Word: beef
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ordinary Britons were bewildered, for all around were the Austins and Jaguars, the TV sets, and choice cuts of beef that mean tangible prosperity. Tory billboards boasted: "Conservative Freedom Works," and judging by appearances, it did. But though British production and sales are the highest in history, neither hard work nor Tory free enterprise have been enough to free the island from its precarious economic geography. Britain depends for its life on the terms of world trade-on the relative amount of food and raw materials that it can earn from other nations by selling its manufactures and skills...
...turned out canned rations for the Army and stepped up its gross from $9,000,000 to $43 million in 1944. But the biggest jump came with peace, when the Swansons noted both the boom in home freezers and the shortage of domestic servants, brought out beef, chicken and turkey pies, new roast beef and fried chicken dinners, all ready for the oven. Their first frozen TV Dinner (sliced turkey on cornbread, buttered peas, sweet potatoes, gravy) now sells at the rate of 13 million a year. Total production: well over 10 million packages a month, from the production lines...
...frozen pre-stuffed turkey costs housewives a few cents a pound more than the unstuffed one, but the Swansons soon hope to sell both birds at the same price, make money on the added weight of the stuffing. Next on the list of possibilities: a corned beef dinner and a ham steak din ner. Says Clarke Swanson: "Our plants are the kitchens of tomorrow. Fifteen years from now 50% of the space in stores will be for frozen foods...
...tomorrow. The malodorous, disease-ridden favelas (shantytowns) on Rio's hillsides are better indicators of the standard of living than the new apartment houses near by. Millions of rural Brazilians live in shacks, exist on a diet of beans, rice and manioc root, with a little jerked beef. Two out of three are illiterate...
Inflation inhibits foreign investment in Brazil, and lessens the country's eligibility for loans or direct aid from Washington. It has also had a disastrous effect on Brazilian workers. The real wages of many workers in Rio shrank within the past five years, as beef soared from 9 cruzeiros a kilogram in 1950 to 46 today, butter from 34 to no. One of the odder symptoms of mass discontent is the mushroom growth of umbanda or espiritismo, a white-magic religious cult with elaborate African rituals. There were 75,000 registered espiri-tistas...