WEEKLY LISTENING - Pt.2

How the supermarket helped America wins the cold war (Ep. 386)

The decades-long Cold War between the United States and the USSR featured a space race, an arms race, and a farms race. This farms race which involved substantial government policies to deliver high-volume and standardized agriculture was about more than just food; it was a battle over which was the superior system, communism or capitalism. The farms race had an obvious winner: American supermarkets were filled with affordable food, while the USSR was ultimately forced to import grain from the United States. But the American victory was, to some degree, a Pyrrhic victory whose aftereffects are still being felt. In this podcast by Freakonomics a sprawling system of agriculture technology, economic policy, and political will come to life in the supermarket.

Shane Hamilton is an American historian who teaches at the University of York in England. He’s author of Supermarket U.S.A: Food and Power in The Cold War Farms Race.

Between 1946 and 1954 in the U.S., the share of food bought in supermarkets rose from 28 percent to 48 percent. By 1963, that number had risen to nearly 70 percent.

Anne Efland is Senior Economist for Domestic Policy in the Office of the Chief Economist, USDA and formerly a historian with USDA’s Economic Research Service. Her historical research has ranged widely, including studies of U.S. farm and rural policy. She says that there should be better transportation for farms. So the unit of U.S.D.A did engineering research on the best road materials and road construction methods. 

C. Peter Timer is the professor of Development Studies, at Harvard University. He believes that the biggest changes to American agriculture were mechanization and automation. It was a fundamentally failed strategy for agriculture. When he was young, all the tomatoes on the farm were hand-picked and hand-peeled. 

Audra Wolfe is a writer and science historian, and the author of Competing With the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America and Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science. In the aftermath of the Cold War, U.S. food power was transformed into a global system of market power, laying the groundwork for the emergence of our contemporary world, in which multinational supermarkets operate as powerful institutions in a global food economy.