We're All Too Busy to Chew

For most of human history, food that asked you to accept less — less flavor, less nutrition, less pleasure — was at least apologetic about it. The purpose of dehydrated meal pouches and cans of salty “meat” during war and famine was brute survival. And the idea was that this period of hardship would be temporary; not that you would ever eat that shit by choice. Rations assumed that, one day, there would be a time at which regular meals — the ones you sit down and eat with a knife and a fork and preferably a loved one — would return. 

Over time, though, eating under constraint outlived the conditions that produced it. After the two World Wars, industrial food lines that had been spun up to feed soldiers cheap, shelf-stable, standardized meals were repurposed to do the same for civilian populations struggling to reenter “normal” life under conditions of economic precarity, displacement, and accelerating work demands. For someone hustling two back-to-back factory jobs, a pot of canned soup bulked out with white bread or potatoes was a genuinely helpful way to fill stomachs.