The Canned Fruit Everyone Started Eating For Breakfast In The 1930s

In the 1930s, grapefruit — especially the canned variety — soared to popularity as a healthful and nutritious way to start the American day. A combination of factors contributed to this collective rise, including the scaling of new canning methods and a huge branding and marketing push. Interestingly, its notoriety was further cemented on a worldwide scale with athletes at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where it was featured as a staple of the U.S. breakfast diet.

While grapefruit first came to the United States via Europe in the 1820s, it wasn't until much later that it really caught on as a fruit of choice and standard accompaniment to breakfast from diner menus to suburban kitchens. Until the 1920s, much of the grapefruit crop, which was centered around Florida and California, was sold fresh, and a substantial amount was lost due to its perishable nature. That changed when canning methods were improved to extend the grapefruit season, rendering it shelf-stable and easily distributed far and wide.

Around the same time, Sunkist ran a grapefruit advertising campaign that promoted the fruit via newspaper and radio. In addition, doctors were touting grapefruit as a health food, including using it as a tonic to supposedly stem and shorten the duration of the common cold. Long before açaí, perhaps grapefruit was the original fruit glow-up.

While many American breakfast tables in the 1930s simply featured a small side bowl of canned grapefruit sections, there are many ways to incorporate these bright and tart gems into your life. If you'd like to make your morning bowl universally tempting, you can brulee it for a pleasing sugary crunch that channels the famous lyrics from Mary Poppins about a spoonful of sugar helping the "medicine" go down.

Grapefruit is indeed packed with positive ingredients, offering a host of health benefits ranging from aiding digestion to helping you feel full to packing hearty doses of vitamins like A and C. For that extra sweet treatment, just drain canned sections, put in an oven-proof dish, sprinkle with a bit of sugar, and broil for a few minutes like creme brulee until the sugar caramelizes and gets crisp and brown.

If you'd like to continue enjoying canned grapefruit throughout the day, it can quickly liven up a ho-hum salad when added as a topping with avocado and some toasted nuts for crunch. It also makes shrimp dishes pop, from chilled preparations to summery grilled stars. If you prefer to enjoy your grapefruit in beverage form, you can use the juice from canned grapefruit to jazz up a gingery Moscow mule. However you use it, you most certainly have a lot more options than folks had when it came onto the scene in the 1930s.