This article is an interesting complement to the “age of average” article that was trending here a few days ago. In the late 60s folks wanted to be a bit different, pushing against the conformity of the 50s. And they did that in part by… buying novel frozen food? Fast forward and this is essentially Trader Joe’s whole thing.
The rise in pizza popularity post WWII was a harbinger of cultural globalization that has now started to feel like homogenization.
I’m fascinated by the interplay between individuals, societies and consumerism. Be unique like everyone else!
Still that feels like a weak take. Where’s the line between lemmings and spreading best practices?
> In the late 60s folks wanted to be a bit different, pushing against the conformity of the 50s. And they did that in part by… buying novel frozen food?
Home refrigerators were still fairly new. A quick google indicates that "a refrigerator in the home" became a standard thing in the US in the 1940s. 1960s seems a bit slow (maybe the war got in the way?), but not every innovation is instant, and in this case the "innovation" is not the refrigerator itself, but the "frozen pizza rolls", second-order effects, the structuring of new products around the common availability of the home refrigerator. The platform precedes it, just like you don't have a mass-market app store before the iPhone.
> and in this case the "innovation" is not the refrigerator itself, but the "frozen pizza rolls", second-order effects, the structuring of new products around the common availability of the home refrigerator.
Are the pizza rolls structured around the availability of a freezer, or of a microwave?
Pizza is an interesting thing. What they had in southern Italy before the war was very different and didn’t have tomato sauce, etc on it. It was a street food for peasants. There are accounts of Italian-American GIs working their way through Italy and surprised that the pizza they were used to back in America did not exist in Italy.
A lot of food we think of as being from a small place and then globalized is sort of marketing. A lot of stuff was created after WW2, associated with a country, and globalized.
Not to pick Italy but carbonara is an example of this. Invented by Italian Americans. The first accounts of it existing are in cook books published in America. Old Italians have no recollection of it pre-war.
But it was characterized as “authentic Italian” and it soon became the national dish of Rome, and modified to its current state today. Before recent times people were not killing enough pigs to make pork jowl universally accepted as the “authentic” protein in the dish.
The rise in pizza popularity post WWII was a harbinger of cultural globalization that has now started to feel like homogenization.
I’m fascinated by the interplay between individuals, societies and consumerism. Be unique like everyone else!
Still that feels like a weak take. Where’s the line between lemmings and spreading best practices?