Tweet [1]
… is from page 163 of Thomas J. Schlereth’s useful 1991 book, Victorian America [2] (footnote deleted):
Food and beverages became highly advertised products only in the 1880s. The concept of the convenient, sanitary, novel, “package” – tin can, glass bottle, sealed cardboard box – transformed marketing strategies by proving that raw goods could be profitably turned into standardized products with national brand names. Canned or packaged food had a threefold impact: They introduced hitherto unknown foods (or foods eaten only by the wealthy) to a wide American market; they provided easier access to diverse food in isolated regions; and they enabled middle- and working-class women to escape some of the time-consuming work of daily food preparation.
Although today we take for granted the ready availability of inexpensive, convenient, sanitary, and novel packaged foods and beverages – these items just seem miraculously to appear regularly at supermarkets and even at rural truck stops – they are in fact a marvelous testimony to capitalist innovation and its resulting greater equalization of consumption opportunities. These items are, in short, proof against the nonsensical claims issued by “Progressives” such as Douglas Rushkoff [3] that industrial capitalism fuels economic growth only for “the rich.”