BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Natl Museum of American History -- Exhibit: Food: Transforming the American Table

DC -- Natl Museum of American History -- Exhibit: Food: Transforming the American Table:

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Description of Pictures: FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950–2000
FOOD: Transforming the American Table 1950-2000 explores some of the major changes in food and wine in postwar America. From the impact of innovations and new technologies, to the influence of social and cultural shifts, the exhibition considers how these factors helped transform food and its production, preparation, and consumption, as well as what we know (or think we know) about what’s good for us. The public will be invited to take a seat at a large, communal table in the center of the exhibition to share their own thoughts and experiences about food and change in America. Julia Child’s home kitchen, with its hundreds of tools, appliances, and furnishings will serve as the opening story of the museum’s first major exhibition on food history.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. SIAHFD_130509_008.JPG: Between 1950 and 2000, new technologies and cultural changes transformed how and what we eat.
2. SIAHFD_130509_012.JPG: Julia Child's Kitchen Legendary cook and teacher Julia Child (1912–2004) had a tremendous impact on food and culinary history in America. Through her books and television series, which spanned forty years, she encouraged people to care about food and cooking. She inspired many Americans to conquer their fears of the unfamiliar and to expand their ideas about ingredients and flavors, tools and techniques, and meals in general. This kitchen from her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home provides both a starting point and a backdrop for this exhibition on changing foods and foodways in America in the second half of the 20th century. It contains tools and equipment from the late 1940s, when Julia Child began her life in food, through to 2001, when she donated this kitchen to the Smithsonian Institution.
3. SIAHFD_130509_024.JPG: "New and Improved!" Americans were greeted by claims of "New and Improved!" on more and more foods and consumer goods during the second half of the 20th century. Scientific approaches to farming and manufacturing brought higher yields and an abundant, affordable food supply. New appliances in the home that demanded greater energy consumption symbolized a prosperous, postwar American way of life for many. Optimistic attitudes about "progress" and "better living" continued throughout the century, even as many raised questions about the long-term effects of mass production and consumerism, especially on the environment, health, and workers.
4. SIAHFD_130509_029.JPG: Bon Appetit! When Julia Child introduced French cuisine and cooking techniques to Americans in the 1960s, she also introduced the European habit of drinking wine with meals. She encouraged her readers and television viewers to see wine as a normal and natural complement to the table -- in her words, as "part of the food chain."
5. SIAHFD_130509_042.JPG: Modern Kitchens: In postwar America, modern kitchens became a prominent symbol of the American way of life. The heart of the home, kitchens were stocked with the latest processed foods and filled with electric labor-saving appliances. Suburban builders like William Levitt promoted and reinforced the kitchen's significance, relocating it from the back to the front of the house and integrating it with the living and dining rooms. Popular magazines advertised kitchens as status symbols, while manufacturers encouraged consumers to transform their kitchens into showcases of progress. Julia Child's real kitchen stands both in contrast to and in harmony with the sleek and modern ideal promoted by American suburban dwellers of the 1950s and '60s. With her husband Paul, Julia designed and set up this kitchen in 1961. As a serious cook, author, and teacher, she had strong opinions about how her kitchen should be arranged. Its homey atmosphere, with simple, painted cabinetry and butcher-block countertops contrasts with the shiny surfaces pictured in kitchen brochures of the time. Yet her embrace of new appliances was very much in keeping with ideas of a "new and improved" kitchen. Julia's Kitchen by Design: Julia and Paul Child designed this kitchen when they moved into their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1961. They had been living abroad for more than a decade due to Paul's work as a cultural attache with the United States Information Service. After living in Paris, Marseilles, Germany, and Norway, Julia and Paul were ready to set up a kitchen of their own. A Place for Everything: While kitchens of the 1950s and 1960s were often designed to keep everything hidden from view, Julia and Paul preferred to hang their pots and pans on a pegboard for quick and easy access. Nor would there be any confusion about where the pan belonged after it had been used, thanks to the outlines Paul traced on the pegboard. Later, for the benefit of student and guest cooks working in the kitchen with Julia, snapshots were added. Work Zones: Julia organized her kitchen around work zones, making sure tools and equipment were placed near the surfaces where they would be used. Her pots, pans, and utensils are near the stove, her knives are near the sink, and her small appliances are set on solid work surfaces, ready to use.
6. SIAHFD_130509_071.JPG: "My gleaming batterie de cuisine" This wall of pots, pans, and other tools used by Julia Child in her kitchen represents her characteristically eclectic style -- a mix of French and American, serious and humorous, sacred and profane. Julia acquired most of her copper cookware in France between 1948 and 1980. Much of it came from the old culinary store E. Dehillerin, a Paris institution beloved by chefs and cooks. With their legendary ability to conduct heat evenly, the copper pots, most lined with tin, reflect cooking methods typical for the French food Julia taught America to appreciate. Amid this French specialization and elegance rest good old American cast-iron pans, an aluminum doughnut-hole punch, a cast-iron heart-shaped trivet, and a tiny image of San Pasqual, a kitchen saint popular in New Mexico. The "JC" branding iron, a gift from a Western admirer to a fellow meat lover, was hunt alongside the French copper for decorative and comic effect.
7. SIAHFD_130509_075.JPG: Legion d'honneur medal, 2000 Julia Child was awarded the Legion d'honneur, France's highest honor, for introducing Americans to French cuisine and cookery through her books and television shows.
8. SIAHFD_130509_084.JPG: A Passion for Food: Julia Child experienced foreign and unfamiliar cuisines for the first time during World War II. Working for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA), she traveled to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and China. With her OSS colleagues, including her future husband, Paul Cushing Child, Julia went out to eat in China as often as she could and discovered that Paul's interest in food was becoming an interest of hers as well. After the war, in 1946, Julia and Paul married. Paul's work for the United States Information Service took them to Paris in 1948, and Julia found, "As soon as we got over there and I tasted that food I just couldn't get over it." In Paris, Paul encouraged her to find something to do and suggested that she go to the elite Cordon Bleu cooking school. Because of her war service, she was eligible for US government-funded training, and along with several American GIs, she entered the professional course. The training she received there, with its emphasis on precise, hands-on technical knowledge and demonstrations by chefs, convinced her that she had found her life's work.
9. SIAHFD_130509_090.JPG: A New Kind of Cookbook: Soon after leaving the Cordon Bleu, Julia Child began thinking about producing a cookbook, a new kind of book that would be a serious tool for teaching Americans to think about cooking the way the French did -- with love and dedication and a willingness to put in time and work. With her French associates Simone (Simca) Beck and Louisette Bertholle, she embarked on what became a ten-year endeavor resulting in the publication of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by 1961. Guided by her belief that a recipe should be written so the cook knows the potential problems that might arise, Julia and her editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, transformed recipes from simple lists of measured ingredients and general instructions to complete explanations of what to do, tool-by-tool and step-by-step. Mastering the Art of French Cooking's success paved the way for other books written for ambitious and adventurous cooks. It became a classic and was the first of fourteen cookbooks Julia produced throughout her career.
10. SIAHFD_130509_094.JPG: Props and Humor: Like all good teachers, Julia Child used a variety of methods on her television show to grab and hold her students' attention. High drama and low comedy, sight gags, and the artful use of props -- from tickling a live lobster to marking out cuts of meat on her own body -- combined to make her cooking lessons memorable as well as fun to watch. On her first shows, Julia hung these French restaurant signs advertising the plats du jour (daily specials), some of them offering things -- like tripe -- that she knew her American audience would find funny and strange. Julia delighted in oversized or exotic tools and ridiculous gear, wielding this enormous fright knife when introducing her audience to an episode on cooking monkfish. When Julia used this blowtorch to carmelize creme brulee, women everywhere smiles as she quipped "Every woman needs a blowtorch."
11. SIAHFD_130509_111.JPG: Degustation de Tripes a Toute Heure
12. SIAHFD_130509_114.JPG: Emmy Award, 1996 Julia Child won an Emmy for "Outstanding Service Show Host" for the show In Julia's Kitchen with Master Chefs, which first aired in 1993.
13. SIAHFD_130509_127.JPG: On the Set In 1963, cooking on television was new, and Julia and the WGBH production staff developed a good rapport as they worked out the details of managing tools and ingredients. In this playful moment, they are spoofing the fiction that Julia did everything herself.
14. SIAHFD_130509_132.JPG: Television Star: In the 1950s, public television programming consisted mostly of lectures, book discussions, science demonstrations, and classical music performances. Julia Child marched into this rarefied atmosphere in 1962 for a book review show on Boston's WGBH-TV with her new book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She also brought her husband Paul and a copper bowl, balloon whisk, apron, and eggs. The enthusiastic response to her demonstration of how to make an omelette launched WGBH's hit series, The French Chef. During its ten-year run, The French Chef made Julia one of the best-known and most enduring figures in American popular culture. Her expert yet easygoing approach to cooking -- along with the rueful good humor with which she quickly rescued herself from occasional slipups and inevitable kitchen errors -- was unlike anything Americans had ever seen on television. Fans responded to her message, cooking is not a chore, but "an immense pleasure and a true creative outlet." In the 1980s, Julia hosted a series of new television programs the reflected the wider tastes and trends of the times. For her last three television series, produced between 1994 and 1999, when she was in her eighties, she welcomed guest chefs into her home kitchen, showcasing many of the chefs who credit her for inspiring their passion for food and cooking.
15. SIAHFD_130509_136.JPG: TV Chefs 1946-2001 These chefs appeared on television by 2001. Since then, cooking shows and competitions have continued to draw large audiences, creating a new generation of celebrity chefs and TV personalities.
16. SIAHFD_130509_178.JPG: Peel, Pinch, Puncture, Slurp: Coffee cup lips are examples of how humble objects are sometimes the result of meticulous engineering. The first lids date to the 1950s, but to-go cup-lid innovation exploded in the 1980s. Patents for lid innovations described peel-back tabs and the pucker-type shapes that make room for mouths and noses, as well as the importance of "heat retention," "mouth comfort," "splash reduction," "friction fit," and "one-handed activation," all enabling Americans to drink on the go.
17. SIAHFD_130509_185.JPG: Newfangled Chips: In the mid-1960s, researchers working for Procter & Gamble mixed dehydrated potatoes with flour and water to create a product that could outlast conventional chips. The result, Pringles, was a chip formulated for a long shelf-life that was also uniform in size, texture, and shape.
18. SIAHFD_130509_191.JPG: Patent drawing, Pringles can, 1966 Factory-formed Pringles chips could be stacked in tall cardboard cans and shipped with minimal breakage. The can saved shelf space in stores and helped the product stand apart from its competitors.
19. SIAHFD_130509_209.JPG: Warehouse shopping cart, 2011 (Costco) The products sold at warehouse stores reflect the workings of global, industrialized food distribution. Relying on economies of scale, from production and manufacturing to containerized shipping and intermodal transport, the system can supply customers were large quantities of goods at low prices.
20. SIAHFD_130509_217.JPG: The Next Supermarket Revolution: The slim margins in food retailing have long inspired grocers to cut costs. In the 1970s, seeking a way to speed up checkout and limit mistakes, grocers led a coalition of manufacturers and retailers to develop a system of standardized product identification -- the Universal Product Codes, or bar codes. The system enabled stores to track inventory and record customer buying habits. It also made possible the discount warehouse, a highly efficient model for distributing food and other goods to consumers at reduced prices.
21. SIAHFD_130509_225.JPG: Telescoping shopping carts, about 1949: Sylvan Goldman of Oklahoma City invented the first wheeled shopping cart in 1939. In 1946, Orla E. Watson of Kansas City developed the familiar telescoping shopping carts that nestled together for compact storage. Watson claimed that each additional parked cart required "only one-first as much space as an ordinary cart."
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