Opening the Lid on Australia’s Love Affair with Canned Meat: Advertising Camp Pie in Twentieth-Century Australia

Regulation and science may make food physically safe to consume but what makes food culturally “safe?” This article explores how canned meat was transformed into a culturally and socially “safe” substitute for fresh meat through an examination of the early-twentieth-century advertising of a uniquely Australian canned meat, camp pie. At the start of the twentieth century, Australian canned meat had a poor reputation. To change this perception, Australian camp pie producers mobilized classed, racial, and national identities to encourage consumers to see canned meat as a desirable and appropriate alternative to fresh meat. Advertising for camp pies in the 1940s and 1950s focused on the convenience and economy of their allegedly nutritious products. By the 1950s, canned meat was more than a finished ready-to-serve product, it was an ingredient that could easily substitute for fresh meat. The once suspicious contents of opaque cans had become “safe” canned meat.