Packaged Pleasures

359 Pages·2014·2.3 MB·English

Packaged
Pleasures

Packaged
Pleasures
Gary S. Cross
How Technology
& Marketing
Revolutionized
Desire Robert N.
Proctor
the university of chicago press * chicago & london
Gary S. Cross is distinguished professor of modern history at
Pennsylvania State University and the author of many books, including
All- Consuming Century: How Commercialism Won in Modern America
and The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century.
Robert N. Proctor is professor of the history of science at Stanford
University and the author of many books, including Racial Hygiene: Medicine
Under the Nazis and Value- Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2014 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2014.
Printed in the United States of America
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-1 3: 978-0 -2 26-1 2127-7 (cloth)
ISBN-1 3: 978- 0-2 26- 14738-3 (e- book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226147383.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cross, Gary S., author.
Packaged pleasures : how technology and marketing
revolutionized desire / Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-12127-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-14738-3 (e-book)
1. Packaging—Technological innovations—Psychological aspects. 2. Packaging—
Technological innovations—Social aspects. 3. Marketing—Technological
innovations—Psychological aspects. 4. Marketing—Technological innovations—
Social aspects. 5. Consumer behavior. 6. Technological innovations—Psychological
aspects. 7. Technological innovations—Social aspects.
I. Proctor, Robert, 1954– author. II. Title.
T173.8.C767 2014
658.8′23019—dc23
2013049702
♾ This paper meets the requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
1 The Carrot and the Candy Bar 1
2 Containing Civilization, Preserving the Ephemeral, Going Tubular 19
3 The Cigarette Story 61
4 Superfoods and the Engineered Origins of the Modern Sweet Tooth 89
5 Portable Packets of Sound: The Birth of the Phonograph and Record 131
6 Packaging Sight: Projections, Snapshots, and Motion Pictures 167
7 Packaging Fantasy: The Amusement Park as Mechanized Circus,
Electric Theater, and Commercialized Spectacle 207
8 Pleasure on Speed and the Calibrated Life:
Fast Forwarding through the Last Century 241
9 Red Raspberries All the Time? 271
Notes 289  *  Index 341

1
The Carrot and
the Candy Bar
Our topic is a revolution—as significant as anything that has tossed
the world over the past two hundred years. Toward the end of the nine-
teenth century, a host of often ignored technologies transformed human
sensual experience, changing how we eat, drink, see, hear, and feel in
ways we still benefit (and suffer) from today. Modern people learned
how to capture and intensify sensuality, to preserve it, and to make it
portable, durable, and accessible across great reaches of social class
and physical space. Our vulnerability to such a transformation traces
back hundreds of thousands of years, but the revolution itself did not
take place until the end of the nineteenth century, following a series of
technological changes altering our ability to compress, distribute, and
commercialize a vast range of pleasures.
Strangely, historians have neglected this transformation. Indeed, be-
hind this astonishing lapse lies a common myth—that there was an age
of production that somehow gave rise to an age of consumption, with
historians of the former exploring industrial technology, while histori-
ans of the latter stress the social and symbolic meaning of goods. This
artificial division obscures how technologies of production have trans-
formed what and how we actually consume. Technology does far more
2 ChApTer ONe
than just increase productivity or transform work, as historians of the
Industrial Revolution so often emphasize. Industrial technology has
also shaped how and how much we eat, what we wear and why, and
how and what (and how much!) we hear and see. And myriad other
aspects of how we experience daily life—or even how we long for es-
cape from it.
Bound to such transformations is a profound disruption in modern
life, a breakdown of the age- old tension between our bodily desires
and the scarcity of opportunities for fulfillment. New technologies—
from the rolling of cigarettes to the recording of sound—have intensi-
fied the gratification of desires but also rendered them far more easily
satisfied, often to the point of grotesque excess. An obvious example is
the mechanized packaging of highly sugared foods, which began over
a century ago and has led to a health and moral crisis today. Lots of
media attention has focused on the irresponsibility of the food indus-
try and the rise of recreational and workplace sedentism—but there are
other ways to look at this.
It should be obvious that technology has transformed how people
eat, especially with regard to the ease and speed with which it is now
possible to ingest calories. Roots of such transformations go very deep:
the Neolithic revolution ten- plus thousand years ago brought with
it new methods of regularizing the growing of food and the world’s
first possibility of elite obesity. The packaged pleasure revolution in
the nineteenth century, however, made such excess possible for much
larger numbers of “consumers”—a word only rarely used prior to that
time. Industrial food processors learned how to pack fat, sugar, and
salt into concentrated and attractive portions, and to manufacture these
cheaply and in packages that could be widely distributed. Foods that
were once luxuries thus became seductively commonplace. This is the
first thing we need to understand.
We also need to appreciate that responsibility for the excesses of
today’s consumers cannot be laid entirely at the doors of modern tech-
nology and the corporations that benefit from it. We cannot blame the
food industry alone. No one is forced to eat at McDonald’s; people
choose Big Macs with fries because they satisfy with convenience and
affordability, just as people decide to turn on their iPods rather than
The Carrot and the Candy Bar 3
listen to nature or go to a concert. But why would we make such a
choice—and is it entirely a “free choice”? This brings us to a second
crucial point: humans have evolved to seek high- energy foods because
in prehistoric conditions of scarcity, eating such foods greatly im-
proved their ancestors’ chances of survival. This has limited, but not
entirely eliminated, our capacity to resist these foods when they no
longer are scarce. And if we today crave sugar and fat and salt, that is
partly because these longings must have once promoted survival, deep
in the pre- Paleolithic and Paleolithic. Our taste buds respond gleefully
to sugars because we are descended from herbivores and especially fru-
givores for whom sweet- tasting plants and fruits were neuro-m arked as
edible and nutritious. Poisonous plants were more often bitter- tasting.
Pleasure at least in this sensory sense was often a clue to what might
help one survive.
But here again is the rub. Thanks to modern industrialism, high-
calorie foods once rare are now cheap and plentiful. Industrial tech-
nology has overwhelmed and undercut whatever balance may have
existed between the biological needs of humans and natural scarcity.
We tend to crave those foods that before modern times were rare; crav-
ings for fat and sugar were no threat to health; indeed, they improved
our chances of survival. Now, however, sugar, especially in its refined
forms, is plentiful, and as a result makes us fat and otherwise unhealthy.
And what is true for sugar is also true for animal fat. In our prehistoric
past fat was scarce and valuable, accounting for only 2 to 4 percent of
the flesh of deer, rabbits, and birds, and early humans correctly gorged
whenever it was available. Today, though, factory- farmed beef can con-
sist of 36 percent fat, and most of us expend practically no energy ob-
taining it. And still we gorge.1
And so the candy bar, a perfect example of the engineered pleasure,
wins out over the carrot and even the apple. More sugar and seem-
ingly more varied flavors are packed into the confection than the un-
processed fruit or vegetable. In this sense our craving for a Snickers
bar is partly an expression of the chimp in us, insofar as we desire
energy- packed foods with maximal sugars and fat. The concentration,
the packaging, and the ease of access (including affordability) all make
it possible—indeed enticingly easy—to ingest far more than we know