The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [79]
Most shopping is done for food. Food shopping isn’t usually seen as the central joy of consumerism, but let’s look again. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many Americans had only recently made the leap into stable subsistence. They had left the old country, often because they were hungry. Keep in mind that it was not only about whether they had money for food: this was a world in which, often enough, there was not much food to be bought. Coming to America worked. The streets here were not golden, but it was a wonder enough that the grocer’s shelves were stacked with food. This was no bony peasant behind a slate of wood with a few roots and two dead pigeons on it; it was a prosperous shopkeeper with piles and piles of produce, tiers of meats and pastries, sausages hanging from the deli ceilings, baskets overflowing with bread. New immigrants regularly wrote home listing the food available in America—apples! pears! peas! beef! duck! cakes!—and teasing their old-country relatives, “still sitting around sucking herring bones.” It is reasonable to guess that such people derived lasting happiness from finally getting enough. A Czech immigrant who came to America in 1914 looked back on his life and said, “We ate like kings compared to what we had over there. Oh, it was really heaven.”1 Note the height of this joy. They were kings. They lived in heaven. For those who had come of age in scarcity, abundance was happiness.
Advertising had to try to keep this movement going beyond the first big bump, beyond the pleasure of going from having too little to having enough. The fact that advertising turned out to work so well (to even its inventors’ surprise) made it possible and necessary to create yet more products. Very early in the history of advertising, the task of a food business—an industrial bakery, say—was to let women know that they no longer had to bake crackers regularly or draw a bagful from the often mouse-infested cracker barrel at the grocer’s. In 1898, Uneeda Biscuits advertised their biscuits as laboratory-sterile: home was dirty; the factory was pure.2 It seems counterintuitive to us because we think of Manchester factories belching soot, but homemakers also had imagery of local grocery stores infected with rodents, bugs, and rot. The imagery of the filthy food factory was not introduced until Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel The Jungle exposed foul practices in the meat industry in 1906. All Uneeda had to do was put up a poster showing uniform, unbroken crackers in sanitary-looking, neat packages. People bought the crackers. Myriad look-alike products then appeared (many with similarly cute names, Taka Cracker and Hava Cracker among them), and advertising grew increasingly competitive.
Once the word was out that various foods were available in packages and cans, advertisers had to get you not only to choose to buy a type of product, but to buy theirs—instead of others, or also. Already have some sour pickles in the house? Why not take home some sweet ones, too? The image of heavenly cornucopia in advertising drew on the abundance inference from fairy tales. This image has been remarkably consistent in food merchandising. In the world of designer handbags and luxury cars there are minimalist stores and minimalist advertisements, but even the most exclusive food stores tend to offer a very full visual palate. What about consumerism is working for us? The image of food abundance would seem to be essential to our answer. For many people, most of them women, food shopping is nowadays not a pleasure trip, but rather a chore. Yet we cannot reasonably dismiss the positive psychological effect of visiting a place of plump, various, and plentiful food and claiming for one’s basket an array of nutrients and pleasures. Satisfaction through abundance saves you from your hunger and