It's not really the 1950s - while today we "celebrate" that decade as the era of weird food and bad recipes, it's part of a much longer trend of prepackaged/commercial/canned/etc. ingredients being considered more sanitary and healthy. /u/TheShowisnottheShow and I had a conversation about that some years ago in response to Post-war America saw the promotion of several peculiar dishes based on newly introduced industrial food stuffs (jellied salads, spam loaves, etc.) which seems profoundly unappealing from current standards. How popular were these dishes compared to the industrial staples themselves.

I also refer to this in my answer to A lot of women's work underwent an era of automation over a century ago. What big lessons can we learn from how their lives changed during and after automation that can be applied to the present round of automation?