When first sitting down to write this reflection, I could think of nothing other than the fact that I was extremely hungry. Looking through rows and rows of periodicals did not help me get my mind off my growling stomach, either. After being somewhat indecisive, I just decided to explore the 1955 Issue of Life Magazine. I flipped to the first article published on January 3rd and quickly discovered it was a Special Issue on Food. Wow, how more convenient could this issue get? Relentlessly, I began reading the issue and was quickly fascinated by one of the opening articles titled “A Triumph and an Obligation”.
This article grabbed my attention simply because it had photographs of farmland and livestock – both prevalent in my home state of Nebraska. One of the first lines of the article stated that each generation is taller, bigger, and healthier than the preceding one. I found this particularly interesting considering America today is having major health issues. The article vaguely mentioned that overeating is a problem in the current day, but never commented on the fear of America becoming overweight, let alone the fear of obesity. The article goes on to describe how America is a powerhouse in the World food market. We, being the United States, had an abundance of $6.6 billion of surplus food in 1955. This made it easy for us in that time to forget that most of the rest of the world lacked in adequate food and that more than half of its people were extremely underfed. This, still being a problem today, has made me realize how little change has occurred with regard to our domination of the food market in the last fifty years.
Finding a way to more equally distribute food across the world was a problem in the middle 1950s and will most likely persist many years from now as well. Since we found the key to dominate the food market, why can’t we share our technological discoveries with the rest of the world? In 1950 America was using combines while some other countries were still using plows and irrigating by the “drawer of water”. Unbelievable.
Once continuing on with the rest of the Life Issue, I came across an article about how New York brings in one-twelfth of all food consumed in the United States. Within the article, different food industries in the New York area are highlighted. It was not the content of the article that surprised me, but rather the photographs of the “behind the scenes” of the different industries. I was completely shocked to see not one single person wearing gloves when personally handling sausages, hams, bacon, salmon, and other types of food. This would definitely not be approved in FDA Laws today. After examining these photographs, I proceeded to research the Food and Drug Administration, FDA, and learned it was established in 1906. However, it was not until 2009 that the FDA amended their laws and required the use of gloves in the workplace by all employees. What a complete shock! No wonder the people in these pictures from the 1995 Life Magazine were not wearing gloves, they had no idea the possible health risks. One sick person who came to work that day in 1955, instead of sleeping in, could contaminate hundreds of pieces of items of food.
If I had not looked at the publication date of this Life Magazine, I would have never guessed it was published around the New Year. There were not any articles, photographs, or advertisements discussing the recent happenings. My initial thought that maybe in 1955 New Years was not an extremely popular holiday was somewhat irrational. New Years is New Years, no matter the era. Perhaps the previous issue of Life Magazine included the year re-cap I was anticipating.
Despite my interest in a few particular articles and pictures in the magazine, I found it to be a rather boring issue. When I first saw that I would be reading a Special Issue about food, I was expecting to be reading less about the farming and production aspects of the food, and more about the nutritional aspect of the food. None of the articles discussed the advantages of eating vegetables over ice cream, or why bacon is a poor food choice among Americans. One other article, in fact, talked about how Americans are choosing to eat fast-food meals more commonly, but the article never talked about how poor that decision was. Their obliviousness to the future health problems in American is striking to me. Perhaps there were many overweight people in America during that time, they just did not know how to address the issue. Regardless, this realization shows the gap between America in 1955 and America today.
Miss Sharp,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, that information you found about the FDA is disgusting. I am glad to say I did not die in my pre-2009 lifetime from a disease-carrying food because someone didn't wear gloves.
I was thinking about what you said about obesity in the US and how we could not see that problem coming. With that large of a food surplus and an increase in attendance of fast food restaurants, one would think someone could guess a problem would arise. However, in 1955, TV's were just getting mainstream, radio was still big, and personal computers were years from origination. In our society, where we can type "obesity" on google and get 1,498,385,384 articles about the problem in .68 seconds, it is simple to research the problem and understand how to address it. However, in 1955, how were people to know fast food was bad for them? This is a society that thought cigarettes had no harmful side effects. Given the information we know now, people in 1955 probably would done things differently. However, they didn't have that information and therefore didn't know any better.
PS- I had to grab a snack after reading this blog.