"Eye appeal is buy appeal": business creates the color of foods, 1870-1970
Date
2016
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation examines the American food industry’s persistent attention to
color from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In the late nineteenth
century, producers, retailers, and intermediate suppliers began devoting enormous
resources to determine and create the “right” color of foods, which many consumers
would recognize and in time take for granted. This initiative to manipulate the color of
foods involved large sectors of the U.S. economy, creating new business partners and
networks among different industries. The management of food color also transformed
merchandising systems and the ways products were presented to consumers. The
dissertation illustrates these complex – and colorful – processes, implemented by
various agents, including dye makers, food processors, farmers, grocers, advertising
agents, and government agencies. While firms influenced and propagated public
perception about the “natural” color of foods, consumers’ strong, sometimes stubborn,
notions about how food should look in turn affected corporate activities. Government
policies on food safety stimulated the integration of color manipulation into food
businesses by regulating, and encouraging, the industry’s color control practices.
The dissertation explores how administrators, scientists, and corporate
managers, across the realms of politics and business, constructed and conceptualized
the color of foods. I trace the place of color in the discussion of food purity and
adulteration, the development of food engineering, and the transformation of food
marketing and merchandising systems from the Progressive era to the Post-World War
II period. At the turn of the twentieth century, the invention of synthetic dyes and
innovations in packaging and retailing technology transformed the function of color
for food businesses. Color-controlling technologies afforded manufacturers and
retailers new ways of coloring foods economically, consistently, and conveniently,
allowing for a new level of control and standardization. As the labor and technology
involved in manipulating food color changed, food companies utilized color as a
marker of consistent quality and brand identity that would appeal to consumers’ eyes
in the market transaction.
To assess how color became the dominant means of presenting and
understanding food quality, the dissertation analyzes how various agents manipulated
the color of foods at different stages of food chains from production, transportation,
and retailing to home consumption. By examining the color of agricultural produce as
an indicator of naturalness, freshness, and ripeness, I demonstrate that dynamic
relations between culture, ecology, and economy created the color of foods, which
many consumers considered “natural.” I also investigate how firms created and
presented, as well as constructed the mass market for, processed foods, including
canned and frozen foods, that consumers had never before seen or eaten. As massproduced
foods flooded into the American kitchen in the mid-twentieth century, food
companies promoted colorful dishes, such as Jell-O and decorated cakes, as a way for
women to express their aesthetic tastes. In highlighting ideologies about gender and
industrialization embedded in narratives about food coloring in the household, I
examine how ideas about purity and artificiality became closely intertwined in mass
consumer culture.