Packaged Pleasures

Packaged Pleasures March 30, 2015

Gary Cross and Robert Proctor describe the changes in technology, marketing, consumption, and habits that followed the packaging revolution. In Packaged Pleasures, they examine how our tastes have been affected by the replacement of fruits and vegetables with packaged candy bars; by the packaging of cigarettes; by the packaging of fun with packaged, traveling amusement parks; sounds and sights were packaged by cameras and audio recordings. 

The theme is partly the democratization of pleasure: “Access to pleasure has long been an expression of privilege and power” (9). Packaged products made pleasures widely accessible. This made “calls for moderation and self-control” more difficult to enforce. It wasn’t just that new products were being products; it was “new techniques of containerization” that contributed to the intensification of pleasures: “new kinds of machines brought new sensations to ordinary people, producing goods that for the first time could be made quite cheap and easily storable and portable. Canned food defeated the seasons, extending the availability of fruits and vegetables to the entirety of the year. Candy bars purchased at any newsstand or convenience story replaced the rare encounter with the honeycomb or the wild strawberry. And while our more immediate predecessors may have enjoyed a pipe of tobacco or a draft of warm beer, the deadly convenience of the cigarette and the refreshing coolness of a chilled beverage came within the grasp of the masses only toward the end of the nineteenth century.” 

All this amounted to an upheaval in “the traditional relationship between desire and scarcity” (10). What we desired was available, now and here, and cheaply. 

Packaged pleasures were not only more readily available, but they could be more intense. Opium used to be chewed, smoked, or drunk, but “was transformed through distillation into morphine and eventually heroin – and then injected directly into the bloodstream” (11). Cigarettes made tobacco “cheap, convenient, and ‘mild’” (11).

The authors summarize the character of packaged pleasure under four headings: Packaged pleasures are engineered commodities that concentrate, preserve, and intensify sensual pleasures; packaged pleasures are cheap, accessible, portable; they are wrapped, labeled, branded; they are produced by large companies with at least regional, sometimes national or even global reach (15).

All this is fairly recent in human history, starting in the late 19th century. Packaged pleasure has rapidly become so pervasive that it is difficult to imagine living otherwise. 


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