Audra Wolfe
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
Nixon retorted that if there was going to be a torpedo fired, it was going to be by America's farmers and ranchers. to which the farmers and ranchers listening to his speech applauded very mightily.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
Some historians would argue that this was one of the crucial factors that led to his downfall. that it was just embarrassing on the world stage for the Soviet Union, this vast country with enormous agricultural resources, having to turn to its archenemy for grain.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
Yeah, I mean, this is central to the kind of lie, really, of the supermarket as a weapon.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
So when the supermarket is upheld as this, you know, effectively missile, this concrete consumer weapon against the claims of communism, it's built on this idea that supermarkets are producing this affordability just through the workings of supply and demand, that, you know, it's unfettered markets that are somehow making food so affordable for American consumers.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
Where the reality is, for everything from milk to beef to grain to processed foods of all kinds, there's massive government investment in the science and technology that enables the productivity of American farms, from fertilizers to frozen food processes to distribution and so forth. And that's all erased. The image is that it's just the supermarket itself that is the source of abundance.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
Yeah, I actually don't have a problem with the U.S. government investment in science and technology and encouraging, you know, more productivity. The concern is with that being disguised as a free market when it's not particularly free. I mean, taking that to a propaganda level and attacking another country for not having free markets, it's just duplicitous, right?
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
There's some debate about when supermarkets actually started, but usually we pin it at around 1930.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
Those massive surpluses of cheap corn... and later soybeans, encourages the rise of industrial meat production, concentrated animal production, livestock feeding operations, where that's enabled by cheap grain production.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
I am the author of Supermarket USA, Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
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.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
Quite a few historians suggest that this all-out push to productivity killed the family farm, effectively. Shane Hamilton again. And it's hard to deny that. On the other hand, we don't apply the same kind of metrics to industrial manufacturing. Where similarly, there's been massive U.S. government investment in science and technology to support economic growth and productivity.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
I'm sympathetic to those who see it as overall a net positive gain. However, the pain is real.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
I mean, Walmart really came in and looked at the landscape of American supermarkets and saw inefficiencies everywhere. What Walmart did was build on its successful model of general merchandise sales. with hyper-efficient logistics and distribution, brought that into the supermarket industry and really shook things up.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
So apples in the early 20th century, consumers in, say, New York state would have access to literally hundreds of varieties. You know, even in mass retail markets by the mid 20th century, it's down to just a handful. And, you know, Red Delicious really dominates the whole market. And apples became remarkably tasteless by the mid 20th century.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
You know, so certain qualities were given up in order to gain that advantage of price and abundance.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
I think today we're certainly witnessing, perhaps especially among millennials, an attempt to kind of reconfigure values. You know, what are you actually looking for when you go to a supermarket? And it's not just price. Price does not contain all relevant information for many shoppers in a contemporary supermarket.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
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 in the early supermarkets. It was a kind of one-stop shopping and service emporium.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
So the costs of pollution, of degraded animal welfare that are currently not being borne by either producers or consumers of food would have to be borne.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
A&P, as of the 1940s, was the world's largest retailer by any measure, by sales volume, by number of outlets and so forth.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
The original goal had been to use the supermarkets to drive down the cost of food for urban consumers.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
I don't mean to deny the power and the might of these weapon systems that were deployed and the space race and all that. But fundamentally... This was a contest to demonstrate that either communism or capitalism was a superior political economic system.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
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.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
Really, the Chicken of Tomorrow is the chicken of today in that we're all eating the kind of genetic progeny of the original Chicken of Tomorrow. What it was was a contest to produce the most efficient chicken using genetic techniques, basically. And
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
It not only had to be an efficient chicken, but very heavy breasts, very light colored feathers so that when it's plucked, it would look good under cellophane and then later plastic packaging. And the birds had to be relatively disease resistant so that they could be put in intensive rearing operations without dying too quickly.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
The U.S. Information Agency were searching for concrete forms of propaganda to display America's wealth.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
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 this display of abundance. And the display was really crucial.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
The 1957 Supermarket USA exhibit in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, which was then a communist country, was a fully operational 10,000-square-foot American supermarket filled with frozen foods and breakfast cereals and everything else. They airlifted in fresh produce from the U.S. because they didn't think Yugoslavian produce was attractive enough.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
It was about this display of affordable abundance available to American consumers.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
There were quite a few people who thought that If you showed that American consumers could access affordable food, you know, strawberries in December without having to wait in line, that that might actually cause the whole communist system to collapse.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
Immediately after seeing it, Marshall Tito, the leader of the country at the time, ordered the whole thing to be purchased. And it was bought wholesale from the United States exhibitors and used as a model. They hired a consultant from an Atlanta supermarket firm to come over and teach them how to build their own chain of socialist supermarkets.
Freakonomics Radio
How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)
Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev There are two of the most explicit users of this Cold War farms race language. Khrushchev declared that by outproducing the U.S. in per capita meat and milk production, that would be the Soviet equivalent of hitting American capitalism with a torpedo.