page_title: American cuisine
section_title: Processed food
hierarchical_section_title: American cuisine / History / Modern cuisine / Processed food
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of a White Castle meal.
context_page_description: American cuisine reflects the history of the United States, blending the culinary contributions of various groups of people from around the world, including indigenous American Indians, African Americans, Asians, Europeans, Pacific Islanders, and Latin Americans. Though much of American cuisine is fusion cuisine reflecting global cuisine, many regional cuisines have deeply rooted ethnic heritages, including Cajun, Louisiana Creole, Native American, New Mexican, Pennsylvania Dutch, Soul food, and Tlingit. Early Native Americans utilized a number of cooking methods in early American cuisine that have been blended with early European cooking methods to form the basis of what is now American cuisine. The European settlement of the Americas introduced a number of ingredients, spices, herbs, and cooking styles to the continent. The various styles of cuisine continued expanding well into the 19th and 20th centuries, proportional to the influx of immigrants from many different nations; this influx nurtured a rich diversity in food preparation throughout the country.
context_section_description: During the Progressive Era (1890s–1920s) food production and presentation became more industrialized.
  From 1888 through 1908 the machine double-crimped, compound-sealed, open-top, so-called "sanitary can" was perfected (replacing individually crafted and manually soldered hole-in-top style cans).  Also during that time, the can manufacturing industry consolidated.  These improvements in canning made fruits and vegetables increasingly available to chefs outside of the regular harvest season.
  During that same time frame, grain-feeding of cattle during low pasture months made milk increasingly available year-round.  The invention of milking machines lowered production costs. Pasteurization, homogenization, evaporation, condensation, and refrigeration along with glass milk bottles, wax paper cartons, and then plastic bottles made milk increasingly available and safe for urban consumers. Milk became a staple food item and an increasingly important ingredient in American cuisine.  Examples include the Root beer float and the Milkshake.
  Major railroads featured upscale cuisine in their dining cars. Restaurant chains emerged with standardized decor and menus, including the Fred Harvey restaurants along the route of the Sante Fe Railroad in the Southwest. Fast food restaurants with standardized product and franchised service models began to appear and spread with the development of the highway system. White Castle (1916) was one of the first examples.  Franchising was introduced in 1921 by A&W Root Beer.  The McDonald's brothers created their "Speedee Service System" in 1948.
  At the universities, nutritionists and home economists taught a new scientific approach to food.  In the early 1900s muckraking journalists raised public concern about the wholesomeness of industrialized food products that contained various preservatives and adulterants of unknown safety.  From 1902 to 1912 Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, supervised "hygienic table trials" to test the safety of food additives and preservatives.  His work contributed to the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.  He became the first commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and later led the laboratories of Good Housekeeping Magazine.
  During World War I the Progressives' moral advice about food conservation was emphasized in large-scale state and federal programs designed to educate housewives. Large-scale foreign aid during and after the war brought American standards to Europe.
  From 1912 to the end of the 1930s researchers discovered and popularized the role of various vitamins and minerals in human health.  Starting with iodized salt in 1924, commercially distributed food began to be fortified with vitamins and minerals.  In 1932, milk began to be fortified with viosterol, a purified vitamin D2 product.  Synthetic thiamin (vitamin B1) first became available after 1936 and bakers began voluntarily enriching bread with high-vitamin yeast or synthetic vitamins in the late 1930s.  The Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Science established the first set of "Recommended Dietary Allowances" in 1941. In 1943, the US War Foods Administration issued the War Food Order No. 1, which made enriched bread the temporary law of the land. In 1945 George Stigler published an article on "The cost of subsistence" which described the so-called Stigler diet - his solution to the problem of providing a diet that met the RDA at a minimum cost.
  The logistical requirements of the US military during WW2 and the Korean War spurred the development and growth of the processed foods industry in the US. These wars encouraged production of shelf-stable ingredients processed on a vast industrial scale.  Examples include powdered milk, powdered eggs, potato flakes, and frozen concentrated orange juice.
  After the war, low cost, highly processed foods became one of the foundational elements of an era of mass prosperity.  Many companies in the American food industry developed new products requiring minimal preparation, such as frozen en
caption: White Castle burgers and fries
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