Audra Wolfe
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Audra Wolfe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Freakonomics Radio · How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update) · 9 Dec 2024
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There's some debate about when supermarkets actually started, but usually we pin it at around 1930.
I am the author of Supermarket USA, Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race.
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.
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.
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.
The original goal had been to use the supermarkets to drive down the cost of food for urban consumers.
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.
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.
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
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.
The U.S. Information Agency were searching for concrete forms of propaganda to display America's wealth.
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.
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.
It was about this display of affordable abundance available to American consumers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I mean, this is central to the kind of lie, really, of the supermarket as a weapon.
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