Authors: Michael Moss
“Can you let me see them?” Clausi asked.
The Hoboken scientists had come up with some amazing concoctions, especially the orange one. It didn’t taste watery like other powdered drinks that Clausi had tasted. It had a fullness, a good mouthfeel, and the flavoring brought to mind real Valencia oranges. It easily beat out the taste of what most people were drinking for breakfast at the time, Clausi told me. “People didn’t have fresh orange juice back then like they do now,” he said. “They either had concentrate, frozen like a hockey puck that took you half a day to defrost in the kitchen sink, and full of pulp, which children do not like. Or they had canned orange juice, which had a tinny, cooked characteristic.”
But DeFelice and his lab crew had been in despair when Clausi came along. When they added in all the vitamins and minerals that were needed
to replicate the nutritional profile of real orange juice, their drink tasted horribly bitter and metallic. Clausi listened to them, and then, with his diplomatic skills, he took the problem to the marketing side, where the director, Howard Bloomquist, said the technologists were being too picky—or rather, they were misreading the potential consumer concern.
Bloomquist said that people mostly associated orange juice with vitamin C, not all the other nutrients the lab technicians were trying to add to their synthetic drink, and vitamin C, as luck would have it, was the one nutrient the technicians could add without hurting the taste. Clausi went back to the lab and urged them to forget all about the other nutrients they were trying to add. Thus was born Tang, the technician’s gift to harried breakfasters everywhere. Released in 1958, Tang blew away yet another of the chores that moms faced at breakfast time, and the General Foods copywriters had a field day. “New! Instant! Just mix with cold water,” the company ads read. “No squeezing. No unfreezing. Real wake-up taste. Always the same sunny goodness, glass after glass.”
“Happiest thing that ever happened to breakfast,” said another.
Tang was never intended to blow out the sugar levels of real juice, Clausi said. If people followed the instructions on the label and used only level teaspoons when scooping the crystals into their glass, Tang had only a bit more sugar than orange juice. But that was one of the beauties of Tang—its bliss point was readily adjustable. Just start rounding the spoonfuls, or throw in an extra, and Tang quickly gets as sweet as soda. The marketing power of this movable bliss point became starkly evident when General Foods began selling Tang in other countries. Clausi was on a marketing trip in China in the 1970s that included taste tests for Tang.
“We started in Beijing, and the further south we went, the sweeter the people wanted the Tang,” he said. Today, with annual sales having pushed past $500 million, more Tang is being sold in China and Latin America—another part of the world where people have a high fondness for sugar—than in the United States.
Tang had one other little-known attribute that contributed to its blockbuster status in the United States, albeit in a peculiar way. NASA, the
space program, needed a drink that would add little bulk to the digestion, given the toilet constraints in space. Real orange juice had too much bulky fiber in its pulp. Tang, however, was perfect—what technologists call a
“low-residue” food. When NASA heard about Tang, Clausi instructed a colleague:
“Tell NASA we’re honored to be of service, and we’ll supply whatever they need—free of charge.” On February 20, 1962, John Glenn returned from his triple orbit around the earth and told reporters that the only good thing about the food aboard his spacecraft was the Tang. With that endorsement, sales exploded.
In the days after Charles Mortimer’s exhortation to be more imaginative, the company’s cereal executives out in Battle Creek, Michigan, showed their own flair for thinking grandly. In 1961, they came up with an invention that could take the place of an entire real breakfast. It was another powdered drink, initially called Brim, and it was promoted as “breakfast in a glass.” The popularity of this new “instant breakfast” was guaranteed by its sweetness. Then, two years later, the Post inventors came closest of all to replicating the cake that Mortimer’s daughter ate for breakfast. They tooled their production plant to turn out two ribbons of pastry dough. A sweet fruity mash was smeared on the top of one, which was then covered by the other to make a sandwich that was cut into squares with edges crimped and then baked. These were called Pop-ups, and they met all of Mortimer’s criteria for convenience: They came in a box, could stay on the shelf for months, could be eaten on the go, and could be served hot without even needing to light the stove. The toaster would do. As with most food inventions, the sure sign of success was the speed with which it was copied. A few months after the squares were introduced, Post’s rival, Kellogg, executed an even more successful version of this breakfast pastry, which had scant amounts of actual fruit but loads of sugar,
as much as 19 grams—more than four teaspoons—each. Called Pop-Tarts, some of the twenty-nine varieties make no pretense of being anything other than cake for breakfast, or cookies at least. Among the flavors: Chocolate Chip, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Chocolate Fudge, Cookies and Creme, and S’mores.
The real beauty of this convenience was its elasticity.
When sales flattened out forty years later, Pop-Tarts would be promoted not as a warm breakfast food, but as a “cold afternoon treat.” Sales shot up 25 percent, according to Kellogg’s account of its 2003 marketing campaign, when it found a rich snacking target:
“The 30 million tweens aged 9–14 who possess an estimated $38 billion in spending power.”
E
very year in New York City, the top executives of companies that sold a wide range of goods gathered together under the auspices of the Conference Board, an august association best known today for conducting the “consumer confidence” survey. In 1955, the dinner speaker was Charles Mortimer, and he got right to the point. Food, clothing, and shelter were still important, he told the crowd. But now there was a fourth essential element of life that could be “expressed in a single word—convenience—spelled out with a capital ‘C.’ ”
“Convenience is the great additive which must be designed, built in, combined, blended, interwoven, injected, inserted, or otherwise added to or incorporated in products or services if they are to satisfy today’s demanding public. It is the new and controlling denominator of consumer acceptance or demand.”
There is convenience of form, he said, citing the Gaines-Burger dog food patties that Clausi had invented to be as soft as hamburger but so durable that they could sit on the pantry shelf until needed. There is convenience of time, like the grocery stores throughout America that were starting to stay open in the evenings to accommodate increasing numbers of women who worked outside the home. And there is convenience of packaging, like beer in bottles that used to have to be hauled back to the store but were now disposable, and the aluminum foil pie pans that were showing up on the grocery shelves.
“Modern Americans are willing to pay well for this additive to the products they purchase,” Mortimer told the executives. “Not because of
any native laziness but because we are willing to use our greater wealth to buy fuller lives and we have, therefore, better things to do with our time than mixing, blending, sorting, trimming, measuring, cooking, serving, and all the other actions that have gone into the routine of living.”
As if on cue, time-saving gadgets and gizmos started arriving in the grocery store that year that helped the modern homemaker trade a little more of her new wealth for some extra time away from the kitchen. Ready-to-bake biscuits appeared in tubes that could be opened by merely tugging a string. Special detergents came out for electric dishwashers that had special compounds to get off the water spots. One entrepreneurial firm even made plastic lids with spouts that snapped on cans of milk or syrup for easier pouring.
As more food companies followed his lead and conveniences arrived in every last aisle in the supermarket, there was only one real obstacle to the social transmutation that Mortimer had envisioned: the army of school teachers and federal outreach workers who insisted on promoting home-cooked meals, prepared the old-fashioned way. These educators numbered in the tens of thousands, and they were spread throughout the country, teaching kids and young homemakers not only how to cook from scratch but also how to shop to avoid processed food. Those preaching this ideal included a few thousand government employees known as extension agents, who worked for the federal and state departments of agriculture and who made house calls to teach young homemakers the ins and outs of gardening, canning, and meal planning with nutrition in mind. The main force of this army, however, was the twenty-five thousand teachers who taught the high school classes known as home economics. Home Ec was the field of formal study that taught how to manage a home and community.
If there was anyone who epitomized the Home Ec teacher, it was a thirty-year-old former farmgirl named Betty Dickson. She had been raised in York County, South Carolina, a heavily wooded and historic part of the Piedmont region just to the south and west of Charlotte, which had been developed by Scotch-Irish settlers in 1750. The main crop on her parent’s
farm was cotton, but they also grew their own vegetables. Dickson learned to cook from her mother, without even the convenience of a freezer. She made it to college and earned her teaching credentials, but it was these practical, low-tech skills from the farm that she passed on to her high school students.
“It was teaching the basics,” Dickson recalled. “They knew how to boil water, or maybe not all of them. But we did the basic skills in preparing and making biscuits, or meat, vegetables, and desserts.” Part of the class work was simply learning how to shop. The town had a small grocery, where she could immerse the students in dos and don’ts. She had them prepare shopping lists to avoid buying those things they didn’t need and “to compare prices, because money was not as free as it would be.”
Dickson belonged to the American Home Economics Association, whose founder, Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards, had parlayed her training in chemistry at MIT into a career as a consumer activist. Richards tested commercial foods for toxic contaminants; lobbied for nutritious, inexpensive cooked food in the home and at school; and pushed back on the notion that “convenience” should be owned and controlled by the processed food companies. Homemakers could do convenience, too, and even better, the association argued. To help make its case, the association conducted a two-layer cake experiment in 1957 that pitted a commercial mix against a homemade batter. As reported in the association’s journal, the homemade cake not only cost less and tasted better, it took only five minutes more than the commercial mix to prepare, cook, and serve. Moreover, for extra convenience, the homemade mix could be made and stored in big batches, for quick parceling out when a cake was needed.
But the world that Dickson and the other home economics teachers were fighting for, a society that valued home cooking, was already showing substantial signs of stress in 1955. Even then, nearly 38 percent of American women were leaving the home to work. When they returned in the evening, it was to cope with a second, even more demanding job: caring for their husbands and kids.
As food manufacturers saw it, these women needed help. They
couldn’t cook meals from scratch, even if they felt that would be more nutritious for their family. Evenings became rushed. More households were getting TVs, too, which added another distraction. Who wanted to be still eating dinner or doing the dishes when
Lassie
and
Gunsmoke
were on? If the teachers of home economics couldn’t see that society was changing, and quickly, then the processed food companies saw it as their mission to change the nature of home economics.
In the mid-1950s,
the food industry undertook two cunning maneuvers to draw these working women into its fold. The first was to create its own army of home economics teachers. Bright and fashionable, these women worked for the companies, held their own cooking contests, set up popular demonstration kitchens, and conducted cooking classes for moms and their daughters in direct competition with the home economics teachers who taught in the schools. By 1957, General Foods had sixty of these home economists on its payroll, promoting its products and working with the company’s technologists to create more convenience foods. They had glamour, and they had style, as Al Clausi, the General Foods inventor, well knew. He married one of them.
The second move by the industry was perhaps the most influential of all. To compete with the home-cooking skills being taught by Betty Dickson and the other home economics teachers, the industry wielded its very own Betty to preach the creed of convenience. Her name was Betty Crocker, and she quickly became one of the most famous women in America, notwithstanding the fact that she was entirely fake. Betty Crocker had been invented by the manager of the advertising department at Washburn Crosby, which later became General Mills, and this Betty never slept. She started out as the friendly signature on the advertising department’s letters to customers, and soon she was responding to as many as five thousand adoring fans a day, like the Mrs. Springer who wrote to her in 1950 to say how much she enjoyed the company’s Party Cake mix.
“You will find that the PARTYCAKE Mix, DEVILS FOOD CAKE Mix and the GINGER-CAKE and Cooky Mix are all grand time savers,” Betty Crocker replied.
Her catchy slogans, like “I guarantee a perfect cake, every time you
bake—cake after cake after cake,” rang out in radio, magazine, and television advertisements. She opened a set of show rooms, known as Betty’s Kitchens, where women were taught quick ’n easy, heat-and-serve cooking with Bisquick and other General Mills products. These kitchens became so famous that Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 held their famous “Kitchen Debate” in a copy of the Betty Crocker kitchen that General Mills had set up at the U.S. Trade and Cultural Fair in Moscow to epitomize the modern American kitchen. Betty Crocker also unleashed the Big Red, a string of bestselling cookbooks that went far beyond hawking desserts. As Susan Marks writes in her book
Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America’s First Lady of Food
, the recipes and advice in these cookbooks helped to drive “the fundamental shift in American diets toward the factory-processed convenience foods that were becoming fixtures in the grocery aisles.”