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Podcast: New Books in Food
Episode: Anna Zeide, “Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry” (U California Press, 2018)
Description: Most everything Americans eat today comes out of cans. Some of it emerges from the iconic steel cylinders and much of the rest from the mammoth processed food empire the canning industry pioneered. Historian Anna Zeide, in Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry (University of California Press, 2018), carefully traces how canners convinced a nation of consumers who ate little but seasonal, fresh food to dare to crack open an opaque container of unknown origins and put its contents into their bodies. The feat required reshaping everything from federal regulatory practices and the...