The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 70)

by Robert J. Gordon

Gail Borden, whose entrepreneurial career was worthy of his contemporary, Horatio Alger: “According to legend, he had been shocked by the Donner Party disaster,”21 in which a group of pioneers snowbound in 1846 in the Sierra Nevada resorted to cannibalism for survival. Borden was determined to perfect a method for reducing or “condensing” food so that it would provide nourishment in a relatively small package.