THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS.

That comfort food?

“Modern American culture is just essentially a product of advertising,” says Christina Ward, author of American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Bananas, Spam, and Jell-O.

Even most of the Norman Rockwell-esque Thanksgiving spread was born in American test kitchens belonging to General Mills (the faceless entity behind Betty Crocker), Campbell’s, and other corporations. In the early 20th century through the post-war years, Madison Avenue and the increasingly large food conglomerates it repped reshaped the ways in which Americans ate.

Sometimes it borders on the odd, as in peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches, and sometimes it becomes almost customary, as in that green bean and dehydrated onion chip casserole at Thanksgiving.

But industrial food spares generations of home-makers from much of the drudgery of preparing a feast. There are many dimensions in which we are underemployed compared with our ancestors.

It’s not a coincidence that Campbell’s condensed soups started cropping up in recipes for everything from cakes to casseroles in the mid-20th century. The company distributed recipes claiming that harried housewives could make their lives easier by swapping a canned product for a homemade béchamel sauce.

Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup debuted in 1934 and quickly became the default base for tuna noodle casserole, turkey tetrazzini, and even Mormon-style funeral potatoes. Minnesota’s tater tot-loaded hotdish also incorporated cream of mushroom base, which earned the soup a nickname: “the Lutheran binder.”

We have become so prosperous that now the food snobs can mock pineapple upside-down cake and fact-check the tradition of a blown-glass pickle on the Christmas tree.