Life – a user's manual Part II - Boksidan

Kristianstad daily 1925
Vehicles
Movies
Health products
Food
Shoes and shoe
cream
We hardly eat any of what they ate 100 years ago,
today
In the country side in the late 1800s or early 1900s
(Nordiska Muséet, 1928) they drank a cup
coffee at 5:30 o'clock and ate breakfast at 7 o'clock.
The breakfast consisted of black pudding, semolina and
cooked peas and fried fatty pork. Half-one they ate
dinner which usually consisted of salted herring,
potatoes and soup (for example beer soup, gruel or pea
soup).
In the afternoon, they drank coffee. In the summer it
was served with buns. At 18 o'clock they ate
something called supper which often consisted of
pancakes with lingonberries and pork. Finally they ate
porridge with milk at 20 o'clock.
Now you can see a large proportion of advertising for food products. Most of it is advertising for margarine
(several brands, which are all gone today, competing for the market domination), but also some advertising
for flour and baking powder. There are also a lot of advertisements for shoes. These ads are from the firm
"Oscaria" which had small ads in almost every issue. Cinema has obviously been spreading across the
country and they advertised, of course, frequently. Health products included several kinds of soaps that were
said to have all sorts of beneficial effects. Finally, there were some ads for bikes and cars (mostly Ford), and
occasional ads for radio receivers (radio broadcast began this year).
Judgign from the advertisements for cars they were becoming more common.
The amount of cars has exploded
The number of registered cars has increased dramatically from 1950 and onwards (SCB 2005), see the
chart below. Now there are about 4 million cars in Sweden. If these cars were knocked out on the
population between 20-84 years, it would be more than one car per every second person.
4500
4000
3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
The amount of registerd cars (1000s)
1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000
116