ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the early rise of modern advertising and focuses on a number of leading trademarks for foodstuffs and luxuries during the decades around 1900, to gauge the influence they had on variations in daily nutrition in Germany and compares this with the period of mass consumption in the late twentieth century. It indicates that a complete food history requires not only the traditional discussion of market prices, household budgets, consumption per head and calories, or narrative subjective reports about meals, but also a consideration of the changing structural influences of the advertising media on the contemporary emotions of consumers. The practice of giving commodities distinguishing signs has many precursors in history but the acceleration in the use of trademarks in Germany is limited to the period from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, when rapidly expanding urban populations and the eclipse of traditional agrarian self-provision made it necessary to look for new systems of supply.
