“One of the best ways a woman can express her personality is through the foods she serves. Mixes are not designed to destroy that creative instinct—but for the busy home-maker, they are the base. The basic product is supplied—the frosting, filling or topping is left to her.” (Ellen Pennell [Ann Pillsbury], “Food Secrets from the Experts,” Forecast, February 1948)
This week I was reading “‘I Guarantee’ Betty Crocker and Women in the Kitchen ” by Laura Shapiro, which is one essay from a collection of essays called “From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies”. This is among my favorites of the texts I have read on food studies up until this point in my education, I found it compelling, informative, and thought provoking. I could probably do my annotations over again and have completely different thoughts and questions but I am very satisfied with what I have taken from it thus far.
This essay focused on Betty Crocker, the fictional character created by the General Mills Company in 1921 as a marketing scheme, and is arguably one of the most successful of her kind, the text says:
“By the early 1950s, General Mills surveys showed that 99 percent of American
housewives were familiar with Betty Crocker’s name, more than two-thirds correctly identified her with General Mills and its products, and some 20 percent spontaneously said “Betty Crocker” when asked to name the home economist they found ‘most helpful”. (Shapiro 2005, P.33)
The success of Betty Crocker was partially the success of the marketers and General Mills, and partially due to the recent end of World War I. What I am most curious about is the relationship between Betty Crocker, who she was and what she represented, and the American housewife, who was the provider of food to the American family. A quote from “The Current State of Live Trademarks,” March 22, 1957 “Ideally, the corporate character is a woman, between the ages of 32 and 40, attractive, but not competitively so, mature but youthful-looking, competent yet warm, understanding but not sentimental, interested in the consumer but not involved with her.”
Betty Crocker was not created to be a friend to the American Housewife, but more a teacher or a role model. Betty Crocker was perfect, and it was easy for her to be so as a static picture on the side of a box, or voiceless words in the newspaper. But if these were the standards laid out for the woman leading American housewives, what does that say of the contradictory standards laid upon the real housewives? Was every woman supposed to be mature yet youthful looking? Attractive but not competitively so? Warm and understanding but not sentimental? Upon first read it seems absurd that they would so blatantly describe their ideals for this woman, but when laid next to the perhaps less spoken (although Andrew Tates still looms) standards for women today and they are eerily familiar.
Betty Crocker was a powerful woman in the corporate marketing world. Her name and picture were on cookbooks, box mixes, and cookware. Her words were in the paper and on the radio, it is even described in the text the ways in which she held a position of power over her male cohost, but it is notable that the time in which Betty Crocker was faced with her biggest failure was when she was launched on T.V. It seems that Betty Crocker in the flesh was not as appealing to the U.S public. General Mills ran her on many shows with a variety of formats, guests, and ideas all with little to no success, it seems that the magic of the perfect housewife, the “living trademark” did not translate to TV. In essence, Betty Crocker needed to be perfect to be Betty Crocker.
The chapter ends on a surprising note, discussing not Betty Crocker but Julia Child. I have a Julia Child cookbook, and the comparison they give between Betty Crocker’s promises of perfect and timely cakes, versus Julia Childs’s no promise, anyone can cook attitude was refreshing. I will most likely start on another essay from this collection next week as I enjoyed this one so much, and I will also be looking for more writings by this author.