How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)

Note

The Supermarket played a crucial role in America’s victory in the Cold War by showcasing abundance and capitalism through affordable food options. US Government investments in agriculture led to increased productivity, surplus production, and the rise of industrial farming, impacting small farmers and food quality. The focus on productivity and financial incentives in agriculture resulted in standardization, less variety, and health consequences like the use of high fructose corn syrup. The current agricultural paradigm may need to shift towards sustainability and environmental friendliness to address issues like pollution, degraded animal welfare, and health concerns.

Highlights

• 2024-12-11 17:53 If you ever Wonder why the USDA’s old food pyramid, the diagram of recommended servings of different foods, why the biggest category at the bottom of the pyramid was bread, cereal, rice, and pasta. Well, the US had an awful lot of all those foods.

• 2024-12-11 10:28 Today on Freakonomics Radio, how a sprawling system of agriculture, technology, economic policy and political will came to life in the supermarket. Tell me, who could possibly afford to buy food in a place such as this?

• 2024-12-11 21:48 The supermarket is so ubiquitous today that it’s hard to imagine the world without it. But of course such a time did exist. There’s some debate about when supermarkets actually started, but usually we we pin it at around 19:30. That’s Shane Hamilton. He’s an American historian who teaches at the University of York in England.

• 2024-12-11 21:48 Was the supermarket a purely American invention? I argue yes. The easy answer is that the first declared supermarket was built in the United States. I think the broader answer is that what makes a supermarket a supermarket is the industrial agriculture system that enables the affordability of mass produced foods.

• 2024-12-11 21:47 The predecessor of the supermarket was the dry goods store. So they didn’t have fresh produce, they didn’t necessarily have milk or meat or a bakery in house. That’s what a supermarket did is it? Put all those food items and often many other things. You could get auto parts, you could get your shoes shined.

• 2024-12-11 21:47 In the early supermarkets it was a kind of one stop shopping and service emporium. Another big difference, supermarkets were self serve. In a dry goods shop you’d ask a clerk for something and they’d fetch it. In a supermarket you could ogle the meat and produce yourself, even handle it and then put it in your basket. The supermarket chain Piggly Wiggly is credited with having pioneered the self service retail model.

• 2024-12-11 10:31 A&P had so much market power that the Department of Justice went after it for anti competitive practices.

• 2024-12-11 21:51 After Sputnik, when the United States was trying to understand why it was falling behind in the space race or why it thought it was falling behind in the space race, many of the commentators said, the problem is we’re not funding basic research. So after 1957, the book budgets of not only organizations like the National Science foundation, but also specific government departments like the Department of Agriculture, their budgets for research increased dramatically on the theory that this is how the United States would win the Cold War by doing the best science, that is. Audra Wolff. I’m a writer, editor and historian. Wolff’s latest book is called Freedom’s the Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science.

• 2024-12-11 21:51 And it really looks at the ways that science as an idea became a tool for propaganda in the Cold War, especially on the American side. There’s this idea that you can change hearts and minds and you can establish a climate of opinion that makes people more willing to accept the American way of life as the better choice. And one of the things that made America so great, its agricultural system, things. Like chicken breeding and hybrid corn, took a outsized and somewhat surprising role in US propaganda in the early 1950s. But there was a tension.

• 2024-12-11 21:50 Chicken in the 1920s was pound for pound as expensive as lobster. By the 1960s, it was so cheap that it was quickly becoming America’s Most popular meat

• 2024-12-11 21:50 This agricultural bounty, those heavy breasted, cheap chickens, those millions of cases of tomatoes, all this was a good candidate for the U.S. propaganda machine. The U.S. information Agency were searching for concrete forms of propaganda to display America’s wealth. Enter one of the most concrete forms of display imaginable, the supermarket.

• 2024-12-11 21:50 The supermarket is not just a retail box, but actually the endpoint of an industrial agriculture supply chain. A supermarket can’t exist without the inputs of mass produced foods. The farms race was about how do you get the food from industrially productive, technologically sophisticated farms to, you know, this display of abundance.

• 2024-12-11 17:24 That is production increases. Around World War I, farmers expanded their production to meet wartime goals.

• 2024-12-11 17:24 And there were some price supports during that time that provided incentives for increased especially wheat and pork and some of these other staple commodities. But there was no real planning for the aftermath after the increased demand and the price supports that are set up for war go away. And it left a number of farmers who had in good faith developed larger farms and more productive farms with very low prices. So after the war, farmers were producing more food than was necessary. Then came the Great Depression.

• 2024-12-11 21:13 These things all take place in the context of their own times. Having policies that found a way to increase farm incomes in the 1930s, I think would be seen as a good thing.

• 2024-12-11 21:49 If you ever Wonder why the USDA’s old food pyramid, the diagram of recommended servings of different foods, why the biggest category at the bottom of the pyramid was bread, cereal, rice, and pasta. Well, the US had an awful lot of all those foods.

• 2024-12-11 21:49 You know, economists who don’t do US Agricultural policy are usually horrified by what they see in terms of distorting markets. Picking, okay, corn, soybeans, wheat, you guys get big subsidies. Apples, grapes, fresh fruits and vegetables. You’re on your own. Dairy, incredibly regulated, both federally and at the state level. Just a mess, just an awful mess. With price guarantees for certain crops and the resultant glut of supply.

• 2024-12-11 21:16 Per capita Today, more than 30% of corn and more than 50% of soybeans grown in the US goes toward feeding cattle and other livestock.

• 2024-12-11 21:18 When the mechanical harvester was introduced, There were around 5,000 tomato growers in the US within five years, 4,400 had gone out of business.

• 2024-12-11 21:49 I used to ask my class, I’m talking 1985, where is the world’s largest supercomputer? And the correct answer was, it’s at the Pentagon. Okay, where is the world’s second largest supercomputer? Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Walmart. They used that computer to track every single item on every single Walmart shelf.

• 2024-12-11 21:22 And Red Delicious really dominates the whole market. And apples became remarkably tasteless by the mid 20th century.

• 2024-12-11 21:48 There was this sense of everybody being trapped in an old paradigm, and now how do we break out of that? I hate to say it, but the current government seems to be trying to take us back to the old paradigm rather than a more sustainable, environmentally friendly, let’s make agriculture do more on organic and natural processes.

• 2024-12-11 21:48 That doesn’t seem to be the political driver right now, but it has to come back. We have to make agriculture green, which is a strange, strange thing to say.