This project will study the modern supermarket as a technological system. Over the course of the twentieth century, American supermarkets not only became powerful machines for selling consumer goods, but also became machines for revolutionizing the science and technology of agricultural production. One key objective of the project is to explain how transformations in American foodways were directly linked to changes in the landscape. Supermarkets reached ever deeper into the soil to transform the nature of agricultural practice, to create new breeds of animals and plants amenable to industrial marketing, and to spark innovations in processing, packaging, and transportation technologies. Unlike earlier, more localized, smaller-scale food retailers such as mom-and-pop grocers and neighborhood butchers, supermarkets demanded that farmers and food processors deliver uniform supplies in enormous volumes. Farmers came to rely on new machinery, powerful chemicals, hybrid seeds, and scientifically bred livestock to produce supermarket-ready foodstuffs. Food processors developed ever more highly processed "convenient" food products to mold fickle consumer tastes into more predictable and profitable forms, perpetuating an industrial food cycle. A second objective of the project is to trace how the supermarket contributed to America's changing political and economic relationships around the globe. In the 1950s the supermarket served as a defining symbol of American consumer capitalism, as in the 1959 "kitchen debate" between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. Supermarkets transformed the food economies of many European countries in the postwar era, in part due to efforts of American business leaders and government officials to introduce a "democracy of goods" meant to stave off leftist revolutions. Doing so, however, required exporting the tightly linked system of industrial farm and processed food production introduced in the American context. Tracking the system's trips abroad will provide insight into the contrasts between American and European political, cultural, and environmental landscapes. Through a social and political history of supermarket technologies, the project will reveal the degree to which European farmers and consumers maintained local and seasonal food production and consumption traditions. By exploring the successes and failures of American-style supermarkets in shaping European agriculture and foodways, this project will engage with ongoing debates regarding the "Americanization" of European society during the Cold War.
Intellectual Merit The PI proposes to use technological history to reappraise the historical and contemporary implications of modern supermarkets. Business historians have depicted supermarkets only as retail boxes, ignoring the technological systems that connected mass food retailers to industrial-style farms in the post-World War II era. Social and political historians emphasize the supermarket as a site of gendered consumption, where women shoppers gained expanded economic autonomy but limited political authority. Cultural historians have seen the supermarket as a microcosm of postwar suburbia, a culture of carnivalesque consumption offering grist for postmodern reconfigurations of the consumer as agent. This project will provide a more synthetic, more integrated, and more firmly grounded analysis of the supermarket's role in shaping modern American political, economic, and social structures.
Broader Impact The proposed project will be of interest far beyond the academic community, offering a new perspective on American industrial food culture in an age when obesity has become an official epidemic, and when journalists and documentary filmmakers have sparked a national discussion on fast-food culture and the dilemmas of industrial and organic agriculture. The results of this research will be disseminated not only in scholarly journals but also in a book expected to reach a broad audience of lay readers.
