Eating in Survival Town: Food in 1950s Atomic America

Abstract

Nuclear anxiety, as crafted and perpetuated by the United States Federal Civil Defense Administration's programmes, not only informed how, and what, Americans ate in the 1950s, but also contoured their relationship with food. This culinary-based nuclear anxiety was reflected in government-sponsored programmes such as Grandma's Pantry, advice concerning the content of bomb/fallout shelter food stashes, and the cookbooks of the period. The federal government's obsession with atomic age cuisine saturated everything, from its promotion of canned convenience foods, to the question of what would happen if a pantry were exposed to a nuclear explosion as was the case in Operation Cue, to what Americans put on their plates and in their martini glasses.

Notes

¹ Val Peterson, Harold L. Goodwin, and Leonard H. Lieberman, Cue for Survival: Operation Cue (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1955), 1.

² Nebraska Studies, “Civil Defense: Witnessing an Atomic Blast,” www.nebraskastudies.org/0900/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0900/stories/0901_0131.html (accessed December 15, 2013).

³ Fallout Shelter NYC, http://falloutshelternyc.blogspot.com/2011/05/nycs-atomic-mannequin-veterans.html (accessed January 21, 2014).

⁴ Peterson, Goodwin, and Lieberman, Cue for Survival, 1; Joseph Masco, “‘Survival is Your Business’: Engineering Ruins and Affect in Nuclear America,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 372–3.

⁵ Masco, “‘Survival is Your Business,’” 272–3; Joseph Masco, “Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3 (2004): 353; Joseph Masco, “Target Audience,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 64, no. 3 (2008): 28–9; Todd Lewan, “Flies, Sage, Tourists Bring Life Back to Atomic Desert,” Los Angeles Times, October 17, 1999, 1; Fallout Shelter NYC.

⁶ J. Delmas Escoe, “Model City is Target for Latest Bomb Blast,” Cleveland Call and Post, May 7, 1955, 3D, 4D.

⁷ Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 54.

⁸ Melvin E. Matthews, Duckand Cover: Civil Defense Images in Film and Television from the Cold War to 9/11 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2011), 88; Masco, “‘Survival is your Business,’” 373.

⁹ Nebraska Studies, “Civil Defense: Witnessing an Atomic Blast.”

¹⁰ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 54, 88, 109, 113; Masco, “‘Survival is Your Business,’” 274.

¹¹ Matthews, Duck and Cover, 88.

¹² Masco, “‘Survival is your Business,’” 375; Masco, “Target Audience,” 28; Masco, “Nuclear Technoaesthetics,” 354.

¹³ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 60–6; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 19–23; Masco, “‘Survival is your Business,’” 378, 383.

¹⁴ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 72–7.

¹⁵ JoAnne Brown, “‘A Is for Atom, B Is for Bomb’: Civil Defense in American Public Education, 1948–1963,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 70.

¹⁶ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, Chapter 3.

¹⁷ Joseph Masco, “Fantastic City,” Cabinet 20 (2005–2006), http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/20/masco.php.

¹⁸Let's Face It, Federal Civil Defense Administration, Washington, DC (c. 1954), https://archive.org/details/LetsFaceIt_966 (accessed November 30, 2013).

¹⁹ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 108–9.

²⁰ Masco, “Target Audience,” 28.

²¹ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 108–9.

²² Ibid., 4–5, 98, 109; Jennifer A. Johnson and Megan S. Johnson, “New City Domesticity and the Tenacious Second Shift,” Journal of Family Issues 29, no. 4 (2008): 498–500; Kristina Zarlengo, “Civilian Threat, the Suburban Citadel, and Atomic Age American Women,” Signs 24, no. 4 (1999): 940; Matthew Farish, “Another Anxious Urbanism: Simulating Defense and Disaster in Cold War America,” in Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics, ed. Stephen Graham (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 95.

²³ May, Homeward Bound, 16.

²⁴ FCDA, Women in Civil Defense, 1952, in “In Case Atom Bombs Fall”: An Anthology of Governmental Explanations, Instructions and Warnings from the 1940s to the 1960s, ed. Michael Scheibach (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009), 55–7.

²⁵ Zarlengo, “Civilian Threat,” 941.

²⁶ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 108.

²⁷ Zarlengo, “Civilian Threat,” 941; Cynthia Lee Henthorn, From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939–1959 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 216; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 74.

²⁸ Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xi–xii; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 108.

²⁹ Jennifer R. Horner, “Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook: A Gendered Ritual Response to Social Crises of the Postwar Era,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 24 (2000): 341; May, Homeward Bound, 99.

³⁰ Tracy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 41; Henthorn, From Submarines to Suburbs, 216; Angela Moor, “Operation Hospitality Las Vegas and Civil Defense, 1951–1959,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2008): 297.

³¹ Kregg Michael Fehr, “Sheltering Society: Civil Defense in the United States, 1945–1963” (PhD Dissertation, Texas Tech University, 1999), 126.

³² Henthorn, From Submarines to Suburbs, 214–6; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 25, 55, 77, 108, 111; Moor, “Operation Hospitality,” 298; Sarah A. Lichtman, “Do-It-Yourself Security: Safety, Gender, and the Home Fallout Shelter in Cold War America,” Journal of Design History 19, no. 1 (2006): 48; The Cold War Museum, “The Federal Civil Defense Agency (FCDA) Women Defend the Nation (1950),” http://www.coldwar.org/articles/50s/women_civildefense.asp (accessed February 2, 2014).

³³ May, Homeward Bound, 19–23.

³⁴ Aaron Bobrow-Strain, “Making White Bread by the Bomb's Early Light: Anxiety, Abundance, and Industrial Food Power in the Early Cold War,” Food and Foodways 19 (2011): 77.

³⁵ Ibid., 76.

³⁶ Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 119.

³⁷ Henthorn, From Submarines to Suburbs, 217.

³⁸ Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 8.

³⁹ Jessamyn Neuhaus, “The Way to a Man's Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks in the 1950s,” Journal of Social History 32, no. 3 (1999): 532.

⁴⁰ Shapiro, Something from the Oven, 8–9.

⁴¹ Barbara Kuck, “Atomic Age Food” (Lecture), Lake County Discovery Museum, January 17, 2010, http://www.wbez.org/episode-segments/atomic-age-food (accessed February 28, 2014).

⁴² Shapiro, Something from the Oven, 10–5.

⁴³ Ibid., 17–9.

⁴⁴ Bobrow-Strain, “Making White Bread,” 76. My emphasis.

⁴⁵ May, Homeward Bound, 29.

⁴⁶ Horner, “Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook,” 341.

⁴⁷ May, Homeward Bound, 99.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 100.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Norma H. Goodhue, “CD Promotes Pantry Plan: Old-Style Idea of Storing Food for Emergency Put to Modern Use,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 1956, C2; Marianne Kelsey, “Grandma's Pantry Returns as Civil Defense Factor,” St. Petersburg Times, March 26, 1955, 22; FCDA, By, For, and About Women in Civil Defense (1955) in “In Case Atom Bombs Fall,” 61; Marilyn Mason, “Grandma's Pantry Emphasizes Women's Civil Defense Role,” Lewiston Evening Journal (Maine), May 5, 1956, 3A.

⁵¹ FCDA, By, For and About Women in Civil Defense: Grandma's Pantry Belongs in Your Kitchen (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1958), np; also quoted in May, Homeward Bound, 100–1.

⁵² Mason, “Grandma's Pantry,” 8A.

⁵³ Laura Scott Holliday, “The Frying Pan and the Fire: Gendered Citizenship and the American Kitchen from the Postwar Era to the Family Values Campaign” (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2000), 29–30.

⁵⁴ Mason, “Grandma's Pantry,” 3A; Maine Memory Network, “Grandma's Pantry Civil Defense Card, c. 1956,” http://www.mainememory.net/artifact/29118/enlarge (accessed January 27, 2014).

⁵⁵ Conelrad: Atomic Platters, “Take the Step (Grandma's Pantry), 1953,” http://www.atomicplatters.com/more.php?id = 8_0_1_0_M (accessed January 27, 2014).

⁵⁶ Holliday, “The Frying Pan and the Fire,” 29.

⁵⁷ Goodhue, “CD Promotes Pantry Plan,” C2; Kelsey, “Grandma's Pantry Returns,” 22.

⁵⁸ May, Homeward Bound, 101.

⁵⁹ Goodhue, “CD Promotes Pantry Plan,” C2.

⁶⁰ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 111–2; Goodhue, “CD Promotes Pantry Plan,” C2.

⁶¹ Mason, “Grandma's Pantry,” 3A; FCDA, By, For, and About Women in Civil Defense (1955), in “In Case Atom Bombs Fall,” 61.

⁶² McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 112.

⁶³ US Federal Civil Defense Administration, Operation Cue (1955), http://www.archive.org/details/Operatio1955 (accessed November 3, 2013). All quotes from the film will come from this version. For additional analysis of the film, see Masco, “‘Survival is Your Business,’” 372–8; Farish, “Another Anxious Urbanism,” 94; and Michelle Neuffer, “Some Days You Just Can't Get Rid of a Bomb,” Colloquium Magazine, September 5, 2013, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/colloquium/2013/09/05/some-days-you-just-cant-get-rid-of-a-bomb-the-nuclear-test-film-uplifting-kitsch-and-batman-the-movie/ (accessed January 7, 2014).

⁶⁴ Masco, “‘Survival is Your Business,’” 373; PBS, “American Experience: Race for the Superbomb,” The Film & More, Enhanced Transcript, Act Three: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/filmmore/transcript/transcript3.html (accessed December 10, 2013). Numerous variations of June Cowen's name exist in the literature, including June Cowan, Joan Cowan, Joan Collin, and Joan Collins. PBS confirms June Cowen, which is the version used here.

⁶⁵ Neuffer, “Some Days You Just.”

⁶⁶ Masco, “‘Survival is Your Business,’” 375.

⁶⁷ Joseph Masco, “A Notebook on Desert Modernism: From the Nevada Test Site to Liberace's Two-Hundred-Pound Suit,” in Histories of the Future, eds. Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 29.

⁶⁸ Peterson, Goodwin, and Lieberman, Cue for Survival, 1.

⁶⁹ Corporate executives even participated in the writing of the ensuing reports, as was the case with The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages, Project 32.2a. David Mantey, “Beer Bombs,” Product Design and Development 8 (2012): 8.

⁷⁰ Carlos A. Greenleaf, James M. Reed, George O. Sampson, et al., Effects of Nuclear Explosions on Canned Foods, Project 32.2 (Battle Creek: FCDA, 1957), 13–4; Jonathan Veitch “Dr. Strangelove's Cabinet of Wonder: Sifting through the Atomic Ruins at the Nevada Test Site,” in Ruins of Modernity, eds. Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 332.

⁷¹ Peterson, Goodwin, and Lieberman, Cue for Survival, ii.

⁷² Ibid., 24.

⁷³ Ibid., 28.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 29.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 134.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 138.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 139.

⁷⁸ The six reports can be found through the Hathi Trust Digital Library (http://babel.hathitrust.org): Sumner C. Rowe, Effects of Nuclear Explosions on Bulk Food Staples, Project 32.1 (Battle Creek: FCDA, 1956); Carlos A. Greenleaf, James M. Reed, and George O. Sampson, et al., Effects of Nuclear Explosions on Canned Foods, Project 32.2 (Battle Creek: FCDA, 1957); E. McConnel, G. Sampson, and JM Sharf, The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages, Project 32.2a (Battle Creek: FCDA, 1957); Robert Philbeck and Delbert M. Doty, The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Meat and Meat Products, Project 32.3 (Battle Creek: FCDA, 1956); Robert Hardenburg and A. Lloyd Ryall, The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Semiperishable Foods and Food Packaging, Project 32.4 (Battle Creek: FCDA, 1956); and HP Schmitt, Effects of Nuclear Explosions on Frozen Foods, Project 32.5 (Battle Creek: FCDA, 1957).

⁷⁹ Barbara Germain Killian, Military and Civil Defense Nuclear Weapons Effects Projects Conducted at the Nevada Test Site: 1951–1958 (Ft. Belvoir: Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 2011), 175.

⁸⁰ Gerard J. DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 285.

⁸¹ Lichtman, “Do-It-Yourself Security,” 49.

⁸² Edwin P. Laug, Operation Teapot Program 32, Exposure of Foods and Foodstuffs to Nuclear Explosions (Battle Creek: FCDA, 1956), 12.

⁸³ Ibid., 13.

⁸⁴ Ibid.

⁸⁵ Ibid.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 14.

⁸⁷ Hardenburg and Ryall, The Effect of Nuclear Explosionson Semiperishable Foods and Food Packaging, 22.

⁸⁸ Laug, Operation Teapot Program 32, 14.

⁸⁹ McConnel, Sampson, and Sharf, The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages, 14.

⁹⁰ Laug, Operation Teapot Program 32, 15; Schmitt, Effects of Nuclear Explosions on Frozen Foods, 5–6.

⁹¹ Terrence R. Fehner and FG Gosling, Battlefield of the Cold War, The Nevada Test Site: Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1951–1963 (Washington, DC: United States Department of Energy, 2006), 137.

⁹² Laug, Operation Teapot Program 32, 15–6.

⁹³ Philbeck and Doty, The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Meat and Meat Products, 34.

⁹⁴ Laug, Operation Teapot Program 32, 16.

⁹⁵ McConnel, Sampson, and Sharf, The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages, 14, 17.

⁹⁶ Hardenburg and Ryall, The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Semiperishable Foods and Food Packaging, 34.

⁹⁷ Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 119–120.

⁹⁸ FCDA, What You should Know about Radioactive Fallout (Revised May 1958), in “In Case Atom Bombs Fall,” 43.

⁹⁹ Agricultural Research Service, US Department of Agriculture and Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Family Food Stockpile for Survival, Home and Garden Bulletin 77 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), 2–5. My emphasis.

¹⁰⁰ DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life, 285; McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 110–1; Lichtman, “Do-It-Yourself Security,” 39–40.

¹⁰¹ Henthorn, From Submarines to Suburbs, 216; Rebecca Allison Devers, “Iron Curtain in the Picture Window: The Cold War Home in American Fiction and Popular Culture” (PhD Dissertation, University of Connecticut, 2010), 283–4; Joshua Gitelson, “Populox: The Suburban Cuisine of the 1950s,” Journal of American Culture 15 (1992): 76.

¹⁰² Davis, Stages of Emergency, 43–4; Eric G. Swedin, Survive the Bomb: The Radioactive Citizen's Guide to Nuclear Survival (Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2011), 21; Lynne Olver, “The Food Timeline,” http://www.foodtimeline.org/index.html (accessed February 13, 2014).

¹⁰³ Neuhaus, “The Way to a Man's Heart,” 533.

¹⁰⁴ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 110.

¹⁰⁵ Kuck, “Atomic Age Food” (Lecture); “Atomic Cake: An Explosive Confection,” April 13, 2013, http://outtathekitchen.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/atomic-cake-an-explosive-confection/ (accessed February 1, 2014); Admiral William HP Blandy, “Operation Crossroads Mushroom Cloud Cake,” November 7, 1946, Washington Post, November 8, 1946, 18, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Admiral_Blandy_Mushroom_Cloud_Cake.jpg (accessed February 1, 2014).

¹⁰⁶ A. Constandina Titus, Bombs in the Backyard: Atomic Testing and American Politics (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001); Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America (New York: Vintage, 2002).

¹⁰⁷ Gerard DeGroot, “The Afterlife of a Nuclear Test Site,” History Today 54, no. 6 (2004): 27.

¹⁰⁸ Dalyn Miller and Larry Donovan, The Daily Cocktail: 365 Intoxicating Drinks and the Outrageous Events That Inspired Them (Minneapolis: Fair Winds, 2006), 99, 100, 188, 201, 212, 246.

¹⁰⁹ Kristin L. Matthews, “One Nation Over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue,” American Studies 50, nos. 3/4 (2009): 6–7.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 14.

¹¹¹ Marcelle Bienvenu, “Eisenhower Barbeque Sauce,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans), March 5, 2013, http://www.nola.com/food/index.ssf/2013/03/bbq_sauce.html (accessed January 28, 2014); Kuck, “Atomic Age Food” (Lecture).

¹¹² Sherrie A. Inness, Dinner Roles: American Women and Culinary Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 145.

¹¹³ Jessamyn Neuhaus, Manly Meals and Mom's Home Cooking: Cookbooks and Gender in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 217.

¹¹⁴ James Beard and Sam Aaron, How to Eat Better for Less Money (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954).

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 212.

¹¹⁶ Ibid., 212–4.

¹¹⁷ Harvey A. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 131.

¹¹⁸ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 153.

¹¹⁹ Davis, Stages of Emergency, 43.

¹²⁰ Andrea Tone, The Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers (New York: Basic Books, 2008); David Herzberg, Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

¹²¹ McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home, 55.

¹²² DeGroot, The Bomb: A Life, 292.

¹²³ Ibid.

¹²⁴ Masco, “‘Survival is Your Business,’” 378.