Canned Food

One of the things that was going on during the Great Depression was the beginning of the sort of modern food technology that rules the way Americans eat today. That is, there are a lot of canned foods were coming onto the market at the time, and also refrigerators were really becoming very, very popular during the Great Depression, both in cities and in rural parts of the country thanks to electrification, the rural electrification administration. People could buy appliances, farmers could buy appliances, and that meant frozen foods were becoming big. At that time, few people could afford to buy them during the early years of the Great Depression, but gradually these things picked up. And so this was like the beginning of the era when people were starting to think about supermarkets with rows and rows of freezer cases and rows and rows of canned foods.