontrolled until the 1970s or later. Although the restrictive laws from the 1920s were supposed to apply to Mexicans, the enforcement was lax. Mexicans therefore moved into Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico in large numbers throughout the twentieth century, even when other sources of national immigration were slow. Mexican dishes already had been prominent in these areas, but continuing immigration kept the traditions alive. Tex-Mex food evolved into a new variety of Mexican food, with unique Texan, New Mexican, and California variants. All this happened well before the immigration blossoming of the 1970s. The various excellent chilies of New Mexico, for instance, have been a popular ingredient since the early history of that territory.

What Kids and Television Have Wrought 

During the twentieth century, the structure of the American family also tipped the balance away from quality foods. Food habits start in the family. That is where we learn what to eat, how to eat, and how to value food. While a palate can be retrained, most people keep the food tastes of their childhood. It is no accident that so many Chinese will eat sea cucumber for the feeling of smoothness, that so many Mexicans do not mind the spiciness of chilies, and that so many Argentines have a taste for kidneys and intestines. They grew up with the stuff. Many Americans treat Wonder Bread as a normal taste, but few Germans will, as they are expecting harder and stronger-tasting breads. Through a series of social accidents, the structure of the twentieth-century American family, when combined with the new technologies of the time, discouraged quality food. Television viewing, working mothers, and spoiled children all combined to dumb down American culinary tastes. Amy Chua’s recent book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother explained that Asian kids are so successful in engineering and the sciences because of an approach to parenting that includes limiting kids’ TV time, forcing them to practice a musical instrument such as the violin, even calling one’s children “garbage” when they don’t meet expectations. Whatever you think of this as a parenting method, strict parenting is better for a country’s food than is permissive parenting. When the kids are in charge, food quality is bound to go downhill and that has been a big part of the problem with American food. Recent immigrants aside, Americans spoil and cater to their children more than do other countries. We buy them more toys, read more books about how to bring them up, and give them larger allowances to spend. Dr. Spock’s best-selling 1946 book told parents to cater to the needs of their children flexibly. Europeans often express their amazement at the child-centered nature of U.S. culture, how much we are always running to please the little tykes, and how little respect we give our elderly. We also spoil our children by catering to their food preferences, but this damages dining quality for everyone. American parents produce, buy, cook, and present food that is blander, simpler, and sweeter, and in part that is because the kiddies are in charge. Children love sweets, French fries, unornamented meats, and snacks. Since it is easier to cook for the whole family, American food followed this simpler, blander path. You simply cannot count on children to monitor the quality of food. Few children will complain that the vegetables are not fresh, that the sauce is under-seasoned, or that the fish is overcooked. In France, in contrast, the wishes of children, whether for food or otherwise, are more frequently ignored. The kids are simply expected to eat what the adults feed them. A lot of American food is, quite simply, food for children in a literal sense. It’s just that we all happen to eat it. If you’ve brought the kids to McDonald’s, for that fun plastic play house, or for the Chicken McNuggets, odds are you are going to eat there too, whether you like it or not. Many fast food outlets target their marketing at children, hoping that parents will be dragged in as well. Burger King and McDonald’s run extensive marketing programs aimed at children and offer brightly colored playgrounds. These franchises are implicit baby-sitters, since the children often run off to play while the parents sit, eat, and talk. Fast food restaurants still cluster around high schools; they are three to four times more likely to be located near a high school than would otherwise be expected, given the locations of those high schools. Furthermore, the United States is still a much younger society, demographically, than is Japan or most of Europe. Parents also give their kids bigger allowances in the United States than in other countries of the world. In part the United States is a relatively wealthy country and in part Americans are, for whatever reasons, more willing to cater to children. Of course children spend a lot of their allowance money on candy, fast food, and snacks. This shapes their tastes and gives them some food autonomy, relative to their peers in other countries, who are typically more dependent on the food chosen by their parents. The result is a lot of bad food and a lot of sweet, bland food. For instance, children have been the driving force behind the prominence of doughnut chains in the United States. In 1962, which arguably is one of the nadir years for American food, 59 percent of U.S. households had children; 91 percent of those families bought doughnuts regularly, as compared to 74 percent of the families without children. Doughnuts are extremely sweet, they come in bright colors, and they contain lots of additives. They are the snob’s culinary nightmare, and their popularity is not surprising in such a child-centered culture. Fast food restaurants did not prosper in Western Europe until American social trends—albeit in weaker form—reached the continent. This includes the dual-income family, suburban commuting, a workday with no lengthy lunch break at home, widespread advertising, and greater purchasing power for children. McDonald’s did not enter the Italian market until the relatively late date of 1984 and it still is not prominent there. The tube is also responsible for a lot of the bad eating habits in this country. Television became popular in the United States more quickly than in Europe. The American love affair with TV took off in the 1950s and viewing rose through the 1980s. By 1955, two-thirds of all American households had TV sets. In most of Europe, this process happened two decades later. This is one reason why America, and not Europe, has been the vanguard of many low-quality food trends. Television encouraged the consumption of food that was quick to eat and prepare. Think about the 1970s for instance. Soap operas ran all afternoon. Reruns already had started at five o’clock, the evening news was shown at six, and prime-time shows began at eight. The “TV cost” of preparing a time-consuming meal was high. Furthermore most of the family would not want to sit around the table and savor multiple courses. More commonly, one parent, or perhaps a teenage child, would prepare something quick, heat up a frozen dinner, or order out for food delivery. In my childhood, many of my favorite shows—including Star Trek and I Dream of Jeannie—were shown in reruns precisely at dinnertime in the critical five-to-seven P.M. slots. By seven thirty or eight, new sitcoms were under way. I was anxious to see Captain Kirk and so I required little more than a hamburger and perhaps French fries. My mother obliged; but I would have fought any approach that tied me to the dinner table for an hour. I learned how to heat frozen French fries, how to order out for “Chicken Delight,” and how to cook a simple hamburger. My culinary tastes were formed during these years, and they were not much modified until a stint living in Germany in my early twenties. The entry of women into the work force pushed food in similar “ready to eat” directions. In 1940, 8.6 percent of married American women with children held jobs. By 1948, the figure had risen to 26 percent, and by 1991 it was 66.8 percent. One early Jell-O pamphlet was persuasive: “Why should any woman stand for hours over a hot fire, mixing compounds to make people ill, when in two minutes, with an expense of ten cents, she can produce such attractive desserts?” Chain and fast food restaurants grew rapidly during this period, mostly to economize on the time and effort of the parents. By 1975, housewives were working thirty-two fewer hours a week preparing meals and cleaning up, on average, than their counterparts from 1910. A lot of this time saved was liberation from drudgery, and who wants that back? Still, it meant that prepackaged food was replacing hand preparation of fresh raw ingredients. The rising divorce rate forced many women out into the workplace and further cemented these trends. Entrepreneurs stepped forward to provide TV-friendly and latchkey-friendly foods. The microwave oven was patented in 1945 and marketed for commercial use in 1947. In 1955 a microwave still cost $1,295 but by 1967 a countertop model could be had for $495. Today a perfectly acceptable microwave can sell for as little as fifty dollars. In 1954 Swanson marketed the first nationally available “TV dinner,” which consisted of turkey with cornbread dressing and gravy, sweet potatoes, and buttered peas. The Swanson executive who thought of the serving drew upon his wartime “mess” experience; he had once consumed a similar meal on a rainy battlefield in Okinawa. Many subsequent Swanson recipes were developed by bacteriologists rather than chefs; it was difficult to figure out which foodstuffs would withstand the rigors of the production process and the subsequent preservation; those factors became more important than the taste of the food. Frozen and pre-prepared foods also had compartmentalized trays to make it easier to eat the food without a table underneath and without looking at the meal. Later the folding TV table-tray kept the food from falling into one’s lap. Pizza took off in the United States only in the 1950s. A pie or two could feed everyone, so it fit well with family life. An order was easy to transport in the car. Above all else, pizza is good for eating in front of the television. It is easily reheated, can be ordered for delivery, and can be eaten by hand from a plate without needing much in the way of a table or utensils. For a busy family, it is quick to clean up and throw away. Television encouraged the purchase of food that can be eaten in one’s lap or from a big bag or bowl. In addition to pizza, this also favored prepackaged, easy-to-handle snack foods such as cookies, potato chips, French fries, and wrapped candy. It disfavored fresh foods with easily spilled sauces and broths. The problem wasn’t agribusiness per se, it’s that consumers were not innovating enough, in part because TV was distracting them. The centrality of television in American life also drove a national market in advertising and this made food more homogeneous. The national networks had most of the popular programs and that further shifted the balance of influence in food markets. National advertising means that the product must be saleable to large numbers of people, as it is not worth buying network airtime for niche or specialty items. The result was that nationally advertised products tended to be bland and popular in flavor; they appealed to a “least common denominator” among American eaters. This favored national brands, which are the same everywhere, and made it harder for niche foods to get a hearing. The advertisement had to feature a single product or a consistent product line, as repetition and consistency of message are paramount to marketing. What better way to reach people than to advertise on a popular show such as the evening news or I Love Lucy? Kraft Cheese would find this profitable, but your local organic grocer would not. As with the stultifying effects of Prohibition, the effects of these causes have often lasted longer than the restrictions themselves. Culinary excellence is hard to start up again once it is destroyed, cooking knowledge in the home is lost, and a network of wonderful restaurants cannot be created overnight. Excellent restaurants require customers who know the difference and care enough to pay for it. When so many restaurants have been mediocre for decades, or altogether absent, it is hard to suddenly rebuild a clientele that appreciates quality. American diners, and home cooks, became accustomed to looking for convenience and the tried-and-true. Furthermore most top chefs are trained by other, older chefs, and it is hard to get the training chain started again. To sum up, a number of contingent historical factors have pushed American food supply networks toward convenience rather than quality: laws and our politicians, our children, and our acquiescence to these forces. Agribusiness does have a greedy quest for profit, so it will support both positive and negative food trends, when consumers are demanding them. It may appear that agribusiness is at fault, but they are the builders of the platform rather than the main shapers of the content. We need to think first about… ourselves. A good place to strike back, to begin a new food revolution, is in the aisle of the supermarket, perhaps behind one of those shopping trolleys designed to conveniently trap and sootNew he demanding toddlers. What are the ways to turn America’s unusual food markets in your favor? The aisles of the American supermarket reflect a lot of what went wrong, so improving the supermarket experience is one natural way to cement your credentials as an everyday foodie.

By Tyler Cowen in "An Economist Gets Lunch" - New Rules for Everyday Foodies, Published by  Dutton (Penguin Group-USA), 2012, excerpts p.42-56. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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