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 podcast

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I'm sympathetic to those who see it as overall a net positive gain. However, the pain is real.

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.

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.

You know, so certain qualities were given up in order to gain that advantage of price and abundance.

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.

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.

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