Marketers who advertise products aren’t just selling a product, they’re selling a set of ideas around the product. Car advertisements sell the idea of a car being sporty and fast; political advertisements sell the idea of the politician being the right person for the job; credit card advertisements sell the idea of the card being just the right one for you.
Food advertisements sell ideas as well. One kind of marketing I’m interested in is origination stories; that is, stories of how products were invented. Many of the stories you hear about products, especially stories that are publicized by companies that sell those products, are either completely fabricated or don’t tell even close to the whole truth (I’ve previously written about the origination story behind Coca-Cola; click here for part 1 and here for part 2 of that article).
One subset of those origination stories are those that involve people of different races interacting. Below are examples of three similar types of origination stories for three different products. In each one a person of non-white status invented a food, but then the recipe ended up in the hands of a corporation. Read on for my analysis of what the stories tell us.
1. Fritos corn chips. Fried corn chips were popular in San Antonio, Texas, in 1932 when Elmer Doolin bought a bag of them. He liked them enough to track down the Mexican maker and offer him $100 (borrowed from his mother, who had pawned her wedding ring) for the recipe.
True? Probably, but I can’t imagine that a corn chip recipe is complex enough that you’d need to buy a recipe since you can’t make your own.
2. Bisquick. In 1930 a General Mills salesman was traveling across country on a train. The salesman was hungry so he ordered some biscuits, and was surprised at how quickly they were served. He talked to the black chef about it and found out he had made a dry mix for biscuits so mixing them up was a snap. As the story goes, the salesman obtained some of the dry mix, sent it to General Mills chemists to analyze, and they then created Bisquick from the sample.
True? Probably not. If the salesman could get a sample of the mix, why couldn’t he just get the recipe? Also, by the 1930s dry mixes had been around for decades (see the next example), so it’s hardly likely that no one at General Mills had ever thought of the idea before. The addition of scientists in the story is a interesting point—the black guy came up with the recipe, but the white scientists are the ones who really created the Bisquick mix.
3. Aunt Jemima pancake mix. This is the granddaddy of these kinds of stories, and the Aunt Jemima story is complex enough that I will probably write a separate article about it in the future. The origination story for Aunt Jemima pancake mix changed over time, but here’s a quick version of it: Back before the Civil War (i.e. during slavery) a Colonel Higbee was known far and wide for the hospitality at his plantation, and for the pancakes that were served there by a slave named Aunt Jemima. During the war the pancakes got Higbee out of a jam when Union soldiers stormed his plantation and threatened to rip out his mustache. Aunt Jemima intervened by serving her delicious pancakes, though, and everything was okay.
Years later, some of those Union soldiers had bought a flour mill and, when thinking about what they could make, thought back to Aunt Jemima’s delicious pancakes. They went looking and found her still working on Higbee’s plantation, and offered her gold for the recipe. Depending on which version of the story you look at she either accepted the gold or turned it down, but at any rate she went north to give up her recipe, and now everyone can enjoy Aunt Jemima’s delicious pancakes.
True? Nope, it’s completely fabricated. However, the various ad agencies that handled the Aunt Jemima account were so skillful at making the story believable that one woman who portrayed Aunt Jemima in the 1960s believed she was portraying a real person.
These stories point to an old idea: that certain foods are more authentic if they come from certain nonwhite ethnic groups. For biscuits and pancakes it’s blacks, while for corn chips it’s Hispanics. The three products themselves all come from huge, multinational corporations, but the origination stories put something of a human face on the products, or at least try to make the products more authentic by connecting the foods to nonwhites.
Sources: The information on Fritos corn chips and Bisquick came from Donna R. Gabaccia’s We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, pages 160 and 165. Information on Aunt Jemima came from M.M. Manring’s Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima.