Advertising of Food and Drinks

Advertising of Food and Drinks
More than in any other nation, American food ways have been formed and nurtured by advertising and media.

The birth of the hype machine can be traced to the mid 19th century, when revolution in transportation, settlement patterns and cheap newsprint led to enormous changes in eating patterns.

In the post-Civil War era, railroads had begum to send oranges from Florida and grain from Midwest to the urban centers of the northern United States even as those very cities were becoming engorged from an influx of ex-farmers and immigrants.

Mass-market magazines were at the ready to instruct the new urban middle classes in ways of preparing the brand new, industrially produced foods that flooded market.

The invention of modern advertising can largely be credited to patent medicine sellers of the Reconstruction era. They came up with all sorts of spurious and even dangerous cures for such ill-defined as neuralgia and dyspepsia, which seemed epidemic in that unsettled time.

To promote their nostrums, the huckster scared their customers with “facts” almost guaranteed to induce psychosomatic symptoms, printed advertisements offering miraculous cures, enlisted celebrities as spokesman and sponsored traveling medicine shows where quack doctors and their accomplices testified to ten efficacy of their potions.

Early Softdrinks were sold and marketed as patent medicine. An 1892 advertisement for Coca-Cola as typical of the genre: the carbonated potion was recommended as “the ideal Brain Tonic for Headache & Exhaustion.”

Coffee substitutes were originally promoted in much the same way. As late as 1951, the Federal Trade Commission was investigating the Post Company for running ads for its Postum beverage claiming that drinking coffee discourage marriage or that it results in “divorce, business failures, factory accidents, juvenile delinquency, traffic accidents, or or home foreclosures.”
Advertising of Food and Drinks