The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [30]
Exciting things were happening in the kitchen, too. “A few years ago it took the housewife 5½ hours to prepare daily meals for a family of four,” Time magazine reported in a cover article in 1959, which I can guarantee my mother read with avidity. “Today she can do it in 90 minutes or less—and still produce meals fit for a king or a finicky husband.” Time’s anonymous tipsters went on to list all the fantastic new convenience foods that were just around the corner. Frozen salads. Spray-on mayonnaise. Cheese you could spread with a knife. Liquid instant coffee in a spray can. A complete pizza meal in a tube.
In tones of deepest approbation, the article noted how Charles Greenough Mortimer, chairman of General Foods and a culinary visionary of the first rank, had grown so exasperated with the dullness, the mushiness, the disheartening predictability of conventional vegetables that he had put his best men to work creating “new” ones in the General Foods laboratories. Mortimer’s kitchen wizards had just come up with a product called Rolletes in which they pureed multiple vegetables—peas, carrots, and lima beans, for example—and combined the resulting mush into frozen sticks, which the busy homemaker could place on a baking tray and warm up in the oven.
Rolletes went the same way as rocket mail (as indeed did Charles Greenough Mortimer), but huge numbers of other food products won a place in our stomachs and hearts. By the end of the decade the American consumer could choose from nearly one hundred brands of ice cream, five hundred types of breakfast cereals, and nearly as many makes of coffee. At the same time, the nation’s food factories pumped their products full of delicious dyes and preservatives to heighten and sustain their appeal. Supermarket foods contained as many as two thousand different chemical additives, including (according to one survey) “nine emulsifiers, thirty-one stabilizers and thickeners, eighty-five surfactants, seven anti-caking agents, twenty-eight anti-oxidants, and forty-four sequestrants.” Sometimes they contained some food as well, I believe.
Even death was kind of exciting, especially when being safely inflicted on others. In 1951 Popular Science magazine asked the nation’s ten leading science reporters to forecast the most promising scientific breakthroughs that they expected the next twelve months to bring, and exactly half of them cited refinements to nuclear armaments—several with quite a lot of relish. Arthur J. Snider of the Chicago Daily News, for one, noted excitedly that American ground troops could soon be equipped with personal atomic warheads. “With small atomic artillery capable of firing into concentrations of troops, the ways of tactical warfare are to be revolutionized!” Snider enthused. “Areas that have in the past been able to withstand weeks and months of siege can now be obliterated in days or hours.” Hooray!
People were charmed and captivated—transfixed, really—by the broiling majesty and unnatural might of atomic bombs. When the military started testing nuclear weapons at a dried lakebed called Frenchman Flat in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas it became the town’s hottest tourist attraction. People came to Las Vegas not to gamble—or at least not exclusively to gamble—but to stand on the desert’s edge, feel the ground shake beneath their feet, and watch the air before them fill with billowing pillars of smoke and dust. Visitors could stay at the Atomic View Motel, order an Atomic Cocktail (“equal parts vodka, brandy, and champagne, with a splash of sherry”) in local cocktail lounges, eat an Atomic Hamburger, get an Atomic Hairdo, watch the annual crowning of Miss Atom Bomb or the nightly rhythmic gyrations of a stripper named Candyce King who called herself “the Atomic Blast.”
As many as four nuclear detonations a month were