In the book, Something From the Oven, by Laura Shapiro starts off with a lengthy introduction and entitles it, “Do Women Like to Cook?” While this is not what the book is about, it does ask some questions and make some statements that resurface throughout. Such as, the women do the cooking, men go to the kitchen as a profession, and the most important the food industry confronted millions of American women and tried to refashion them in their own image. This caused Americans to think differently of their eating. She also says in this introduction that the 1950’s were not what you thought they were. The purpose of the author writing this book was to inform us that the 1950’s were not what we thought it was, and especially not the food industry. …show more content…
The author was trying to achieve that by the time the reader was finished they would know that the 1950’s was not all housewives cooking, and that once the war was over rations did not just end, they would be sold and business would employ all types of tactics to get the middle-class American to buy the new technology of food they were …show more content…
She used many sources, books, magazines, statistics, etc. She included “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.: A Fantasy of the Future”, published in Quick Frozen Foods, as an example of how powerful people really thought frozen food was. The publisher said it was based off the current trends they were seeing in frozen foods and the possible results. Was this really true? The manufactures and packagers needed to persuade shoppers to buy their product. Was this just another ploy? The author leads the reader to think this from the earlier statement: the 50’s were not what they seemed. While frozen food did take off, it did not take off right away and shoppers were weary of an unfamiliar product. She provides evidence that many magazines started using recipes that used pre-packaged goods. When reading this I realized many recipes in magazines feature a certain brand pre-packaged food today. The tactics I mentioned earlier include publishing stories claiming that women used pre-packaged food, long before they actually did. They held bake-offs that you had to use one ingredient made by the company that was pre-packaged. The American food industry told a tale of women hating to cook, loved convenience foods, and all the work that went with cooking from scratch. Sharpiro made it very clear that women were suspicious of pre-packaged and convenience foods, and actually loved cooking more than any other house chore. The author states