The American Scene; Convenience Foods

Good morning, my name is Joel Zanger for the American Sea. Our subject this morning is convenience foods. These foods, which since the war, have appeared with increasing frequency in the markets. You've seen them, of course, foods which are not merely packaged, but in many cases prepared. Cooked, all we require is heating, perhaps the addition of a condiment at two. These foods have appeared in almost every area. They're affecting American cooking habits, the construction even of American kitchens. To discuss some of these foods, what they are, how they are affecting us. We have this morning two guests. Our first guest this morning is Mrs. Ruth Allen Church. She is possibly better known as Mrs. Mary Meade. Is that right? Mrs. Mary Meade. Mrs. Church on Miss Meade. Mrs. Church on Miss Meade, she's the home economics editor of the Chicago Daily Tribune. And our second guest is Dr. John H. Litchfield, who is an assistant professor in the Food Engineering Department at the Illinois Institute of Technology. I wonder if we could start out this morning, Ms. Church, by asking you in your double role as professional food editor and homemaker. I assume that's your

role too. Certainly is. Why precisely have all these foods suddenly appeared? Is this in response to a particular need in the part of the American homemaker? Well, I do think that there has been a need on the part of the homemaker for quicker ways to do things. I don't think that all of the foods that are appearing now are, it's a direct result of the demand of the homemaker. She does want to get her meals in quicker time because she has such a many women have a dual role. They're working and also taking care of a family. And even the ones who aren't employed commercially have lead very busy lives these days and would like to have short cuts in their cooking. In other words, you'd say that one reason these foods have appeared is simply because social habits themselves have changed. Well, I think so. I do think women have demanded

short cuts. I don't think they've demanded quite as much as they're getting. I see. Well, I'd like to go back to that. I'd like to wish for you. Certainly, there is a technical element here. Well, I think a very interesting thing here, the question always arises as to, does the industry push these new products onto the public who people actually demand these new products? And actually, it's a combination of both. There's a very competitive situation today in the food processing industry. Perhaps viewers are aware of the fact that the food processing industry is characteristically a high volume low profit margin industry and so high volume of sales, low profit margin on per unit. And so we have to have a lot of units of individual items produced in a very economical way and so there's much competition to get a new product under the market and promote this product before the public. And so this naturally brings a lot of manufacturing problems, which we probably will get

into a little later in our discussion. Still, having these things, these new things, I think of aerosols and the food in various plastic packages, isn't it? To a degree, at least the result of certain technical innovations. Could they have been done, for example, in 1935? No, it's a very interesting point. Practically all of our processed foods that we see on the market today that are, let's say, distinct from pre -war are almost a result of the wartime research and development programs for the Armed Forces. And it's a very interesting thing how a wartime application did result in a tremendous influx of new products radically different from the industry we had before. Because canning, which was the original, I think was supposedly done under Napoleon, wasn't it? Yes, very much for the same reason. I wonder if we could go back with this church. We have all these conveniences, but I kind of detected with a slightly

sour note, when you spoke of perhaps too much convenience. Well, I happen to feel that way myself a little bit. I think I perhaps am a little jealous of all these, maybe I'm jealous for my position. I like being a food editor and telling people how to cook. And maybe I'm not going to have a job one of these days, because all the cooking is taken out of the home. And if it's a matter of just heating and eating, where do I come in? I don't think it's that personal, but I do think that most women have, even if they don't cook very much, they have a certain pride in accomplishing and doing things for their own families. And it worries me a little bit that that's being taken away from them. I was wondering when you said you were worried about this as a food editor. I think probably you would worry as much as a homemaker that a certain amount of the traditional skill that belongs to the woman in the house is being passed on to a factory somewhere, some serious thing. I do see a little counter current, though I don't think all women are accepting convenience foods in total there.

Also, going back to some of the old -fashioned techniques like baking bread, for example, I think maybe this helps compensate them if they have a guilty feeling for serving totally prepared foods, perhaps during the week. Then on weekends, they can bake bread and get back to grandma's kind of cooking. It's a very satisfying thing. I think this is a very interesting point. And Mrs. Church is probably aware of this. When the cake mixes first came out, the tendency was to take all the work out of making a cake and the processes had it so that only perhaps one liquid ingredient had to be added. However, this is the very same thing. The housewives rebelled and they felt that this was taking away there. Some of the skill required, and now a lot of the products require that you add eggs, some other component, in addition to, say, the liquid part of the mix. This is a tendency backwards. In other words, I went to an extreme in some products and now we're having a tendency back in the other direction. Well, Dr. Elitchfield, I wonder if,

is that the only reason for packages of cake mixes, for example, to leave the eggs out? Is it a better product if you add your own items? Well, I think in many cases, you'll have problems with product stability when you add a lot of these ingredients and combination. In other words, they don't have the shelf life. And sometimes dried egg products have been improved tremendously, but yet still a no substitute for a fresh egg, as far as many products are concerned. So I think from that standpoint, there probably was a real improvement in the product by leaving some of these ingredients out and having a housewife. When you mentioned the no substitute for the fresh eggs, I thought back to your mention of the aerosol cans and I understand that there have been some experiments in serving in selling eggs in aerosol cans. I don't think it's come to the commercial aspect of it yet, but how about that anyway? I really

want to get eggs in aerosol cans. I don't like that idea. I heard of somebody working on eggnog mix for the holiday season in aerosol cans. The problem is in that product, as well as all others in aerosols, there's two problems. Number one, the container has to be functional, has to withstand the pressures, which have been pretty well worked out, but the gas problem, in other words, what type of a propellant will we charge this package with and not have to force the product out? It's caused some troubles in a number of products. No, whether this might be a problem in eggs, I'm not entirely sure. But for example, we're limited to about three propellant gases by law, in edible foods, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide, is that lefty gas? That's right, but it has leaves no toxic residue in foods. These are the only three that our federal food and drug administration will allow in foods, because they leave no toxic residue, where the type of gases that we use in the shaving creams and cosmetics, you couldn't consume,

you couldn't consume internally. So this has been a real problem in aerosol foods, and it's a cause of considerable expenditures and research money from the standpoint of the food processes. How about egg whites in aerosol? Couldn't you squirt out a meringue on top of your pie? Some women would like that. I think it might be an excellent idea. I'm not aware of any particular product of this type that has been marketed undoubtedly, someone is experimenting on a type of product, because this is a very competitive field. I wonder if we might come back to the general topic that you have introduced, the whole question of the quality of these convenience foods. I think, well, you speak of the good fresh egg. Can any convenience product be as good as the fresh product? I think some of them are, but I'm quite concerned with not only with the flavor aspect of quality, but texture. It

seems to me that we're going a little far afield in developing foods that are so tender, cakes that are so tender, that they're entirely different from the cakes that grandma used to make. And our meats, for example, are becoming so tender. What are we going to do with our teeth? We're going to let them fall out because they don't get exercised. It seems to me that maybe we're carrying things a little too far in protecting and making things easier to chew and fluffier in texture and forgetting that maybe a little chewing is good sometimes. You say cakes that don't taste like the cakes grandma used to make. I'm speaking of texture in the main. Also, I think there is a flavor factor there, and in some, on the whole, I think cake mixes are wonderful. They're very good. And women can make cakes now who

never could or would make a cake because they're foolproof. But flavor wise, synthetic flavors bother me. And sometimes you get them. You can get them in opening a package of of a cake mix and banana, for example. Here's this artificial banana flavor. And to me, it just, it's clearly artificial. Yes, it's just totally artificial. What's the real problem? This artificial flavor, of course, or a large number of flavor manufacturers. And this is a big business in the United States and also abroad. Many of our flavors, food flavors, synthetic and otherwise are imported. And this is a subject of much research and has been a problem of identifying their true flavor components in the natural food and then trying to duplicate them in the laboratory. And this is the reason we haven't got to the stage that we can duplicate them in the laboratory to the satisfaction of most consumers. And I think this is just the difference that you're pointing up

here at the time. Many artificial flavors hold better in the foods, don't they? I think so. That's the reason for using them there. They're more stable and they come through in the baking better. I think that's a large reason, of course. Have a bad say, honey. Yes, yes. Cheap. I wonder, simply, what happens to an article of food? Let's say there's going to be frozen. Or let's leave there so now. I think you're just going to weigh out. Okay, that's kind of off a beaten track. Yeah, it's sort of a novelty, but frozen foods, certainly. This is very important. Well, I think this is a very interesting point. And I just wonder how many consumers are aware of what goes into, say, for example, manufacturer of a package of frozen peas. What are the qualities of the peas that go into the package in the first place? I think most people think that the peas that they buy in the supermarket are in the grocery store in season, probably the epitomean quality. They think that the fresh peas, fresh peas, in season, the

top quality that they could expect. And yet, most frozen food processes will use a quality of pea, for example, for frozen peas. It's a superior product. In other words, it has been harvested with more care. It has been rushed to the factory, freezing plant. That's right. Perfect time. In other words, today we have techniques for determining how many days by the solar cycle and heat units, how many days it takes for actually pea crop to mature from the time the seed is planted until the time the peas should be harvested. They can predict actually within hours when these peas should be harvested and they rush them to the freezing plant within an hour or two at the most and they're processed in the peak of perfection. So actually the food processing industry today is very aware of this necessity of quality. Why is it an necessity? This problem of, again, the consumer making a comparison with fresh product in season. Every

process product that comes out in the market, I'm sure unconsciously the consumer is making a comparison with a fresh or unnatural product. I mean, it'd be true in the next generation because many children, I think, don't know anything but orange juice in the concentrate and peas in the package. They don't know what it's like to be. Green peas out of the garden. So, perhaps there's a problem there that we won't have in another generation. Well, I think that's entirely right there. You can show that this has happened in many cases. You had an experience that I had mentioned to Joel's here, an experiment that we did with Apple cider. Here is an old product that we familiar with in the fall of the year and one that we did some work several years ago on a radiation of apple juice is to preserve them over the normal, past the normal harvest season. The interesting experiment we ran, we selected 33 students around our laboratories and asked

them to taste various apple juices blind. In other words, they did not know what products these were and we included a canned apple juice. We included a fresh farm fresh right from the press sample. We included a frozen concentrate product that had been reconstituted. We included the irradiated product and I guess we included the heat pasteurized product that was sold and jugs on a local stand and after the score sheets were evaluated. Mind you, these people did not know what they were getting. They were just a paper cups label with numbers on. How many did they have all together? They had six samples, I believe. After evaluating these samples and scarring them and analyzing the results statistically, we found that surprisingly, the canned apple juice was very much higher rating, had a very much higher rating than any of the others. And the fresh and the fresh. And this seemed non -noemless

to us but we went back into the backgrounds of these boys and we found out that almost all of them had grown up in the inner city here in Chicago and they probably had no cognizance at all of what apple cider really was. The canned apple juice was the product that they had always associated with apple juice. So it shows how people can have that taste educated by what's available. I understand that this was a problem when they finally did put a fresh tomato juice on the market. People didn't want it, didn't taste like a can. It didn't go over. It seems ashamed to me but I can understand it. Other canned tomato juices are wonderful but there is a flavor difference there and I'm surprised that it wasn't accepted in the fresh frozen state. Well it's a very interesting thing. I think this can be extended onto a lot of food products. I think the public would be surprised. Many food products if they compare the process product with the

fresh and what they think is the one they prefer would probably be the process product instead of the fresh product. I'm sure that's true in many cases. We've been talking about frozen foods and frozen foods are, I suppose, the most important of pre -packaged foods on the market. But there's this new area of what is it pre -prepared, pre -packaged, pre -cooked frozen foods. And I think of those. There is sort of especially interesting in terms of what you said about the role of a housewife and the kitchen and what she feels she should be doing. I think of vegetables now which are not only cooked but come with the sauce, the haunders or a cream sauce or one thing or another. Now here you've gone almost completely to an extra. To the pre -prepared, yes. What does this do for well, the kitchen itself must change. I also wonder where do little girls learn to cook nowadays if they learn? Well I don't think little girls learn to cook until they're married and their husbands are teaching and that's what surprises me these days. Mother's don't seem to teach

their daughters to cook anymore. Do you think that this kind of thing is a novelty or will it keep going? Oh, I think it'll keep going and I think that there are good many very fine products packed this way now with their sauces. And for a small family, for the family of one or two, they make sense. I think when it comes to a larger family, they don't make much sense because of the cost, primarily, and then the inconvenience of having individual servings, perhaps there will be larger servings for Sunday -sized families so that they can be, but the very opening and serving of any number of little packets of food individually is kind of a problem. I know I suppose sometimes if one reason another, my wife isn't at home or she can't cook me, I

might pick up a TV dinner or if I'm in a hurry, I want either to special hour, but Lord, just think of feeding a family. It's a by five TV dinners. That's pretty expensive. This is a different one. I think we pretty monotonous if you had it very often too because there, again, we get back to kind of the sameness in, I think of my friend Charlie Brown in the comic strip of my favorite newspaper, who's undergoing his personality now as being described as blah. He thinks he's blah and his friends think he's blah. Well, a lot of food can be blah if it's, if you eat too much processed food, I think it all seems blah. If you have it once in a while, for a change it's fun, but to have one of those dinners every night, they taste the same, the flavor is the same from coast to coast, there's no individuality, and sometimes they get a kind of a steamy, warmed -over flavor, I think. That's a terrible idea, really, from coast to coast,

asparagus and hollandaise, you know, across country. But what really disturbing about it is because it means that if people aren't eating not the produce of the part of the countries in which they live, really. Of course, remember, that's a real problem in the United States. Season, crop season is very, and again, that's problem of the sameness of these TV dinners. This is a real problem for the food processor because, after all, these products have to be made in volume. By machinery, in other words, the filling of the container and the farming of the package has to be done by automatic machines, otherwise the cost would be excessive. So there is a real problem. How do you preserve some identity to the product and yet be able to produce this thing in a price that consumer can afford to pay? For example, I think a standard TV dinner,

just to take a typical example, we have a perhaps a mashed potato, or some type of a potato, and a piece of corn, and some meat item. While all of these products had to be handled separately, they had to be prepared and pre -cooked beforehand, they had to be metered, let's say, a measure into the tray by filling automatic filling equipment. This involves quite a better work, and so result is that we naturally would run into a standardized type of product, a low, perhaps. This is not the ideal situation. I think the whole picture is that the housewife should probably use a little ingenuity even on a TV dinner, otherwise put something on it, he has to doctor it up a bit. It hasn't pointed out that the sale of spices and condiments have gone spectacularly. That's a phenomenal thing to me to see how spices and seasonings go there. Do you think this is possibly a response to the pre -prepared food? It might have something to do with it, but I also think it goes along with this tran -tard

weekend cooking or gourmet cooking on the weekend, the creative type of thing that during the week, the whole week. Well, the man dirties every dish in the house. Well, yes, men, but during the week, the busy career wife, say, serves these pre -prepared foods on the weekend she wants to cook, and so there she gets out all her spice jars and her herbs and seasonings, and if she can get into the kitchen, her husband may be there first, but she does it too, they both do. There's a lot of weekend cooking. I think a long range viewpoint on this has been a tendency for most of the food processes to produce a gourmet line of food products, in other words, more and more national food processing companies are making these gourmet food products for the weekend cook, and products for the backyard barbecue specialist. I mentioned to Joel the other day an aerosol package barbecue sauce that you can spray on your chicken while it's on the rotisserie in the backyard.

A lot of these products and it's big business, sir, is a big demand evidently. That knocks out even Saturday cooking, weekend cooking, if the gourmet product now appears on the weekend. See, they'll trace you right down the line. You don't make your own barbecue sauce? That's right. I don't know. You say that's not a bad idea. I think I find myself kind of appalled by it, you know, aerosol barbecue. Actually, I am, too, but I can see this being taken up on all sides. It's just wonderful. This aerosol... The chicken goes right on the spit, you keep squirting. There's an element of game there, too. This is fun. It's something you do and it's fun. This is a major thing. I think the aerosol packages probably are extreme, but there are many cases in packaging today that we have made great advances compared to pre -war, for example. I think a typical case is where we have a plastic type of package, where the housewife has a refrigerator dish, you see, that she can

use after the product is consumed. I think we demand so much of a package today in the food processing industry. We demand that it will protect the product from damage during shipment, and we demand that it will perform the function of advertising. It's got the seller product in the store, and then it's usually they like to have a bonus for the housewife and form that the package can be used afterwards. So you see, we're really asking quite a lot of that food package that gets to be a problem. The paper products, the paper end products, the packaging, perhaps the reason the housewife wants a refrigerator dish so that she can slide the food in the refrigerator is that otherwise she's got a waste basket filled up to here every day full of all the rattings from maybe the garbage can small, but the waste basket's big. We have, I know I've been appalled, if you go to a little storage downtown, you buy it to buy a quarter pound of cheese, then I will put it in some wax paper and then put some brown bushes paper around it and

then put it in a bag. That's right. We're overwrapped. We're literally overpackaging, and if this has been a comment in the food field in general, how are we overpackaging? I want to know how much we're paying for. We're paying plenty, we're paying plenty, we're paying plenty, but yet there seems to be a real demand for this. Well, for example, lately I've seen product, for example, pre -packaged meats in aluminum pans, overwrapped with transparent packaging material, and this has been test marketed in the east. Well, the idea is that you use that pan as a boiler. You put the thing right in your boiling compartment of your range, and then you'll bring the finished steak out. No dishes to wash. No pans to worry about or anything. It's brought away. I wonder about something else. We only have, no one have a great deal more time, but there's one thing I wonder if we might touch if only

briefly. The problem of safety here, I know if I go into the green grocers and buy a tomato, and if it's rotten, I know it on touch, but so much of this kind of knowledge is denied to me in the packaged area. Aren't there dangers here possibly that we can't control? Isn't, can't we poison ourselves unknowingly? Well, I think the whole problem of the package moving from the manufacturer right to my reference. It isn't mental properly. That's right. This has been a source of great concern in, I know the frozen food industry, national association of frozen food packers, and association of food and drug officials of the United States have made a very extensive study of the handling of frozen foods and the time it is processed and the plant, to the time it gets into the retail market, and studied the conditions that prevail in retail markets and have been tremendous improvements. In other words, the industry has policed themselves in a very good manner there, and I think from the standpoint of the food processing industry, they are very aware that it only takes one case

of poisoning and then to ruin their brand name and perhaps put them out of business. So I think industry is very sensitive about this and doing everything possible to improve the situation. Well, I'd like to thank you for being here this morning. Mrs. Church, Mrs. Mary Meade, and Mr. Litchfield, I think we've enjoyed this very much, and I think we learned a great deal. The convenience foods will continue to appear in your shelves at your grocers, and of course we'll all try them because they'll have an addition to being convenient, a quality of novelty, which will certainly be attractive. However, I think we should perhaps keep in mind what Mrs. Church pointed out to us this morning, that there's nothing like that fresh egg for flavor. Thank you very much. Good morning for the American scene. It's a jewel zanger.