>>20249571Late 1940s. The war machine was being wound down a bit, and all these food companies had huge production lines to manufacture highly processed foods with long shelf lives to feed millions of soldiers. They didn't want to tear that all down, so they started advertising it as an easy way for housewives to save time. Throw in the refrigerator/freezer combo achieving mass market saturation in the 1950s and a housewife could go buy a week's worth of food, most of it canned, bagged, frozen, etc. and have a lot more time left over to do other shit. So you get frozen lasagna, canned vegetables that are already chopped, shake and bake type shit, and more. And it worked. It was a huge time-saver for women, and at the time no one in society knew it was any worse. So cooking became less a skill and more of just following some basic instructions to assemble a pre-prepared meal. They don't have to know WHY they add this at this time, or WHY they bake at this temperature vs that temperature, they just follow directions. Now no one knows how to cook after 75 years of this.
Add in the vacuum cleaner, the electric dishwasher, clothes washing machines and dryers, and everyone having two cars because all the production lines built to manufacture military vehicles were converted to make commuter cars, and you have a situation where women needed only a fraction of the time to complete their housework and were mobile. You get suburbia, and then you get bored women wanting to do something other than sit around and do nothing in their houses because their homemaking is done.
