"This book explores the earliest roots of the modern food industry, focusing on the development of the canning industry in the United States. Canning leaders leveraged the power of scientific expertise to create a market for canned food. Before the mid-twentieth century, in order to win consumer trust, canners adopted new technologies, cooperated with federal food regulation, sponsored agricultural and bacteriological research, and standardized food production. All of these moves helped to make canned food a staple of American pantries by the 1940s. As other industries entered the processed food landscape, and environmental and consumer critiques emerged, canners widened their scientific research base to more centrally incorporate marketing, advertising, and political strategy. In their increasing power, industry leaders were less willing to defer to governmental authority and more eager to directly control production and consumption. This study takes up the stories of six particular canned foods--condensed milk, peas, olives, tomatoes, tuna, and Campbell's soup--to understand the tools used by the food industry to build consumer confidence in a new way of eating. This modified diet not only changed the relationship between business and consumers, but also the relationships among Americans, farmers, universities, advertisers, and the natural environment."--Provided by publisher.

In Third Wave Capitalism, John Ehrenreich documents the emergence of a new stage in the history of American capitalism. Just as the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century gave way to corporate capitalism in the twentieth, recent decades have witnessed corporate capitalism evolving into a new phase, which Ehrenreich calls "Third Wave Capitalism." Third Wave Capitalism is marked by apparent contradictions: Rapid growth in productivity and lagging wages; fabulous wealth for the 1 percent and the persistence of high levels of poverty; increases in the standard of living and increases in mental illness, personal misery, and political rage; the apotheosis of the individual and the deterioration of democracy; increases in life expectancy and out-of-control medical costs; an African American president and the incarceration of a large percentage of the black population. Ehrenreich asserts that these phenomena are evidence that a virulent, individualist, winner-take-all ideology and a virtual fusion of government and business have subverted the American dream. Greed and economic inequality reinforce the sense that each of us is "on our own." The result is widespread lack of faith in collective responses to our common problems. The collapse of any organized opposition to business demands makes political solutions ever more difficult to imagine. Ehrenreich traces the impact of these changes on American health care, school reform, income distribution, racial inequities, and personal emotional distress. Not simply a lament, Ehrenreich's book seeks clues for breaking out of our current stalemate and proposes a strategy to create a new narrative in which change becomes possible.--Book flap