Season 2, Bonus Episode: From Wheat to Wheaties
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
An excerpt from my interview with Michael Lansing - a look at how industrialization eventually led to product diversification, marketing and advertising, and more sophisticated food distribution.
With Special Guests:
Michael J. Lansing is Associate Professor of History at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. A historian of the modern United States, his current book project is Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism—a history of factory-processed grains and the hidden logic that drives contemporary food systems. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as well as commentaries in MinnPost, BillMoyers.com, and Zócalo Public Square.
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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Liz Russell Narration:
One of the most interesting things about food is that it touches so many of our lives in so many different ways. In my interview with Michael Lansing, we had a chance to go into marketing and product diversification. And though I couldn't find a good way to include it in the main episodes, I thought it was really interesting to share. Check it out.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
When you get on the other side of this massive shift of broader industrialization and urbanization in the United States, and the specific story of food and its industrialization, the shift towards new methods of production and distribution and consumption that creates all kinds of new possibilities, mostly for businesses. And those possibilities include much more sophisticated forms of advertising and marketing and merchandising. They include much more sophisticated forms of distribution, and then finally they involve the great diversification of products. So for instance, if you're one of the flour makers in Minneapolis in 1920, flour sales are actually starting to drop off. There are a variety of reasons for that. Bread made from wheat flour had made up 40 to 45% of the American diet in 1880. And by the early 1920s, it's only making up 20 to 25%. There's a bunch of reasons for that. But that shift means if you're one of these big flour making companies you're looking around and saying, oh my God, are we gonna have a business 20 years from now?
So diversification of products becomes a crucial piece of the puzzle for these food companies, as they try to sort out how they can create new markets often from the same food stuffs, the same kind of original product. So for instance, Washburn Crosby, this maker of Gold Medal flour, known across Europe and south America, as well as North America for this award-winning high quality white bread flour, one that nutritionists had even deemed full of energy and perfectly appropriate for you in terms of nutrition science at the time, they figure out how to take the same wheat kernel and to create a cold breakfast cereal with it, they call it Wheaties. And so there had been cold breakfast cereals for some time, that craze had started in the 1890s and largely created out of Battle Creek, Michigan in the Kellogg Sanitarium there, in a very particular kind of Seventh Day Adventist story.
So cold breakfast cereal was not necessarily new and it was already starting to replace a more typical American breakfast by the early 1920s. But for Washburn Crosby, they took the same wheat kernel that came into their mill and they devised a new industrial process. And then actually built a new plant in Chicago to produce this new cold breakfast cereal made from wheat. They called it Wheaties. In 1927, they launched the first kind of important radio advertising campaign with jingles. The world's first commercial jingle is a barbershop quartet singing about Wheaties. So once again, marketing and advertising becomes more sophisticated, a brand new technology of radio. And in the early 1930s, Washburn Crosby has consolidated with a number of other flour making companies in the south and the southwest and the Pacific northwest, and is now known as General Mills. And General Mills is making contracts with major league baseball teams to have Wheaties sponsored baseball broadcasts on the radio.
And by 1940, Wheaties accounts for almost 20% of all American cold breakfast cereal sales. So it's about these sophisticated forms of advertising and merchandising, the kind of more sophisticated forms of distribution, and then finally product diversification. That's how these companies continue to make money. They certainly fulfill consumer desires to have a much wider range of products when you go to the grocery store. That's a moment in American history, the early and mid 20th century, when choice is seen as a very positive thing. A number of people now in 2020 are thinking like, oh, there's just too much choice, I don't need 13 kinds of yellow mustard, just have two kinds of yellow mustard, I'm good to go. Choice is still something that's really valued in American consumer culture in the early 20th and mid 20th century.
Liz Russell:
It's funny you say that because I do tend to be on the side of anti-choice and I guess it's just a lifestyle choice for me. I just don't care enough, but I do think… it's so phenomenal to me to believe that there's just a big enough market to do that, but there clearly is.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
Well, absolutely. You create your own market, but the number of Americans is growing, like straight demographics, there are more and more citizens in the United States. And so there are more and more consumers to sell food to. And that's one of the things that makes food, as an industrial product, different than other industrial products, different than cars, different than radios, different than nearly any other consumer product you can think of - it’s that every human being needs to eat in order to survive. And so in that sense, it's kind of a captive market in this broadest sense, at least. And of course the major American food companies are kind of working in concert with nutrition scientists, this kind of new science and nutrition, which has antecedents in the early 19th century, but really doesn't take off in the form that we know it as, until the 1890s in the United States.
Nutrition scientists are trying to understand food at a chemical level and then trying to take that chemical understanding of food and understand how food works when the body processes whatever you put in your mouth. The physiological question, that's really complicated science and the food companies are right there from the beginning alongside nutrition scientists, trying to sort that out because of course for the food companies, the stakes are really high. As businesses, they need to know these things from the nutrition scientists. They of course want people to be healthy. They wanna make sure that people are getting the right kind of food, the right portions. They wanna make sure that the food people get is safe and will help them have better bodies almost literally. And so even the federal government will play a role in ensuring that nutrition science and the food companies have some places of overlap where they're deeply engaged or enmeshed with each other, not in terms of a conspiracy. But the ways in which they're dependent on each other is in some ways encouraged by the federal government and even the regulators that come out of the federal government.
Liz Russell Narration:
Stayed tuned because we have one more great convo coming up. This time, about the history of dieting.
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