Keys to History

Grocery stores proliferated in the second half of the 19th century, stocking canned, boxed, and other prepared foods on their shelves, as well as new products such as baking powder, compressed yeast, powdered gelatin and glass preserving jars. By the 1890s most breakfast cereals (puffed, toasted, flaked, extruded) were on the market in brand-name packaging. Grocery stores soon came to replace the local market as the foundation of the food supply system.

At the turn of the 20th century, innovations in marketing brought sellers and buyers closer together, and consumers discovered new forms of purchasing, including catalogues, deliveries and department stores. As the century reached its midpoint, small retailers were increasingly being replaced by self-service grocery chains such as Loblaws and Steinberg's. Mass production of food and mass distribution of goods in supermarkets homogenized the diets of rich and poor.

References

Jennifer Salahub, The Cult of Domesticity, webtour, http://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/keys/webtours/tourID/VQ_P1_6_EN, McCord Museum, 2003.

Caroline Coulombe, "Entre l'art et la science: La Littérature culinaire et la transformation des habitudes alimentaires au Québec," RHAF, vol. 58, no. 4, printemps 2005, pp. 511, 518.

Elizabeth C. Cromley, "Transforming the Food Axis: Houses, Tools, Modes of Analysis," Material History Review 44 (Fall 1996) / Revue d'histoire de la culture matérielle 44 (automne 1996), pp. 12, 20.

Carol Ferguson and Margaret Fraser, A Century of Canadian Home Cooking: 1900 through the '90s (Scarborough, ON: Prentice Hall Canada, 1992), pp. 7, 8, 55.