"Food as Science," an interview.

This is an interview with my Father, Zachary Smith that I conducted over the phone. Zachary was born 1954, and was thus quite young during most of the decade. He nonetheless had recollections and insights into the food culture of the day, as well as the changes in food and ideas about food in subsequent decades. In the 1950s, Zachary was living in Mill Valley, a small city in Marin County, Northern California, just a short drive over the Golden Gate bridge from San Francisco, where he currently resides.

Z: What I recall from eating in the 1950s is that our diet was very standardized. There was always a well-defined starch, you know, like rice, and a meat, frozen vegetables. We had milk with dinner every night. There were no "faddist" foods served in our home. I think the most unusual thing that my Mom cooked was succotash, “An American Indian Dish,” corn and beans. Up until the 1960s, everything my Mom cooked, she learned how to cook from her Mom, or someone like that. Because we were 'WASP'ish, our diet didn’t have some of the things that other people were having, no . . .

D: No Jello casserole?

Z: Yeah none of that. The way our kitchen was set up, we had a modest-sized fridge and we had what's known as a California cooler, which was basically a hole in the wall with a screen on the inside where we kept things like root vegetables. So very little of our food was refrigerated. I remember in one of those cabinets we had a big container of Crisco. My Mom did a lot cooking with Crisco at that time, but I also used to just eat the Crisco plain. I thought it was delicious.

D: What were your other favorite foods?

Z: Frozen foods were starting to be a really big deal. Initially I remember there were a lot of canned vegetables, but I didn’t like those as much. Frozen vegetables had a fresher taste. So, I really liked frozen green beans. And I really liked rice with butter, long grain, white rice with butter.

D: And you liked tapioca, right?

Z: I liked tapioca.

D: Would that have been from a package?

Z: We had tapioca balls, actually, and my Mom would boil them. I don't remember when it was, maybe by the late 1950s, but the milk guy would start having "exotic" things like yogurt for us, and I liked that a lot, too. At that time all of our groceries were delivered; we would order them over the phone. We were far away from the store and only had one car at that point, so it was easier that way.

D: How would you say your diet shifted over time? What foods was your mom making in the 1960s, say, as opposed to the 1950s?

Z: What I would say is that between 1954 when I was born, and 1964, over the course of those ten years, things changed really a lot. Mostly in the early 60s, but some in the late 50s, too. My mom was always kind of into healthy food. She didn’t believe in eating . . . well, for example, my neighbor Dennis Lippitt had white bread with pasteurized cheese squares as a snack. Now, I thought those were really, really good, but my mom would never get something like that. Even back in the 50s she was not totally buying the whole “industrial food” thing. There had already been a long tradition stretching back before the 50s of health foods. At the end of the 50s that started accelerating. We started seeing the influence of “hippie food,” and other foreign cuisines, Mexican and Japanese I would say were the biggest influences in that regard.

D: What was the general cultural climate in Mill Valley at that point?

Z: It’s interesting about Marin, it seemed that there were a lot of Germanic bohemians in Mill Valley at that time. Not particularly hippie, and more substantially working class than it is now. Right across the street from our school was a shop that was run by a guy who would fix your blender, and did those sorts of repairs for a living. I don’t think that particular real estate could be filled by someone who did that sort of work anymore.

D: What was it like in terms of restaurants? What was the local flavor, and how did that shift? Was your family going out to each much at that point?

Z: Going out to eat was a treat for us in the 1950s. I think at first what we were eating was mostly fancier versions of the food that we had at home. There was Italian food. There were a few fish restaurants. On the whole, though, it was all very American. There were French places, too, I think, but they were too fancy to take kids. Like I said, that changed over time, and eventually there were Mexican and Japanese restaurants that we would go to.

D: And did you see the influence of those foods in home cooking?

Z: Well, there's a funny story about that. Some time in the late 1950s, my parents were having Dad’s boss over for dinner, and they knew he was a major Japanophile, so my Mom tried to make this obscure Japanese dish for him. As I recall, it was basically fish that you served almost raw on a bed of stones and pine needles. No one even ate the fish. They all just pushed it around on their plates while it stared up at them from the bed of pine needles. So anyway, all the fancy, exotic food we ate, we ate out. That is until the 1960s with the influence of "hippie food" came into our home, which was, of course, brown rice, steamed vegetables, no spices. (Laughing) Brown rice, steamed vegetables, no spices.

[...]

Z: So anyway that’s approximately the story. In terms of people’s attitudes about food, the notion that food was something delightful and kind of a catalyst for a wonderful occasion or an experience in and of itself, that was totally foreign to the culture of the 50s that I knew. You were certainly supposed to consider your food. Food was something you were supposed to take seriously, but it was not fancy. It wasn’t something you were supposed to revel in. That idea was somehow decadent. Food was some combination of fuel, and an occasion for family. Then later it became a kind of political statement. Now there is much more of an emphasis on food as a wonderful experience.

D: I've been thinking a lot about that shift in doing this project. Obviously "foodie" culture is a condition of economic class, but there's such a stark contrast between today when those who can afford to want the organic food, the local food, they want to know where it came from and what's in it, as compared to the 1950s when food from packages, processed foods, frozen foods seemed to have been embraced wholeheartedly by many 1950s families. Part of the way that I explain that phenomenon is a comparison to attitudes of the day toward novelty and technology. The foods were fast, efficient, and new. Do you feel that level of excitement about those kinds of foods could be compared to attitudes about science and technology at the time?

Z: Yes, definitely. We were arch Modernists. The whole frozen food thing was definitely the new modern thing. It was great, right? Food all of a sudden came in the these nifty square packages. It was tasty instead of awful and metallic, which was how it was when it came in cans. The people that sold that stuff exploited its newness and modernness. I didn’t watch a lot of T.V, but in what I did see the commercials for that stuff were all very "modern." It was all talking about how "the process" - the modern industrial process - locked in the flavor and made it better. And locked in the vitamins, too. That was another thing that happened in the 1950s. There was a really simple idea of what constituted a healthy diet, and you wanted to advertise your food in terms of that model of basic food groups, and vitamins. That was a very modern way of thinking about food, sort of like chemistry. That continued to expand into the 60s, and then there was a backlash. A backlash against techno-modernism you could say. One aspect of that "hippie food" was, while it was important to think about food as nutritious, people were uncomfortable with the idea of "food as science." They didn’t want all their food handled by scientists, and injected by vitamins.

D. Would you say there was an anti-corporate thing going on there, as well?

Z: Well, I think in the 1950s people seemed sort of okay with corporate food. In advertisements for cereal you wanted to see that it was made by General Mills, or whoever. Then all of a sudden they weren’t okay with it. I mean, it’s funny, the trajectory of thought on the East coast was different from the West coat. As I recall, on the East coast it was much more political, and specifically Marxist. One of the aspects of their new approach to food during that period was that you were actually supposed to be suspicious of food that had been made by companies like General Mills because they were considered evil on a number of dimensions. They did shadowy things to your food.

[...]

Thank you, Zachary for your words on food and attitudes toward food during this period.