Gary Cross and Robert Proctor:
"Packaged Pleasures" (2014)
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The book is an excellent examination of a modern phenomenon: the wide availability (and consumption) of goods that used to be scarce and necessary and are now
abundant and detrimental.
The most obvious example is food: fat and sugar used to be essential to surviving and scarce, but today they are everywhere and it's even difficult to escape them. The craving for sugar and fat is an evolutionary trait that helped humans survive, but the industry has turned it that natural instinct into a business opportunity.
There are probably evolutionary reasons why we crave sounds and images, and the industry is now flooding us with music and videos.
Pleasure was born as an attractor towards evolutionary fitness (pleasure signals to us what is good for our body), but the industrial world found a way to mass produce the things that give us pleasure and now we live in the age of overconsumption of pleasure that is totally removed from the evolutionary needs.
Chemical factories produce sugary foods and drinks that are attractive in taste because for millions of years our bodies needed sugar that was scarce to find.
The first chapter focuses on the inventions that made goods storable and portable, notably food containers. There's a chapter on the cigarette, a chapter on sugary food, a chapter on the record, a chapter on cinema and a chapter on the rollercoaster. Along the way the book is a treasure trove of trivia. The sheer number of data is stunning. The chapter on food is probably the most interesting chapter for the general audience: it shows how so much food novelties didn't provide any nutritional improvement but satisfied our appetite for sugar. Three decades earlier Peter Farb and George Armelagos published a similar book, "Consuming Passions" (1980), that discussed a lot of trivia about why eat what we eat, and why older civilizations ate what they ate. Sidney Mintz' "Sweetness and Power" (1985) the impact that sugar had on the economic and social history of humankind, how sugar has shaped our world. Massimo Montanari's book "The Culture of Food" (1994), or his later "Food is Culture" (2006), has a history of food production and consumption in Europe. The chapter on sound is one of the best histories of the early recording industry that one can find, despite some mistakes (records made of shellac appeared in 1895, and the founder of Victor Talking Machines was Eldridge Johnson not Emile Berliner). The chapter on sight retells the story of photography and cinema, but starting from the camera obscura and the panorama. (Alas, it credits Eastman for Hannibal Goodwin's invention of the celluloid film roll). There is also a chapter on the amusement park and the rollercoaster, although this chapter looks only half-baked. Overall, it's an impressive survey of modern industries that are also addictions. |
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