Food Power and the Global Supermarket

This chapter discusses how U.S. transnational agribusiness corporations demonstrated U.S. farm and food power to the world from the 1960s into the 1980s. In earlier decades of the Farms Race, U.S. farmers were called upon to feed the hungry world as a counter-revolutionary project with a humanitarian veneer. By the late 1970s, politicians and businessmen were increasingly declaring their intent to rewrite the rules of global food production and trade on entirely profit-driven terms. Building on Cold War-inspired modernization and development projects initiated in the 1940s–1960s, U.S.-based transnational agribusinesses in the 1970s–1990s—including the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), the former linseed-oil manufacturer turned global commodities giant Archer Daniels Midland, and the Ozarks-based retail chain Walmart—constructed a world in which private corporations, including supermarkets, emerged as the primary institutional mechanisms for regulating and coordinating global food chains.

Socialist Supermarkets and “Peaceful Competition”

This chapter focuses on Eastern Europe, highlighting the ways in which the communist contestants in the Farms Race pursued noncapitalist goals in the economic battles of the Cold War. Supermarket USA—a project jointly pursued by the U.S. Department of Commerce and a private supermarket trade group in 1957—was the first full-scale American-style supermarket to be erected in a communist country. U.S. propagandists touted the Supermarket USA exhibit at Zagreb’s 1957 trade fair as proof of the power of capitalist agriculture and efficient food distribution. Yugoslavian communist leaders, however, recognized the potential for deploying supermarkets in their campaign to convince restive rural peasants to accept socialist approaches to food production. The Yugoslavian adaptation of American supermarkets contrasts with the Soviet Union’s efforts, under the leadership of the rhetorically gifted Nikita Khrushchev, to defy American proclamations of capitalism’s superiority as a mode for spurring agricultural productivity and consumer abundance. In particular, the chapter highlights the ways in which the famous 1959 Kitchen Debate between Khrushchev and U.S. vice president Richard Nixon should be understood as a debate not just about kitchens or consumerism but about the structure of the agricultural systems that fed into both capitalist and communist kitchens.

Machines for Selling

The first chapter maps out the power structures of midcentury American supermarketing, exposing the essential lie of the notion that supermarkets were mere products of “free enterprise.” The focus is on the world’s largest supermarket chain at the time, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P). After a brief summary of the rise of the supermarket business model—a model at first rejected by A&P’s executives but then fully embraced by the end of the 1930s—the chapter illustrates the ways in which consolidated food retailers relied upon government support of industrialized agriculture to transform the nation’s food economy by the late 1940s.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the concept of the Farms Race and how it links to the weaponization of American supermarkets during the Cold War. The connections between supermarket retailing and industrial agricultural supply chains are introduced, highlighting the ways in which this book is not a traditional business history but is instead a history of capitalism that uses supermarkets as a lens into the workings of industrial agriculture. The introduction also explains why the book is not a military or diplomatic history of the Cold War, or a study framed primarily by the concept of “Americanization.” American supermarkets were machines for selling goods as well as ideas, for enabling as well as constraining the choices made by food producers and consumers. As such, they were instruments of power.

Supermercado USA

This chapter focuses on the first formal effort to use American-style supermarkets as anticommunist weapons. In 1947, Nelson A. Rockefeller launched a for-profit development corporation with the avowed purpose of raising living standards and dampening communist political leanings in Latin America. Rockefeller’s most ambitious—and most profitable—effort was a series of supermarkets opened in Venezuela beginning in 1947. The story of Rockefeller’s Venezuelan supermarkets is remarkable for several reasons. They were intentionally paired with a simultaneous (though unsuccessful) effort to industrialize Venezuelan agriculture. They were the first profitable international venture in American-style supermarketing with an avowed anticommunist purpose. They were also, as the chapter details, met on occasion with violent rebuke from Latin American citizens who refused to accept the notion that Yankee capitalism was morally superior to alternative economic systems

Food Chains and Free Enterprise

This chapter returns to the United States, where in the 1950s and 1960s supermarkets secured economic dominance in the nation’s food system. Even as American-style supermarkets were exported as “weapons” against international communism, no small number of American farmers and consumers developed cogent critiques of the notion that supermarkets were unassailable exemplars of “free” enterprise. American farmers, long upheld as the backbone of democracy, bristled at the realization that supermarkets’ demands for standardized, low-priced foodstuffs often pinned farmers in an uncomfortable position. Economic freedom—supposedly the hallmark of the American supermarket—seemed increasingly illusory to many in the rural United States who were expected to either conform to the demands of supermarket-driven industrialized agricultural production or get out of the agricultural marketplace altogether. Meanwhile, many American consumers who appreciated the low prices and wide range of goods on offer in their supermarkets nonetheless contested conservative economists’ declarations that “consumer sovereignty” was a central achievement of “free enterprise.” Even at the height of the Cold War Farms Race, when Americans’ certainty in the economic superiority of capitalism was at its apogee, the undeniable power of corporate entities in the American food system raised questions about capitalism’s moral and political legitimacy.

Epilogue

The epilogue centers on the question of how the contemporary world of global agribusiness differs, but also builds upon, the structures of the Cold War Farms Race. A brief discussion of Walmart’s entry into India opens the epilogue, offering an examination of how agricultural development as pursued by multinational corporations has been framed as an apolitical exercise. Yet as a brief discussion of Venezuela’s current food crisis demonstrates, the power exercised in food supply chains means that no such action can be apolitical. A discussion of supermarkets’ penetration into Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War furthermore highlights the ongoing contestation over what counts as “free enterprise” in the global supermarket-driven food economy. Finally the epilogue offers a few words on the paucity of contemporary food politics discourse and the problem of assuming consumer sovereignty.

The Farms Race Begins

This chapter explains the conceptual outlines and historical roots of the Cold War Farms Race. Openly violent notions of the anticommunist power of American agriculture and food distribution emerged, making it possible to conceive of American supermarkets as not only products of “free enterprise” but also as “weapons” capable of demolishing communist claims to economic superiority over capitalism. The rhetorical militancy of the Farms Race did not emerge out of thin air during the Cold War, however. The three strands of the Farms Race—a pervasive rhetoric of exceptional American food abundance, a counterrevolutionary ideology of capitalist economic development, and a moral claim to the justifiability of U.S. economic might—emerged from decades of U.S. agricultural and food policies stretching back to the era of World War I. During and immediately after World War II, ideas about development, modernization, and feeding a hungry world merged into formal Cold War policies under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. Disagreements about the appropriate role of private enterprise versus formal government action shaped the historical trajectories of such programs as Truman’s Point Four campaign and Eisenhower’s “trade not aid” agenda, but by the mid-1950s the Farms Race was in full swing.