Are Women Tiring Of "Push-Button 99 Meals?

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28793, 14 January 1959, Page 2

Are Women Tiring Of "Push-Button 99 Meals?

The latest invention for food shopping in the United States is an automatic machine about the size of a large sideboard where food in packets, tins and cartons (including milk) can be obtained by inserting money and pressing the appropriate button. It is suggested that this may be a bid by the self-service food stores—with Sunday emergency shoppers in mind—to hold their own against the lure of the small, family grocer. Some housewives have already tired of the giant supermarkets which have grown so big that the shopper is worn out by the time she had trundled a basket carriage around the miles of shelves and queued up at the checking counter. Although food-markets with self service have their advantages, there is an irresistible appeal in the courtesy, service, and personal attention of the smaller grocery shops. The attraction is especially noticeable where home deliveries are made. Parking Problem New Zealand grocery stores have comparatively recently followed the self-service supermarket trend introduced several years ago in the United States. However, there is one outstanding difference—the most up-to-date and comprehensive food stores which offer self-service in New Zealand, still cling to the heart of the cities where parking, and loading groceries into a car, are most inconvenient, if not impossible on a regular basis. Supermarkets in the United States do their greatest business well out of the cities, in well-organised suburban shopping blocks where plentiful free parking space is provided and assistants carry the heavy loads out to the cars for women shoppers.

Several women questioned in Christchurch said they were not

unconditionally enthusiastic about food stores where self-service was compulsory. They regretted the gradual disappearance of the family grocer who delivered and gave credit. Some believed the advantages of handling merchandise and choosing articles at leisure was outweighed by the time wasted looking for items and the burdensome chore of dragging home heavy baskets on buses and trams. Other more complex and perhaps even psychological aspects involved in “push-button” automatic services and the reduction of women’s work in the kitchen and in food shopping have evolved. They may seen paradoxical but they are being given serious consideration by women living in America. "Saturation Point’* A New Zealand woman who has lived for 12 years in the United States notes that New Zealand housewives have not yet reached ‘‘saturation point” when it comes to packaged foods, readymixed cakes, breads, pies and puddings and impersonal services. In America many women had reached that, she said. After several years of frozen and processed foods of all description and push-button devices of all kinds provided in the relentless drive made there to relieve the housewife, the housewife to a certain degree, had rebelled, she said. Many were weary of tasteless food, reflecting the mass produced recipes of enormous commercial kitchens. They were bored with pushing buttons, tired of flabby pre-wrapped bread with consistency of blotting paper and dissatisfied after being relieved of too many creative crafts and arts.

One of the latest crazes in the “back to nature’* reaction was home bread-making. Classes had been organised to instruct groups

of women how to make bread like grandmother used to. Tired of the ease of sticking down ready-to-lay carpets by means of precut carpet square, groups of women were learning how to weave and hook rugs so that they might make their own furnishings with individuality and effort.

Creative effort was again being recognised as one of the major satisfactions of life. Spinning wheels were fetching enormous prices—not as antiques, but as functional aids to creating something. Bottling and preserving at home had been revived in many sections of the country and families were licking their lips over flavours whose enjoyments had been forgotten with the constant use of canned and frozen foods. Handknitted woollens, so commonplace in New Zealand, were greeted with lavish admiration, and women who had not touched a ball of wool were wondering if they too could learn to knit