On May 12th, 1965, Donald Goerke invented SpaghettiOs, the round, canned cousins of spaghetti.
The SpaghettiO is now a strangely timeless icon. Looking for a way to make canned pasta more exciting, Goerke experimented with all sorts of shapes—cowboys being the most notable—before he settled on the simple and now-iconic O shape.
After drafting the singer Jimmie Rodgers, who transformed one of his romantic ballads into the far more memorable (“It’s the neat little spaghetti that can fit on your spoon/Uh Oh, SpaghettiOs”) every piece was in place for this circular pasta to become a staple of the American diet.
By 2010, over 150 million cans of SpaghettiOs were sold each year; put another way, on average, 720 million Os are consumed every day. One can of SpaghettiOs is identical to the next: the size and shape of the can, the volume of the contents inside, and the taste of the pasta and sauce. In this sense, it is a food source that completely disconnects “food” and “source.”
During the 19th century, Americans believed that only the most ignorant consumers would buy their food without knowing where it came from. Americans knew their local butcher, and were taught to inspect every cut of meat to make sure of its quality. Shopping for food involved knowing where it came from, the reputation of the farmer, whether the seller was trustworthy.
For Italian-American immigrants, who began arriving in the United States in large numbers between 1880 and 1920, pasta was a cohesive part of ethnic identity. These Italian immigrants stressed the importance of homemade meals shared between an extended family. And even as second-generation sons and daughters left their ethnic enclaves and assimilated into mainstream American culture, many of them remembered most of all that they shared meals with their families.
Just as mass immigration from Italy slowed after World War I, spaghetti and meatballs (a uniquely Italian-American dish without analogue in the old country) had started to become part of the mainstream American palette.
At the same time, America’s relationship with food was changing.
Refrigerated train cars, used after the 1880s, allowed meatpackers to send meat long distances, making it impossible to know quite where your food came from.
By the early 1920s, chain stores, like Piggly Wiggly, began gradually replacing community grocers. Inviting shoppers to pick food from the shelves rather than rely on expert grocers, consumers learned to read labels on cans rather than inspect the qualities of the goods they bought.