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143 Chapter 6 Capital and the Modern Kitchen Commentators who reject the view that post-war immigration had any impact on Australia's changing food habits frequently point to something more fundamental as an explanation: industrialisation. As Humphrey McQueen has said: "The migration of capital has been more influential than the migration of consumers or shopkeepers."' Indeed, industrialisation, or capital, has brought about, and continues to bring about, tremendous changes in the way people eat. In 1950, it was still possible to pinpoint a tynica; v, worth of meals eater. hy most of the Angier -Ceitic nopulatior.. Then. people ate man\ of the same things. prepared in much the same way from the same ingredients as their neighbours. Though there were some socio-economic differences, most meals still fell within an English framework based on certain raw ingredients. That is not true today, even when one accounts for class differences. Today, supermarkets all across Australia stock foods from Thailand, India, Italy, Greece, Mexico, China and many other countries. The sheer availability of ingredients means that people can now pick and choose what to cook, and what they choose may be significantly different from what their neighbours have chosen. The food manufacturing and retailing industry has made it far easier for all Australians to cook 'ethnic,' as we shall see below. But what they have also done is made it far easier for Australians not to cook at all. A 1999 survey of Australian food habits indicated that 90 percent of Australians use 'not-home- 1 H. McQueen, Strong, black and deadly, The Australian's Review of Books, December 1999, p. 23. 144 prepared' food in a week, with almost four meals per week falling into this category. 2 Of the meals prepared at home, a growing number are assembled rather than cooked; the `home-meal-replacements' sold by supermarkets are a billion-dollar industry, with the largest segment being chilled and cooked meals that only need to be reheated. 3 The Sydney Morning Herald appeared to have its finger on the pulse of the nation when it published an article entitled 'The Death of the Kitchen.' According to the article, "The household cook of the '90s [relied] on recipes of eight words: 'Pierce plastic cover and heat for two minutes.'4 Local, regional and national foods have all become more global, more processed and more packaged. This is largely due to industrialisation. It is not within the scope of this chapter to examine industry's role in the growing 'fast foodificat9n` a meal r. contemporary ustraiiL, though th ramification:_ art pr:n -ounc — and not just on a nutritional level. 5 Rather, this chapter will show how the food industry marketed new foods to the Australian public in the post-war years, and how it helped influence the adoption of ethnic foods as a result. Industrialisation vs. immigration Michael Symons argues that Australia's post-war ethnic food boom was almost entirely the result of industrialisation. He maintains that because Australia never had a peasant society, it could not develop a cuisine of its own and instead had to turn to 'industrial' cuisine: preserved and transportable food brought from Britain at first, followed by food processed 2 G. Slattery, Accept no imitations, The Age Food, 11 May 1999. 3 S. Mangosi, Tie-and-Sandwich Corner Shop Threatened by Dynamics of Fast Food Industry, BIS Shrapnel News Release, 18 May 2000. 4 D. Macken, The Death of the Kitchen: Will Cooking Survive the 1990s?, The Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum, 7 September 1996, p. 10s. 5 G. Stansbury, Arresting Fast Food, M/C A Journal of Media and Culture, vol. 3, no. 2, June 2000, (hap://www.media-culture.org.au/0006/food.himl. 145 and supplied by the growing domestic and international food industries. 6 "The lack of a peasant experience — or, conversely, our total history of industrialisation — explains why we have traditionally cared less about food than any other people in history," he says.? Nevertheless, there have been times Australians have cared about food — namely in the 1850s, the 1880s and the post-war years — although Symons maintains that these `waves of interest' in food occurred because of revolutions in transportation, the food industry, and the kitchen and not because of concurrent waves of immigration, which he claims were coincidental. Symons writes: In the first step, the agricultural and industrial revolutions in England fed a newly estate-less bourgeoisie, who installed the first ranges, employed French cooks and en.ic.)yed the groceries of other lands...A second step in the I 880s brought the great food companies based on the railways, roller-mills. refrigeration, brand names and chain shops. Processed foods again shook preconceptions about eating and drinking....Finally, considerable investment throughout the 1960s and 1970s took cooking out of the home and into the factory. The saturation advertising of multinational food corporations persuaded consumers to experiment once again with taste sensations.8 Certainly, developments in transportation, household appliances, shopping and the food industry resulted in tremendous changes in the availability and nature of foods and their preparation. But consumers are not entirely passive recipients of the mandates of industry, as Symons likes to suggest: 6 The debate over the existence of an Australian cuisine has been a vigorous one, but with the exception of how it relates to the wide scale adoption of ethnic foods in this country, it is beyond the scope of this thesis. To explore the subject in further detail, see Graham Ponts response to Michael Symons no peasantry/no cuisine premise in Upstart Gastronomy: A Cuisine without Peasants, presented to the Third Symposium of Australian Gastronomy: A Multiculinary Society, Adelaide, 1988 and Barbara Santichs Australian Culinary Xenophobia in the same publication, as well as Ruth Riddell (1989) and Cherry Ripe (1993). 7 M. Symons, One Continuous Picnic, Penguin Books Australia Ltd., Ringwood, Victoria, 1984 (1982), p. 12. 8 ibid., p. 228. 146 With supermarket selling, the processors manipulated both food and us. Market researchers identified gaps, food scientists devised new styles of foods, packaging companies created fetching guises, home economists found recipes to sell them, and advertising agencies presented us with persuasive social models.9 Industry will rarely produce a product for which it believes there will be no demand. And consumers will not buy products that do not fulfill their needs and desires. As Karl Marx said, "Nothing can have value without being an object of utility." 10 So while industry can influence or manipulate consumers to try an innovation, it cannot force them to adopt it if the innovation does not meet certain criteria relating to relative advantage, compatibility, trialability and observability (see Chapter 4). Thus far. all those who have commented on the profound and permanent changes that have occurred in Australian food habits durin g the last 50 years – whether by stating that the cause was immigration or industrialisation – have missed the point. It is the innovation itself that matters. There was a reason Australians began experimenting with ethnic foods after World War Two – and a reason Italian food was the first they chose to bring into their homes: the relative advantage in adopting Italian food after World War Two was very high, higher than that of any other cuisine. Neither immigration nor industry could have caused the wide-scale adoption of something that did not speak to a broad segment of the population; they could only facilitate the process. Immigration helped by exposing people to new foods via interpersonal channels of communication and by being the first suppliers of those foods. Industry helped by reaching 9 ibid., p. 195. 10 K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, 1867, Chapter 1, Section 1. 147 a far wider audience via mass media channels of communication and by greatly expanding the availability of those foods. Immigration and industry are not mutually exclusive. As we have seen in Chapter 5 and will further examine here, immigrant-owned businesses like San Remo and D'Ortogna played a significant role, too. Whether they are of the multinational or 'mom-and-pop' variety, companies become change agents when they embark on advertising campaigns and promotions to encourage the adoption of their products. Change agents and mass media channels of communication: advertising What are change agents? Change agents influence consumers' innovation decisions in a direction they deem desirable. Often. they do so by undertakin g a campaign that "intends to generate specific outcomes or effects in a relatively lar ge number of individuals. usually within a specified period of time and through an organized set of communication activities."' Rogers defines change agents as individuals working on behalf of change agencies, such as an agricultural extension agent talking to farmers about a new seed on behalf of the World Bank or the Department of Agriculture. But food manufacturers and food retailers are also change agents in that they seek to influence consumers' decisions regarding their products – in other words, they seek to persuade consumers to buy, and ideally adopt, their products – and they frequently undertake advertising campaigns and special promotions as a form of communication, often via mass media channels of communication. 11 E. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 4th edn, The Free Press, New York, 1995, p. 344. 148 hs Ij IS _SERVING I he Fighting SW/feel U l grant twat slew predsactic:n 4 Savoy Macaroni, insetted mod wilier Nutrifenth-- which leaves little for she fallu at home. Later youll he aisle weskit" all yea want of these Continental Delicacies. J-41.4)09 NUTRIFOODS .+Aducthava. , siut.a&alt. •arty otithAA In the mid-1940s, Savoy Nutrifoods, a Leichardt-based company in Sydney that produced dry spaghetti and macaroni.