Package deals

The kitchen of today, especially in the cities, is more compact. The elevator made the skyscraper possible; the package has made the kitchenette home possible. The modern kitchen contains a greater variety of foods, and its care is much less laborious than the kitchen of years ago. But it is incredibly more extravagant. In spite of these conveniences of which we boast as products of a superior civilization, the home does not turn out anything like the volume of food, laundry and sewing which the housewife of former years turned out as a matter of course. For the privilege of buying in packages and bottles instead of in sacks and jugs, and for buying its jams and jellies and fruits and vegetables in tin cans containing whatever the packers in the generosity of their hearts choose to embalm in them, the housewife has very largely abandoned the preserving of all these foods in the good old glass jar. If this is progress, then I am for the reaction. To can your own fruits and vegetables, improving upon your forbears only by using the inventions of modern science in preserving under steam pressure and in using materials and appliances which lessen the labor involved, pays not only in dollars and cents, but physically and gastronomically.

Ralph Borsodi, The Distribution Age: A Study of the Economy of Modern Distribution (New York: Appleton, 1927). Reproduced at the Soil and Health Library.