Why read Canned?

Book cover of Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry

Book description

2019 James Beard Foundation Book Award winner: Reference, History, and Scholarship

A century and a half ago, when the food industry was first taking root, few consumers trusted packaged foods. Americans had just begun to shift away from eating foods that they grew themselves or purchased from neighbors. With the…

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Canned as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Xaq Frohlich

Author

Today most foods American consumers purchase are packaged. A hundred years ago this wasn’t so.

This is a dramatic change in how we get our food, what we know about it, and what we even think food is. Zeide’s book is an important read because she takes us through this with one of the earliest forms of packaged food: canned foods.

Her discussions of how the canning industry overcame food safety concerns with canned products and consumer resistance to the idea of canned as less fresh, less palatable, and cheap helped me to rethink the different ways a packaged food…

From Xaq's list on The best history books that explain the origins of our industrial food system.