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                There was never demand for fish sticks. But through a lot of savvy marketing and government assistance, they became an American staple anyway.
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                ... bringing banking back to the people.
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                    Issue #125
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                    Sunday, September 20, 2020
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                The Hustle is proud to deliver original longform journalism to your inbox every Sunday. This work would not be possible without the support of our sponsor,
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                <h2 style="font-size: 30px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 120%; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 25px;">
                 <strong>
                  How marketers convinced America to eat fish sticks
                 </strong>
                </h2>
                <p style="color: #737373; font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: italic; line-height: 120%; margin: 0; padding-bottom: 10px;">
                 There was never demand for fish sticks. But through a lot of savvy marketing and government assistance, they became an American staple anyway.
                </p>
                <p style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 120%; margin: 0; padding-bottom: 24px;">
                 <strong>
                  BY
                  <a style="color: #D62829; text-decoration: none; text-transform: uppercase;">
                   Michael Waters
                  </a>
                 </strong>
                </p>
               </td>
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               <td class="h2020 ignore-defaults" style="padding: 0px 10px;">
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 There is perhaps nothing more quintessentially American than the fish stick.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Where else but in this nation could one freeze processed whitefish into a brick, cut it up into deep-friable strips, and ship it to a landlocked region like Kansas for immediate consumption?
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Since they were introduced in 1953, fish sticks have become an unlikely staple. Today, Americans eat
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   55m pounds
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 of them per year — and during the pandemic, consumption has been
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   on the rise
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 .
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 But they weren’t always a mainstream hit.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 “No one said, ‘I want a fish stick,’” Paul Josephson, who chronicled the rise of the fish stick in a 2008 paper, “
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   The Ocean’s Hot Dog
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 ,” tells
                 <em>
                  The Hustle
                 </em>
                 . “What we see is that the manufacturers, through marketing, were able to create demand that otherwise wouldn’t be present.”
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 How did marketers transmorph a culinary oddity into an icon of the 20th century middle class?
                </p>
                <h4 style="font-size: 17px; height: 100%; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 22px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 8px;">
                 <strong>
                  A century of trying to make seafood happen
                 </strong>
                </h4>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 To understand the triumph of the fish stick, you have to understand that Americans have always been skeptical of seafood.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Many early American settlers fled Europe, where cheap fish was a dietary staple of the working class. And if the New World represented an escape from Europe, then it also needed to represent an escape from fish.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 As William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth colony,
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   wrote
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 in a letter in 1623, “If ye land afford you bread, and ye sea yeeld you fish, rest you a while contented, God will one day afford you better fare.”
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 This distaste trickled through the centuries. In the 1800s, for instance,
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   lobster
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 was hardly the delicacy we know it as today. As Josephson wrote, lobster was a “trash fish” reserved for prisoners and servants.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Compared to other meats, fish always wound up in last place.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   In 1910
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 , the average American ate less than
                 <strong>
                  7 lbs. of fish
                 </strong>
                 per year — well below beef (60 lbs.), pork (60 lbs.), and chicken (15 lbs.).
                </p>
               </td>
              </tr>
              <tr>
               <td>
                <a style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">
                 <img alt="" src="https://inboxflows.com/_/image/https%253A%252F%252Fthdaily.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com%252Ffish%2520chart_20200918191004.jpg/?inbox_flows_img_sig=eyJwYXRoIjoiaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZ0aGRhaWx5LnMzLSJ9:1kXMMM:mqAq5ypoowzPjWWYvfXNkodBZJFe9dCm_qFR8-Zc2zc" style="height: auto; max-width: 600px; padding-top: 10px; width: 100%;" width="600"/>
                </a>
                <p style="color: #5f696c; font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 8px 5px 20px;">
                 Zachary Crockett / The Hustle (data: USDA, via The Washington Post)
                </p>
               </td>
              </tr>
              <tr>
               <td class="h2020 ignore-defaults" style="padding: 0px 10px;">
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Part of this was an availability issue: fish spoiled easily, and transporting fish from the coast to the inland was close to impossible.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 At the turn of the 20th century, seafood vendors began experimenting with industrial-scale freezing — but these efforts left a lot to be desired.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Fishermen froze their catches in massive blocks onboard ships. Hours later, when they tried to pry apart individual fish, the ice splintered into chunks. The public wasn’t interested in the end result. One 1926 newspaper
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   noted
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 the widespread “prejudice against cold storage fish,” especially among home cooks.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 So the industry tried again — this time, by mincing up the frozen blocks and re-packing them into “fishbricks.” Picture a carton of ice cream, but with a heap of frozen fish inside.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 The hope was that consumers would cut these fishbricks into smaller, cookable pieces. Though several major grocery chains agreed to carry fishbricks, they never caught on.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 The reason that frozen fish — after failing for so long to achieve mass popularity — became a hit in the 1950s has a lot to do with World War II.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 During the wartime effort, meat producers shifted their focus to feeding soldiers. On the homefront, legal restrictions and supply chain shortages meant that Americans had to ration their consumption of chicken, beef, and pork.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 But there was one meat product that couldn’t travel well abroad — and that didn’t face the same restrictions: fish.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Suddenly, fish was the only widely available protein.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Seafood distributors wanted a new signature product to anchor themselves to America’s kitchens. It needed to be so simple, so inoffensive, and so universally palatable that even a nation of fish skeptics would embrace it.
                </p>
               </td>
              </tr>
              <tr>
               <td>
                <a style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">
                 <img alt="" src="https://inboxflows.com/_/image/https%253A%252F%252Fthdaily.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com%252Fblock_20200918191025.jpg/?inbox_flows_img_sig=eyJwYXRoIjoiaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZ0aGRhaWx5LnMzLSJ9:1kXMMM:mqAq5ypoowzPjWWYvfXNkodBZJFe9dCm_qFR8-Zc2zc" style="height: auto; max-width: 600px; padding-top: 10px; width: 100%;" width="600"/>
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                <p style="color: #5f696c; font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 8px 5px 20px;">
                 A factory worker prepares to turn a block of frozen fish into fish sticks (Carmen Jaspersen / picture alliance, via Getty Images)
                </p>
               </td>
              </tr>
              <tr>
               <td class="h2020 ignore-defaults" style="padding: 0px 10px;">
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 In the post-war years, a few struggling fish companies took one more stab at frozen fish.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Instead of serving frozen fish in brick form, they decided to try out a shape that Americans knew well, cutting the fish into rounded strips, like hot dogs or sausages.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 And this time, it paid off.
                </p>
                <h4 style="font-size: 17px; height: 100%; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 22px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 8px;">
                 <strong>
                  How to sell an aquatic hot dog
                 </strong>
                </h4>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 In 1953, 3 separate companies (Gorton’s, Fulham Brothers, and Birds Eye) hit the market with their own version of fish sticks.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 More than anyone else, Gorton’s — a small fishing company based in Gloucester, Massachusetts — turned this product that no one really wanted into a mainstream hit.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 At Gorton’s, the task of promoting fish sticks fell on its newly minted director of advertising,
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   Paul Jacobs
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 .
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 A lifelong Bostonian and food marketer, Jacobs knew he had a challenging road ahead: when he joined Gorton’s in 1953, the company was fresh off its first loss in nearly two decades. It desperately needed a win.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 But this didn’t scare Jacobs.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 He started targeting home chefs with the claim that fish sticks represented a well-deserved break for the “harried housewife.” The appeal of the dish was its ease: all it took was a few minutes to heat up.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Jacobs soon convinced
                 <em>
                  Parents Magazine
                 </em>
                 — a then-influential line to the American middle class — to endorse Gorton’s fish sticks.
                </p>
               </td>
              </tr>
              <tr>
               <td>
                <a style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">
                 <img alt="" src="https://inboxflows.com/_/image/https%253A%252F%252Fthdaily.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com%252Fpaul_20200918191049.jpg/?inbox_flows_img_sig=eyJwYXRoIjoiaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZ0aGRhaWx5LnMzLSJ9:1kXMMM:mqAq5ypoowzPjWWYvfXNkodBZJFe9dCm_qFR8-Zc2zc" style="height: auto; max-width: 600px; padding-top: 10px; width: 100%;" width="600"/>
                </a>
                <p style="color: #5f696c; font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 8px 5px 20px;">
                 Paul Jacobs (far left) looks on as a frozen fish shipment arrives at Gorton’s in 1962 (Paul J. Connell / The Boston Globe, via Newspapers.com)
                </p>
               </td>
              </tr>
              <tr>
               <td class="h2020 ignore-defaults" style="padding: 0px 10px;">
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 How did Jacobs create demand out of thin air? By pitching hard.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 When Jacobs advertised fish sticks to grocery stores and other distributors, his rhetoric often turned lofty. The fish industry, he said, was engaged in a fight for supremacy against the beef and chicken titans — a fight he dubbed the “battle of the proteins.”
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Jacobs even gave his fish stick speech a title: “
                 <strong>
                  The Fabulous Fish Stick Story
                 </strong>
                 .” In it, he told potential partners that fish sticks weren’t just a food — they were a “tribute to the ingenuity of the American businessman.”
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Gorton’s started sending out mailers claiming that fish sticks had become the “the industry’s greatest contribution to modern living.”
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 One popular ad featured Catherine Feuerherd, the home economist who ran the initial taste tests for Gorton’s rival brand, Birds Eye.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Many of the tasters, she
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   boasted
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 , had insisted they “didn’t care for fish” — but once they’d sampled fish sticks, “they ate the new ‘sticks’ like mad and went away singing their praises.”
                </p>
               </td>
              </tr>
              <tr>
               <td>
                <a style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">
                 <img alt="" src="https://inboxflows.com/_/image/https%253A%252F%252Fthdaily.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com%252Fad_20200918191108.jpg/?inbox_flows_img_sig=eyJwYXRoIjoiaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZ0aGRhaWx5LnMzLSJ9:1kXMMM:mqAq5ypoowzPjWWYvfXNkodBZJFe9dCm_qFR8-Zc2zc" style="height: auto; max-width: 600px; padding-top: 10px; width: 100%;" width="600"/>
                </a>
                <p style="color: #5f696c; font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px; margin: 0px; padding: 8px 5px 20px;">
                 A 1955 ad in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram trumpets the “ocean fresh” quality of Birds Eye fish sticks (Fort Worth Star-Telegram, via Newspapers.com)
                </p>
               </td>
              </tr>
              <tr>
               <td class="h2020 ignore-defaults" style="padding: 0px 10px;">
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 The ad campaign was big enough that customers decided to try out this futuristic new dinner dish — though, they didn’t exactly know what to do with fish sticks once they bought them.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 So, magazines started pumping out recipes for
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   fish sticks with spaghetti
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 , or the much more ominous “
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   fish stick burger
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 ” (imagine a lattice pattern of fish sticks splayed across a bun).
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 But one of Gorton’s savviest strategies was to link fish sticks to post-war modernity. It wasn’t exactly clear why so many Americans distrusted fish. The preference might have had a lot more to do with culture than with taste.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 As Josephson explains: “There are tastes that become a symbol of modernity, and wealth, and comfort, and civilization.” In the US, meat meant prosperity; fish didn’t.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Gorton’s broke that perception by driving home the phrase “modern luxury” in its ads.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 All this high praise for what was ultimately a clump of frozen fish in the shape of a sausage might sound a bit over-the-top. But the marketing worked.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 By the end of 1955, Gorton’s sales had jumped
                 <strong>
                  27%
                 </strong>
                 , and fish sticks were selling
                 <a style="-webkit-text-fill-color: #d62829; color: #d62829; text-decoration: none;">
                  <u style="color: #d62829; text-decoration: none; underline: none;">
                   <strong>
                    ~64.4 million pounds
                   </strong>
                  </u>
                 </a>
                 per year.
                </p>
                <h4 style="font-size: 17px; height: 100%; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 22px; margin: 0px; padding-top: 8px;">
                 <strong>
                  The federal government steps in
                 </strong>
                </h4>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Clever marketing exposed fish sticks to America. But there was another x-factor that gave the dish ubiquity: the U.S. government.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 An early boon was the Saltonstall-Kennedy Act, which gave tens of millions of dollars to the US fishing industry. Passed in 1954 — one year after fish sticks hit the market — the subsidies bankrolled the seafood industry’s signature new product.
                </p>
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                 Fish sticks being prepped at a factory (Frederic Pitchal/Sygma, via Getty Images)
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                 Equally consequential was the rise of school lunch programs, which first began to crop up in public schools following the passage of the National School Lunch Act in 1946.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Gorton’s immediately saw the high school cafeteria as a potential market for fish sticks. School lunches meant guaranteed sales — but by selling fish sticks to young kids, they were also minting a new generation of fish stick loyalists.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 The company spent the 1950s lobbying school districts to put fish sticks on the menu — an effort that has paid off to this day.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 In 2014, Gitta Grether-Sweeney, the director of nutrition for the Portland public schools system,
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                 the
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                  Wall Street Journal
                 </em>
                 that fish dishes, including fish sticks, appeared on her menu a couple times each month.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 Though, she also admitted that kids weren’t exactly racing to the cafeteria to shove them down their gullets.
                </p>
                <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 140%; margin: 5px 0px 10px;">
                 “They don’t come through and say, ‘Oh, it’s fish today!’” Grether-Sweeney said. But she was quick to add, “They do like it.”
                </p>
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                  One Finance
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                 is redesigning banking for modern life -- AKA, younger people like
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                  us.
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                 The brainchild of the founding CEO of PayPal and a former Capital One exec,
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                 combines the core products of a traditional bank with the tech and convenience of a fully-online institution.
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                 The result?
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                 A service that makes it easier to save, spend, share, and borrow -- all with just one account, one card, and one app.
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                 Check out their
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                 and see how they’re helping simplify money management during these hard times:
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