What Canned Food Stands For: A Conversation with Anna Zeide

The other night I was watching Chopped. During one of the backstory montages at the beginning of the show, one of the competing chefs said, “I might cook for the homeless, but I like to say we open hearts, not cans.” The line stuck with me. A few months ago, I took a job similar to the cheftestant’s, and while I am sympathetic to his concerns about processed food, I am also uncomfortable with his smug, highfalutin tone. His remark made me think about how while food justice efforts can challenge racial capitalism, they can also be in cahoots. That tension is on display in even the story of the humble tin can. And no one tells this story better than Anna Zeide.

In her new book, Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (University of California Press, 2018), Anna Zeide recovers the history of how we came to trust canned food and how that trust set off a transformation of the entire food system, from crops’ genes to glossy magazine advertisements. We spoke on the phone two weeks ago and discussed the inception of the project, the difficulty of grasping consumers’ fears and desires, the social and cultural politics of canned food, the food justice organizations she admires, and her own admirable work teaching students to see that food is never just about food.

Stream or download our conversation here. Interview highlights follow.

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Interview highlights:

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Faron Levesque: I’d love to hear the story of how and when you realized that this everyday opaque object was your entryway into a hidden history of food.

Anna Zeide: For a long time I’ve known that the history of food was really interesting to me. That’s because of my personal relationship to food as a child of immigrants and growing up in a place where food was a marker of cultural difference, and also because I’m a vegetarian and had thought a lot about the ethics of how we eat.

So I wanted to study food, but I didn’t know what aspect. But then, one of my graduate mentors, Bill Cronon, was talking about the Icelandic food hákarl, which is shark that is packed under the sand and left to ferment, which turns its flesh into something edible, if very stinky. This got me thinking about these older methods of eating out of season and out of place.

As I started to look at different forms of food preservation, canned food emerged as this first form that grew into an industry, which connected me to my interests in business and consumer history. The thing that really clenched it is that I found that the National Canners Association (which was the major trade group whose archives serve a major source for my book) eventually became the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which today is the one of the major players in the food industry in terms of lobbying and political power. So it clicked that I could understand the modern food system by looking at the history of canning. And that’s when I said OK, that’s something I can spend a decade of my life on.

FL: Through your emphasis on consumer confidence, trust, and fear you do a great job bringing in the many affective realities of American food culture. Could you tell us more about how you were able to sort through and historicize the many fantasies and feelings that animate the larger history of capitalism you’re discussing in the book?

AZ: So much of effective historical writing is being able to put readers in a place a long time ago when their entire world was so different. Because canned food is so boring today—so commonplace, basically invisible—it’s really hard to project back into a time when it was scary or weird or revolutionary. There are also not a lot of records of people describing their interactions with canned food, those intimate consumer moments. In the book, I ask how the canners themselves imagined these consumers and attempted to win their trust. That concerns institutions and the broad system of capitalism, but at the core of it is always individual consumer decisions. Of course we don’t make them all on our own. We’re very much, then and now, influenced by ads and marketing (increasingly neuromarketing) today. But still, that moment when that consumer picks up the can of peas off the shelf and decides to bring it home and trust it and open it—that’s the moment when this whole story plays out.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the connection to edible insects today. It’s the “next food trend,” and a lot of people are advocating this new healthy, environmentally sustainable food source. But I think most Americans do not want to eat insects and don’t really see the need for it. There’s some parallel to be made to the 19th-century consumer and canned food. Drawing out that visceral response can help readers today think about how something might have felt at a time when canned food was as weird as cricket flour is today.

FL: You write about how, after the Great Depression, big corporations used market research to find out about consumer desires and used advertising to create desires. Which came first, the “adman” or the “housewife”? 

AZ: At that time, you have the rise of marketing as an organized discipline. As one actor in that chapter says, consumers begin to become “get-at-able.” It’s always an imagination. If you watch Mad Men or whatever else, they’re always imagining who it is who is going to be the audience for their advertising. One the one hand, we know from statistics that there was much more diversity in the audiences in terms of race, class, and gender of who was buying and using canned foods. It was a fairly ubiquitously used item by the 1930s. But the advertising continued to be very narrowly targeted. You had these pen-and-ink drawings of white woman in fancy hats with feather plumes going into the store with their handbags.

In terms of the question, the ad man comes before the housewife. The housewife was the creation of the advertisers. It’s who the canners wanted to be their market, who they wanted canned food to be associated with. There has been and continues to be a battle for a sense of what canned food stands for, and I think it helped the industry that their consumers were these well-off women as a way of saying canned food stands for something you all can aspire to rather than some fallback when you’re too busy to prepare your food, which was often a clear reality.

FL: One thing that really struck me in your book is how you address the class- and race-based complexities of access and equity when it comes to food. How do you as a scholar-activist create a usable past in the histories you write about? 

AZ: I think many people can agree that there is a public health crisis when it comes to the standard American diet and that change is necessary. However, we see a lot of the really classist language that comes out of this food advocacy moment. I think that’s been changing in the last five or ten years with an awareness of how much we have to have a sensitivity to those complexities. But there are always trade-offs. We can talk about canned food not being the freshest or the tastiest or sometimes having problems with packaging or BPA. On the other hand, compared to the broader spectrum of processed food that it’s a part of today, it can offer healthy, already cooked food that, if you’re living in uncertain housing, you don’t need to keep frozen. You basically just have to have a can opener. That’s a major reason why food pantries and food drives are so stocked with canned food, because it really does have this power to transcend problems of access. In that way, it’s very snobby to pooh-pooh it, to suggest we somehow have to get away from it—especially because people who consider themselves foodies or eat a lot of fresh food use a lot of canned food also. I think it’s a clear and necessary part of even a broader culinary exercise.

In graduate school, I taught a little one-credit seminar in the environmental dorm. It was called “Eating and Memory” and my students read personal essays about people’s relationships to food, and also carried out oral histories with family or community members. At some point a student asked, “So what does this have to do with environmental studies?” We had a really great conversation. And I think one of the things they took away from it was if environmentalism moves your relationship to food and agriculture, then you’re going to want people to change their diets in some specific ways toward the end of more sustainability. But if that’s the only lens you go into that exchange with, you’re going to ignore all of those many, deeply layered personal stores and memories that give people a reason to eat something that can feel more important in the moment than whether it emits this many greenhouse gases or that many. So I thought that a necessary part of any activist identity was one where we try to be as sensitive as possible to the range of experiences that people bring to any of their behavior. Without that sensitivity, it’s a nonstarter. You’re going in and telling people how to live their lives in a way that’s going to be off-putting and end up not being effective. Attending to the complexities is the first place to start with any kind of activism.

FL: Do you have any projects on deck that you’re excited about?

AZ: I’m co-editing, and also have an essay in, an anthology about the making of modern food, tentatively titled Acquired Tastes. What I think is most exciting about it is that we’re really trying to produce a book that is beautifully written, that understands the elements of creative nonfiction. We just had a workshop last week in Pennsylvania where all 13 writers stayed in a big house together and we  hired a close friend of mine who is also a professional writing teacher to come be a writing coach for us. We did these workshops, as well as public presentations of quick, six-minute versions of our essays. We really tried to boil down what is interesting about this stuff and figure out how we make food history accessible to broad audiences. It was so inspiring—such a non-stodgy, non-pretentious academic affair.

Featured image: Visitors to the Museum of Modern Art take in Andy Warhol’s “Campbell Soup Cans” (1962). Photo by Brandon Price, June 2016. 

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Anna Zeide is Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the History Department at Oklahoma State University, where she also co-organizes the OSU Food Studies program. Her first book, Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry, was published by the University of California Press in March. She last appeared in Edge Effects with her short essay “Jello & Mayonnaise? What Fresh White 1950s Suburban Hell Is This?!” (November 2016). She lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma, with her husband and two daughters. Website. Twitter. Contact.

Faron Levesque is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, completing a dissertation entitled “The Secret History of School: Alternative Academies, Revolutionary Imagination, & Educational Activism in 20th-Century North America.” They live in Memphis, where they work full time as Community Kitchen Coordinator for Memphis Tilth, a food justice organization. Contact.