Eye Appeal Is Buy Appeal

This essay explores the development of visual appeal, particularly color, as a key driver of demand in the American food sector between the 1920s and the 1940s. It analyzes, through case studies of oranges and fresh meat, how food producers and retailers sought to create a standardized food color that many consumers would recognize and eventually take for granted as "natural." The creation of "natural" color was a process of standardization, facilitating a new kind of visual regime. This dramatic transformation of visuality in the early twentieth-century American foodscape laid the groundwork for creating standardized, albeit artificial, notions of naturalness and freshness of foods today.