As American as Budweiser and Pickles? Nation-Building in American Food Industries

1. As American as Budweiser and Pickles? Nation-Building in American Food Industries Donna R. Gabaccia

2. What is the American National Cuisine? • Does America lack a national cuisine? - YES • Mass produced foods that are intended to be prepared and eaten quickly are considered “American” around the globe • how foods are produced, packaged, and served make them more or less American • Mass produced foods as icons of democratic and national “American” eating • salt pork, preserved fruits and vegetables, condensed milk and soup, breakfast cereals, Jell-O, hamburgers, and Coke. • American Genius: big business, understood to encompass mass production, bureaucratic management, and enormous capital • American foods have more often been products of American industry than of American kitchens.

3. Plurality in the American Food Industry • According to the ANB, in the 19th and early 20th century, business and industry were dominated by American-born leaders but were far more open to immigrants from Europe than to American-born African Americans or women. • However, this diversity is misleading since foreigners and American-born developed different food industries. • For example, foreigners dominated wine making and distilling whereas cereal manufacturers and heads of large fruit and vegetable canning operations and dairy processing enterprises were largely American-born. • European immigrants had advantages in locating and introducing technologies developed abroad because many of the technical innovations that made mass production possible that came from Europe.

4. American and Foreign Food Industries: Similarities • Packaging, branding and marketing. • Both also sought national markets for their products • foreign-born businessmen rarely called attention to their national origins. Example:, A.J. Heinz • These business strategies of the earliest big businessmen were precursors of “Coca Cola” or “Model T” marketing strategies that rightly assumed that standardized products appealed to the largest group of consumers. • This was the foundation on which products could “become American” in the national market.

5. American and Foreign Food Industries: Differences • The most striking difference was concentration of the foreign-born in a distinctive alcohol niche in the American Economy. • Outside the alcohol niche, southern and eastern Europeans almost completely disappear as industry leaders. • American-born and British and Irish immigrants were abandoning it due to an anti-alcohol sentiment that developed • Conflicts over the production and consumption became a major dimension of the food fights which recognize the xenophobic elements of reform initiatives, such as prohibition. • Alcoholic beverages did not become “American” as a result. • The consequences of this division between foreign-born and American-born not only helped the shaping of American consumer identities but also held the potential for shaping American business practices into the 20th century by labeling some products as clearly “American.”

6. Business, Nation and the Alcohol Niche • In the 19th century a paradoxical business climate was created through a growing alcohol market, coupled with a politically charged movement to rid America its of alcohol-related problems. • Foreign businesses assumed these risks and the association of alcohol with foreignness became pronounced and affected business practices • The most common business strategy was intergenerational transfer of the business. • The late 19th century and changes in the definition of American big business • raised questions about the impact of xenophobia and food fights on business strategy • Different managerial cultures : • Foreign strategies of business and the alcohol niche and foreignness in the food fights of America’s emerging consumer society. • Corporate and bureaucratically managed enterprises increasingly defined what seemed modern and “American” in American business.

7. Culinary Nation-Building and Its Consequences • Meatpacking, the 2nd most important food industry, where foreign-born and second generation meatpackers refused to join the movement and chose to remain independent. • Intense consumer scrutiny, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Pure Food and Drug Act was followed by trust-busting and regulation of the meatpacking industry. • Consolidation of the brewing industry, also the countries largest industry, was too risky • The result was that neither of the countries largest food industries could become foundations for corporate consolidation. • However, business enterprises founded by Native-born Americans in milling, cereal, and canning later became the foundations of the earliest food conglomerates, such as General Mill and Campbell’s soup. • Business and industry = places where concepts of the American nation are constructed and continue to evolve • For example, foreign businessmen are characterized as dynastic and imperial. • Usually at the core of most these biographies is the belief that the mass production of alcohol is sufficient explanation for their moral failings • Corporate dynasties in the alcohol niche were constructed as un-“American” • Corporate families doing business outside of the alcohol niche were considered as fully “American.”

8. Culinary Nation-Building and Its Consequences • Moral discourses of the food fights of the early 20th century • Recurring linkage of morality and food which acts a dimension of American nation-building. • For example, older interpretations of prohibition divided Protestants, rural “dries” with deep American roots from recently arrives, Catholic and Jewish, urban “wets” focused their attention on nation-building. • Instead, historians of consumer movements should ask: • What are the ties linking purity and prohibition campaigns? • Why did the consumer criticism in the early 20th century focus of meatpacking, candy, baking, and brewing but not flour, milling, cereal manufacturing, or canning? • Without such questions historical accounts of consumer society will continue to produce culturally over-determined and deeply American tales of good and evil in the marketplace.