American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us To Love Bananas, Spam, and Jello

Why do we eat the foods we eat? Someone told us to eat them. Or--"sold us" to eat them.

Christian Ward's American Advertising Cookbooks tells the story of how corporations and big business influenced Americans to buy their products, creating an American cuisine that included Jello, Spam, and 7-Up in baby's milk. 

As a kid growing up in the 50s I was deluged with television ads telling me to buy the bread with the red, yellow, and blue balloons and sugared cereals with cartoon mascots. Then came Golden Arches and Coke Cola vs. Pepsi and newfangled foods like Pringles and Fritos. Remember the Where's the Beef, Beef--it's what America eats, and the Got Milk? celebrity ads? How many thousands of food commercials have I seen?

 Velveta actually was once real cheese. Now its a "cheese product"
vintage ad from my collection

While we Boomer kids were pleading for the latest product marketed on our TV shows, our mothers were collecting recipes from the magazines she brought home from the grocery store. Did a 25 cent rebate inspire Mom to try La Choy Chop Suey? (Dad hated it.) Did she get her favorite Spanish Rice recipe from a magazine ad?

Perhaps this La Choy magazine ad inspired Mom to try Chinese
from my collection

Spanish Rice was one of Mom's standard meals. from my collection

I don't remember Mom having any two-inch-thick Cookbook Bibles. She did have a collection of smaller cookbooks published by companies. Hotpoint Ovens. Fleischmann yeast. The Joy of Jello. Pies Men Like. She had recipes that came with her Bundt cake pan and electric skillet and cookie press. Mom used Bisquick and had the Bisquick Cookbook. I remember the coffee cake with streusel topping she often made.

some of Mom's recipe booklets

I remember learning how to make mini-pizzas with English muffins. Another magazine recipe...

Mom made a few signature dishes from scratch, but she also loved to try every new product that came out on the market including frozen TV dinners. I am grateful for one thing: we never had to eat the ubiquitous canned green beans/mushroom soup/Durkee fried onion casserole at holidays. (Dorcas Reilly invented the casserole recipe for Campbell's Soup, the most famous and important recipe they ever created. I read about her passing while working on this review.)

When I married, we began with Hamburger Helper and recipe booklets and magazine recipes. Before long we were cooking from scratch, even making our own bread.

my 1970s bread recipes from Robin Hood Flour 

I am fascinated by the history of food. So the idea of a book about how Big Business inspired American housewives to buy products caught my attention. The book includes a history of what we ate and why and photos from Ward's advertising cookbook collection. There were some pretty awful recipes. Like Ham Banana Rolls. Chiquita Banana says it's good, so it must be. 

Seeing the advertisements and recipes is great fun. But the book is more than a trip down memory lane to laugh at the ill-advised foods we once ate. The essays on the history of food and cooking in America include some stories that may shock readers. Political intervention in foreign governments, environmental degradation, racism, manipulation to encourage buying things that are bad for us--This is the history of American capitalism in American kitchens. 

Jello Pudding Cheesecake advertisement, my collection

Did you know that Daniel Dole went to Honolulu in 1841 with a missionary group, then with his son Sanford helped to depose Queen Liliuokalani--and then placed Sanford as President of the Republic of Hawaii? The family then built their pineapple plantations. And no, pineapples are not native to Hawaii.

You have perhaps heard about Banana Republics. Bananas were brought to South America to feed slaves. North Americans first ate them at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. People went ape over bananas. Banana plantations were planted all over Central American, forcing out native species. Over time, United Fruit became the banana monopoly, powerful enough to interfere in Bananaland politics.

The book is divided into Why Are We Eating This and Empire Building in the Free World? Chapter topics include:

• Bananas & Pineapples: The food of paupers and kings
• Chiquita Banana vs. the World: Banana republics, pineapple princes, and the Boston families who started it all
• Class, race, and cultural signifiers: How cookbooks reinforce and change our way of thinking
• Rationing & Fish Sticks- Food as both tool and weapon
• Invasion of the Home Economists: The uneasy relationship between food science and marketing

Photo chapters cover all the major 'food groups': jello, pineapple, bananas, mystery meats, and sweets. 

Ward discusses the roots of American cooking and the first American cookbook, and how immigrants were taught to make American foods as part of their assimilation. 

Readers learn how the government got involved to clean up the food business and how Home Economics became a scientific part of education and entertaining with food became an art form. 

The Mad Men era saw entertaining become an art form. Vintage ad from my collection.

American Advertising Cookbooks would be a great gift with wide appeal. It was Boomer nostalgia for me. My son and friends loved the idea of this book and can't wait to get a hold of it.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us To Love Bananas, Spam, and Jello

by Christina Ward

Publication: November 27, 2018

ISBN 9781934170748, 1934170747

Trade Paperback 208 pages

$22.95 USD, $33.50 CAD

from the publisher:

American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas, and Jell-O is a deeply researched and entertaining survey of twentieth-century American food. Connecting cultural, social, and geopolitical aspects, author Christina Ward (Preservation: The Art & Science of Canning, Fermentation, and Dehydration, Process 2017) uses her expertise to tell the fascinating and often infuriating story of American culinary culture.

Readers will learn of the role bananas played in the Iran-Contra scandal, how Sigmund Freud's nephew decided Carmen Miranda would wear fruit on her head, and how Puritans built an empire on pineapples. American food history is rife with crackpots, do-gooders, con men, and scientists all trying to build a better America-while some were getting rich in the process.

Loaded with full-color images, Ward pulls recipes and images from her vast collection of cookbooks and a wide swath of historical advertisements to show the influence of corporations on our food trends. Though easy to mock, once you learn the true history, you will never look at Jell-O the same way again!

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I have shared many recipes from Mid-Century magazines over the years but also from Advertising Booklets. Click on the titles of the booklets below to read my posts.

Pies Men Like 
Coconut Dishes Everyone Likes 
Big Boy BBQ Book
641 Tested Recipes from the Sealtest Kitchen

1931 Advertising cookbook for coconut. From my collection.