Lecture 29: Big Business and the Homogenization of Food
to be driven on the hoof to market. It can be slaughtered in one
central place—usually Chicago—packed into refrigerated cars, and
shipped everywhere. The fridge doesn’t come into domestic use
until the 20th century. Eventually, people are able to shop for more
foods at once and store them relatively dependably in an icebox,
or fridge. In the 1880s, the process of freezing food really takes off. Clarence
Birdseye is the pioneer in this business, and his singular stroke
of genius was that if he bought directly from the growers and
did all the processing, packaging, distribution, and marketing
himself, he could sell it everywhere—which is of course exactly
what happened. This led to everyone across the country eating the same frozen
peas instead of fresh ones, which is not necessarily a bad thing,
because you can now get them year round. This affected both the
producer and the consumer: They’re not connected in any way now,
and the growers have to produce to strict specifi cations set down
by Mr. Birdseye—not what his customers ask for or what may
be traditional in each region. In other words, foods and taste are
becoming homogenized. The other technology that completely transforms the food industry
is canning, which was dependent on Louis Pasteur, who, in the
course of his research into beer yeast strains, not only discovered
the role of bacteria as human pathogens, but also fi gured out that if
you heat up foods to a certain temperature to kill all the bacteria and
then hermetically seal it off, food doesn’t spoil. Pasteurization has made a lot of foods safer than they were before
it was discovered in 1862. However, the U.S. government went a
little overboard, and big business had a suspiciously large role in
getting legislation passed that made pasteurization mandatory. A few years ago, lobbyists came very close to getting all
unpasteurized cheeses banned in the United States. However, such