Fresh from the Factory

Debates about "natural food" have long stood in for broader confrontations about science, health, and power. These persistent tensions in American society can be illuminated by exploring the origins of a beloved consumer product: breakfast cereal.Shredded Wheat, Corn Flakes, and Grape-Nuts emerged in the 1890s with eye-catching packaging that promised clean, healthy, and natural contents. Producers of these and other early packaged foods developed marketing campaigns that reframed industrial food as the key to reforming capitalism's excesses. In so doing, cereal manufacturers became some of the world's largest food processors and, at the same time, among the nation's most prominent nature writers, health authorities, and social reformers.Fresh from the Factory shows that American consumption habits and beliefs about nature developed together. Cereal manufacturers gained influence by appealing to a widespread desire among a largely female consumer base for cleanliness, purity, and simplicity in feeding their families. These companies took advantage of and helped promote new ways of making, advertising, selling, and distributing food--and did so in the name of the unadulterated goodness of nature. In an era of little public health regulation, hazy ideas about scientific authority, and public uncertainty about whom to trust, cereal producers promised to deliver the divine powers of nature straight from the factory floor.