Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
fruit growers, coffee roasters, and sugar refiners pursued similar market-
ing strategies.
16
However, the undeniable rise of mass marketing and ad-
vertising budgets in the early twentieth century should not be taken as
evidence that the masses were seduced (or duped) into their consuming
habits.
17
For the commodities examined here, the steepest climbs in per
capita consumption took place in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, prior to the creation of national advertising campaigns directed at
end-consumers. In fact, national advertising campaigns for bananas, cof-
fee, and deciduous fruits from California did not begin in earnest until
consumption rates began to plateau during the early 1920s. As U.S. his-
torian Steven Stoll has observed for the case of California fruit-grower
cooperatives after World War I, marketing campaigns sought to redefine
a condition of ''over-production'' as one of ''under-consumption.''
18
If the emergence of professional advertising agencies cannot be cred-
ited with creating demand, they were quite adept at identifying—selec-
tively and with considerable distortion—the changing social and cultural
contextsofconsumption.Forexample,asthetwentiethcenturyunfolded,
United Fruit's advertisements shifted from rather detailed descriptions
of production and distribution processes to a changing set of images
that conveyed consumers' desires—for health, for sex, for humor, and of
course, for good-tasting food. Advertising, according to U.S. cultural his-
torian Jackson Lears, created widely circulated ''fables of abundance'' in
which industrial eciency—be it in a steel mill or in an orange grove
—guaranteed a cornucopia of pleasures. The fetishized images of com-
modities created by advertising agencies reflected their creators' highly
selective visions: the connections between resources, workers, and mass
consumption were seldom discernable. In 1932, the editorofPrinters'Ink,
an important U.S. trade journal for advertisers, proposed replacing the
''full dinner pail'' (an image strongly associated with factory work) with
the ''full cereal bowl'' as the icon for an emerging generation of ''full-
fledged consumers.'' One cannot help but wonder if the editor imagined
a sliced banana topping off his symbol for ''the future of America.''
19
The editor's optimism—even during the Great Depression—was not
entirelyunfounded:themassproductionoffoodstuffsenabledlower-and
middle-classpeopletoeatanddrinkwhatwasoncerestrictedtothetables
of the elite. In fact, processed cereal with a banana was a quintessen-
tial urban-industrial meal that reflected larger changes in when and how
working people prepared and took meals.
20
Daily life in the United States
increasingly moved to the synchronized beats of standardized time.Time
zones,punchclocks,watches,schoolbells,andhourlywagesreconfigured
