A number of things have been overlooked in the search for an answer to this admittedly valid question.
Athena’s OP makes a pertinent observation about the role of children in food selections. However, it is not that kids prefer bland food. When you are young you have almost twice the density of taste buds on the surface of your tongue. The bland foods referred to, in fact, have a rather noticeable flavor to a child. This aforementioned density decreases as you get older. This is why most adults develop a preference for spicy and strong tasting dishes later in life. It is also the reason why childhood foods are remembered as having more intense flavors than they do today.
There is also a bit more to this issue than meets the eye. As families increasingly become dual income or divorced, parents use food as a reward or attention surrogate. I need only mention the current epidemic of obesity among American youth to enforce this point. Consequently, we see a dramatic shift towards foods that appeal to a child’s palate. The nearly one hundred varieties of sugary breakfast cereals in the supermarket are mute testimony to this fact.
Even worse is the near addiction that kids have for French fries and other deep fried foods. The rich body of these fried foods, combined with their relatively mild flavors serve as a dietary one-two knockout punch for the health of modern American children. Whether it is high fat or the empty calories of sugar laden foods, these “rewards” are nothing more than a slow poison for today’s kids.
Other factors are of even greater importance in the predomination of what we might call “bad food”. The advent of canned foods around the time of Napoleon (1810) was heralded as a stunning advance in food storage home economics. Not only were out of season edibles suddenly available in the middle of winter, but surplus harvests could be put up for consumption at a much later date. In these modern times we are acutely aware of the mediocre quality of bulk canned food products. Home canning, in its day, was a significant way to provide healthy and cost efficient nutrition for a household.
Almost fifty years later, after the invention of large scale refrigeration, did it become possible to have fresh fruit and vegetables distributed on a nationwide basis. Refrigerated rail cars played a critical role in this revolution. Frozen foods soon followed but home refrigeration was still not so wide spread as might be thought. Only one hundred years after the invention of canning did the home refrigerator begin to make its debut. Even so, due to it’s economy, the tradition of canning food for home consumption remained quite entrenched.
Not until the twentieth century was the shift over to mechanical refrigeration made. Even then, fresh fruits and vegetables had a much shorter shelf life due to poor handling and longer transit times by train. Even as they began to appear in the market place, bulk storage of frozen foods in stores still represented a substantial capital equipment investment and involved considerable operating costs. Other factors, such as refrigeration’s use of toxic ammonia hindered wide spread adoption by the commercial community.
Only in the modern age of agribusiness and interstate trucking has there been the luxury of fresh produce on demand. With this relatively recent development, public taste has begun to shift away from canned products. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to assume that America’s substantial elderly population retains a palate for canned foods and, perhaps, even finds them easier to eat. There is also the issue that a need for less shopping trips and the greater longevity of canned foods still play a role in their popularity with our aging citizens. The stupendous variety and heretofore unknown quality of today’s fresh produce, meat products and condiments are testimony to recent technological advances. Any shift in popular preferences will lag behind such developments.
All of this does not take into account another significant and possibly greater influence in the flavor and texture of food from fifty or more years ago. The fact remains that even today America has what is probably the most diverse population on earth. Turn of the century food production could not possibly accommodate this plurality of ethnic backgrounds and tastes. In order to arrive at an acceptable compromise, foods were more often than not bereft of any distinctive flavor or consistency. Instead, this could be provided by the housewife during the final stages of preparation at home. The stunning variety of food products available to us today stands as a monument to modern industry and productivity.
However modern an era we live in, there will still be throwbacks to far older traditions. Whether processed or well aged, many American cheeses are still dyed orange. Originally this was the hallmark of a single English production site. In the Cheddar Gorge, whey was strained along with flower petals to give it a unique and distinctive color that helped to protect the identity of their product. Even today, one is still able to find red dyed pistachios though few, if any, people are put off by a roasted nut of pale color. Pistachio ice cream is colored green although only the nut itself has that shade. In any Mexican market yellow dyes are sold to mimic the coloration of the astronomically more expensive saffron threads. Golden colored rice remains a sign of affluence and luxury to this day.
As to why there are such products as Miracle Whip and Bologna, it is safe to say that the second World War played a significant role in the development of low cost and economical foods. They remain second tier in their quality and flavor but have retained consumers out of habit more than a preference for fine flavor. And it is at this point that we come full circle to the original issues of pallid taste and tepid consistency. The inertia of uneducated American palates will perpetuate these food practices for some time to come. We can thank a new generation of chefs and their noble attempts to lift us out of the middle ages of food preparation and flavoring. To better understand all of the above topics, please read the wonderful tome “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee as published by Scribners.
