Salt Sugar Fat

by Michael Moss

  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.”

  But even Betty Crocker wasn’t enough to totally undermine the teachings of Betty Dickson. To do that, the processed food industry had to come up with another, more insidious strategy. Like the Hoover-era FBI pursuing its enemies list, the industry infiltrated the association of home economics teachers. This operation started with money and advertising, an archive of the association’s journal reveals. In 1957 alone, General Foods funneled $288,250 into the grants and fellowship program of the home economics association, winning the gratitude of a generation of teachers. The association then devoted a special section of its journal to publicizing all the convenient products, from Stove Top Stuffing to nine-serving cake mixes. And General Foods and other manufacturers took out big ads for the hospitality booths they set up at the association fairs.

  Then the food industry began sending people to further reshape the association to its own designs. It sponsored candidates for the organization’s top leadership posts, candidates who would bring a decidedly pro-industrial view to home economics. Marcia Copeland, a General Mills executive who became the home economics association’s president in 1987, told me that the decline of scratch cooking wasn’t a corporate plot as much as it was a foregone conclusion when women acquired greater roles in American society. “When I joined General Mills in 1963, it was evident that people weren’t having the time or interest in preparing meals from scratch,” she said. “They would do one meal from scratch, like a pot roast, and they developed a specialty if they were entertaining, like they would do the bread or the dessert, one spectacular thing. We tried to make people at General Mills look at food to be more fun.”

  In the meantime, teachers like Betty Dickson were forced to alter their curriculum to deal with all of the pressing problems that came to bear on the modern housewife. It would be foolish to call her the last home economics teacher in America. They do still exist. But the focus of home economics changed dramatically through the 1970s and 1980s. Each year, the association chose a home economics teacher of the year, and when Dickson won in 1980, she was praised for having a curriculum that still included cooking and shopping. In the years that followed, however, the winning teachers were cited for teaching their students not how to produce their own things like meals but how to get jobs and be consumers.

  Dickson was still only in her sixth year of teaching in 1959 when it might be said her fight was lost. Time did a long article on convenience foods, and after casting about for a person who would illustrate all that was new and great about cooking, the magazine chose someone else to put on the cover about convenience foods: Charles Mortimer, CEO of General Foods and the man who coined the phrase. “Modern Living,” read the headline of the article. “Just Heat and Serve.” Inside was a profile of a Hollywood secretary who’d thrown together a dinner party for fourteen guests, on a weeknight, after coming home from her job. She served hors d’oeuvres, shrimp cocktail, lobster Newberg, fresh salad, asparagus tips in Hollandaise sauce, rice, rolls, white cake, and ice cream. “Almost every bite of the appetizing meal she placed before her guests had been washed, cut, peeled, shelled, precooked, mixed and apportioned by ‘factory maids’ long before it reached her hands,” the writer gushed. “Such jiffy cooking would have made Grandma shudder, but today it brings smiles of delight to millions of U.S. housewives. The remarkable rise of ‘convenience’ or processed foods—heralded by slogans ‘instant,’ ‘ready to cook’ and ‘heat and serve’—has set off a revolution in U.S. eating habits, brought a bit of magic into the U.S. kitchen.

  “No company has done more to revolutionize U.S. cooking than General Foods Corp., the world’s biggest food processor,” the piece continued. “It sparked the revolution with its line of Birds Eye frozen foods, still the biggest-selling brand. Last year it put its 250 products (including different flavors and varieties) into 4.5 billion packages that the housewife took home for $1.1 billion. On pantry shelves and in refrigerators from Maine to Florida, its products are household words—Jell-O, Maxwell House coffee, Post cereals, Swans Down cake mix, Sanka, Minute Rice, Gaines dog food, etc.”

  In one final blow to the traditional teachings of home economics, Mortimer was quoted reading the long, arduous instructions in Fannie Farmer’s Cookbook for preparing a fresh fish, which trudged along from cleaning to scaling to boning. “And so on,” Mortimer said, “through all the other gruesome procedures before the housewife could start to burn her fingers in the hot grease or fill her kitchen with clouds of fish-laden smoke.”

  “What does it say on a package of frozen fish sticks?” he said, triumphantly. “ ‘Heat and serve.’ ” />
  Betty Dickson is diplomatic about the turn that home economics took in the 1960s and 1970s, when cooking from scratch increasingly gave way to the kind of quick fare celebrated by Time. “We taught skills, but over the years that changed. It became more consumer education,” she said. “I’m so thankful that jobs became more available, and people had more resources. But that wasn’t always for the best. The change came in how they used their resources. The boys in high school had to have a car, and they had to get a job to get the car.”

  Charles Mortimer died in 1978, and he is buried on the horse farm he owned in New Jersey, which one of his grandsons has turned into a winery. His legacy is left for Al Clausi to defend, and he had a bit of a struggle with it when we spoke. Today, he told me, the most remarkable aspect of Mortimer’s convenience doctrine is not the speed with which pudding can be made, or how a few spoonfuls of sugar powder can avoid the hassle of squeezing oranges, or even how multi-course dinners can be pulled out of the freezer and refrigerator, already prepped by “factory maids.” The most remarkable aspect of the doctrine, he said, is how it is now being challenged by newer generations of consumers—the sons and daughters and grandchildren of the people he and other food technicians had wooed with the quick-to-cook packaged foods.

  “Convenience is still very high in the consumer’s mind,” Clausi said. “But it is not what it used to be. Now there are more questions being asked. How is it convenient? What are the ingredients? What am I trading for the convenience?”

  Clausi still works as a consultant to the food industry, and he had to chuckle to himself recently when one of General Foods’ old rivals called on him for some advice. It was Kellogg, the cereal maker, looking for ways to boost sales. Keeping in mind the doubts that consumers were starting to have about convenience, Clausi told Kellogg to think about something other than sugar to draw their interest. “Why can’t you make breakfast cereal from a protein source like nuts?” he told them. “They have a good nutrition profile.”

  This was the same company, however, that had relied heavily on sugar in trouncing General Foods back in the early 1950s and in maintaining its lead over other cereal makers ever since. Kellogg had gone so far down the road with sugar, in fact, that there was no easy way to turn back. If consumers were getting antsy about the health implications of sugar, getting rid of it was not a viable way out for Kellogg. The biggest cereal maker in the world would have to find another way to keep drawing its customers in, and it would find that that way was in the hands of a section of the processed food industry that was gaining in stature every day: marketing.

  * Clausi recalled that Alpha-Bits had far less sugar than the sweetest cereals. But by 1983, it was named among the company’s most sugary cereals in a consumer lawsuit, and ten years later, when companies had begun disclosing the salt, sugar, and fat content on their labels, Consumer Reports listed the sugar load in one version, Marshmallow Alpha-Bits, at 49 percent.

  chapter four

  “Is It Cereal or Candy?”

  John Harvey Kellogg had one thing in mind when he created his sprawling health complex on the prairie of Michigan in the late 1800s. He wanted to cure people of what one observer had called “Americanitis”—or the bloated, gaseous stomachache caused by the ailment otherwise known as dyspepsia. The whole country seemed to be suffering from it, thanks in large part to what they were eating for breakfast. Nineteenth-century Americans typically started their mornings with sausages, beefsteaks, bacon, and fried ham, to which, as the day progressed, they added salt pork and whiskey. Grease, in effect, had become the national condiment.

  As a medical student at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital Medical College, John Harvey Kellogg had seen, up close, what this diet was doing to America’s health. Concerned by the profusion of indigestion he saw, he ended up beating a hasty retreat to his home state of Michigan, where he decided that what America needed—as much as another doctor—was someone to promote better nutrition.

  Kellogg took over a tiny health facility in Battle Creek, a town on the prairie 120 miles west of Detroit, and renamed it the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He added a solarium, a gymnasium, and a glassed-in palm garden with rubber trees. As word of the facility’s salutary treatments got around, the rooms began filling up. In high season, four hundred guests were tended to by a staff of one thousand, and they happily underwent a relentless regime of baths, enemas, and exercise that included a high-stepping workout to a song that was dubbed “The Battle Creek Sanitarium March.” Mostly, though, Kellogg sought to remake their eating habits with a strict dietary regimen. He served wheat gluten mush, oatmeal crackers, graham rolls, and a tea made from a South African grass. He disdained salt and abhorred sugar, citing the overconsumption of both as primary contributors to the nation’s health woes, so there was none of either to be found in the sanitarium food. Nor was there much fat; his reform diet was built around whole grains and a dearth of meat.

  On a trip to Denver in 1894, Kellogg met a dyspeptic entrepreneur who had invented a cereal made from shredded wheat. Enamored by the idea, Kellogg set out to make his own breakfast version of it. He returned to Battle Creek and, with help from his wife, took some leftover boiled wheat, ran it through a machine that turned the mush into thin sheets of dough, and popped them into the oven. Out came a flaked cereal, which Kellogg served to his guests and which his guests liked. Kind of. The texture was certainly novel.

  That might have been the extent of his cereal’s market—the captive sanitarium guests—except for a bit of treachery in the Kellogg household. John Harvey Kellogg had a younger brother named Will who worked as the sanitarium’s bookkeeper. Will was far more interested in making money than his older brother, who was forever going off on some scientific lark just when the sanitarium most needed sound management. So Will took over the cereal operation, commandeering a barn out back to make the dough and bake the flakes. The Kellogg brothers called their cereal venture the Sanitas Nut Food Company, and with Will’s attention to detail it did reasonably well, considering its unsweetened taste: They sold 113,400 pounds of the stuff in 1896, mostly to their own patients and Battle Creek locals. With his brother’s encouragement, Will also began experimenting with flakes of corn, called cerealine, which were used by the brewing industry. They named these the Sanitas Toasted Corn Flakes.

  Then came the betrayal.

  In 1906, John Harvey was in Europe on a medical-science trip when Will went out and bought some sugar, which he added to the corn flake mix. These, the sanitarium patients really liked. When John Harvey returned, he was furious. So Will struck out on his own. Within months of leaving, he was churning out 2,900 cases a day of the cereal he called “Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes.” The brothers ended up in court twice, fighting for the commercial rights to the family name. Will prevailed. On December 11, 1922, Will registered his company under a new name: Kellogg.

  Thus, the sweetened breakfast was born, as was a core industry strategy that food processors would deploy forevermore. Whenever health concerns arose over one of their pillar ingredients—salt, sugar, or fat—the solution of choice for the food manufacturers was the simplest: Just swap out the problem component for another that wasn’t, at the moment, as high on the list of concerns. In this case, the fat-laden breakfast plate of the nineteenth century, vilified for upsetting the national stomach, was largely replaced by the sugary cereal bowl of the twentieth century, and with it came a new set of health issues that would be slow to arouse widespread public concern.

  Will Kellogg should not get all the credit, or blame, for sweetening cereal, however. One of the sanitarium’s earliest guests was a marketing whiz named C. W. Post, who took the baths, ate the meals, and, inspired by what he experienced there, eventually went into business for himself. In 1892, he started a rival health spa on the east side of Battle Creek and began turning out a stream of health-conscious items: a coffee substitute called Postum; a cereal he called Grape-Nuts—“grape” for the maltose sugar he used, which h
e called “grape-sugar,” and “nuts” for the flavor—and a sweetened corn flake cereal he called Post Toasties.

  Post’s cereals, however, weren’t his most lasting contribution to the industry. Rather, it was his knack for marketing. In some of the first-ever advertising campaigns in America, Post sold his Postum by disparaging coffee as a “drug drink” that contained “poisonous” caffeine. He sold his first cereal with the slogan “Brains are built by Grape-Nuts.” And he sold Toasties by putting an image of the prophet Elijah on the green-and-white box, an unapologetic attempt to tap into the spiritual movement sweeping America at the turn of the century. By 1897, Post was spending a million dollars a year on advertising and clearing a million dollars a year in profits.*

  Will Kellogg took to marketing, too, and as he and Post began racking up their fortunes, Battle Creek turned into a cereal boom town. Entrepreneurs swarmed in from around the country to set up factories, some of which amounted to little more than an oven shoved into a tent. Soon, there were Grape Sugar Flakes, Malt-Too, and Malted Oats; Korn-Kinks, None-Such, and Luck Boy Corn Flakes. By 1911, Battle Creek was home to 108 brands of cereal, but Kellogg and Post would emerge as the dominant players. They were eventually joined by a third manufacturer, General Mills, which began making cereal at the colossal flour mills it had on the great falls of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.