Please view the posters presented at the 18th Annual CityTech Faculty and Student Research Poster Session below. You can click on each poster to enlarge it and view the PDF version under the poster abstract.
We thank all presenters for sharing their innovative and informative research with the CityTech community and beyond!
21. Consuming Poppy Cannon
Poppy Cannon was a best-selling food writer prominent in post-World War II America. Within the pages of her many books and syndicated food columns, she positioned the use of processed foods as uniquely innovative. Cannon’s recipes, featuring packaged and frozen foods, were written for an audience eager to exhibit their modernity by harnessing the increasingly accessible food supply paired with the use of newly manufactured kitchen gadgets. Cannon, once a household name, is now mostly forgotten. Her recipes now act as amusing internet fodder; held up as kitschy examples of bad 1950s food (not the balm to harried housewives that they actually were). The Vassar-educated Cannon held her own in a cutthroat publishing world while raising three children from three different fathers. She married four times, her last marriage in 1949 to Walter White, the African-American NAACP executive and civil rights leader. Cannon battled social norms and scratched out a career in a rampantly sexist and racist environment. In the forthcoming Consumption and the Literary Cookbook (edited by Harde & Wasselius, published by Taylor & Francis) I have written a chapter about Poppy Cannon. In this work, I seek to reconstruct Cannon’s reputation and to establish her rightful legacy. View or download a PDF version of this poster.
