Last week, we heard a former U.S. ambassador describe Russia’s escalating conflict with the U.S. Today, we revisit a 2019 episode about an overlooked front in the Cold War — a “farms race” that, decades later, still influences what Americans eat. SOURCES:Anne Effland, former Senior Economist for the Office of Chief Economist in the U.S.D.A.Shane Hamilton, historian at the University of York.Peter Timmer, economist and former professor at Harvard University.Audra Wolfe, writer, editor, and historian. RESOURCES:Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, by Audra Wolfe (2018).Supermarket USA: Food and Power in The Cold War Farms Race, by Shane Hamilton (2018).“Association of Higher Consumption of Foods Derived From Subsidized Commodities With Adverse Cardiometabolic Risk Among US Adults,” by Karen R. Siegel, Kai McKeever Bullard, K. M. Narayan, et al. (JAMA Internal Medicine, 2016).The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, by Robert J. Gordon (2016).“How the Mechanical Tomato Harvester Prompted the Food Movement,” by Ildi Carlisle-Cummins (UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences Newsletter, 2015). EXTRAS:"Is the U.S. Sleeping on Threats from Russia and China?" by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
Chapter 1: What was the Cold War farms race?
We clearly won the abundance war. But the American victory was, to some degree, a Pyrrhic victory, whose after-effects are still being felt.
Economists who don't do U.S. agricultural policy are horrified by what they see in terms of distorting markets.
Today on Freakonomics Radio, how a sprawling system of agriculture technology, economic policy, and political will came to life in the supermarket.
Tell me, who could possibly afford to buy food in a place such as this? This is just an ordinary food market. Competition and big volume keep prices down. Utterly impossible.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
The supermarket is so ubiquitous today that it's hard to imagine the world without it. But of course, such a time did exist.
There's some debate about when supermarkets actually started, but usually we pin it at around 1930.
That's Shane Hamilton. He's an American historian who teaches at the University of York in England.
I am the author of Supermarket USA, Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race.
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Chapter 2: How did supermarkets revolutionize American agriculture?
That's when we see the beginning of real price policies for agriculture.
Price policies for agriculture would take many forms over the ensuing decades, from crop insurance to loans and direct payments and many more. Now, you can understand why the government would want to make agriculture financially viable and remove some of the uncertainty. A national food supply is a pretty important thing.
One key policy tool the government used was a price support system, guaranteeing farmers a certain minimum price for a specific crop at a specific time.
There was an idea of something called parity, which was that the price should be such that it would give farmers the same purchasing power in comparison to workers and others in the economy that they had had before World War I. And that was the guideline for what those price support levels ought to be.
But if you increase the price being paid without limiting the amount being produced, well... One of the problems with this is that it leads to a large surplus. This would leave the federal government to buy and store excess produce. In the early 1930s, when the U.S. government guaranteed farmers 80 cents per bushel of wheat, the government wound up buying and storing more than 250 million bushels.
These things all take place in the context of their own times. Having policies that found a way to increase farm incomes in the 1930s, I think, would be seen as a good thing. But there are also consequences of that over time as they get embedded.
If you ever wonder why the USDA's old food pyramid, the diagram of recommended servings of different foods, why the biggest category at the bottom of the pyramid was bread, cereal, rice and pasta. Well, the U.S. had an awful lot of all those foods. And if you ate as the USDA instructed, there's a good chance you put on a few pounds.
You can't think about nutrition without thinking about agriculture policy. And U.S. agriculture came to be driven by financial incentives, incentives that, given how government funding often works, weren't always entirely sensible.
You know, economists who don't do U.S. agricultural policy are usually horrified. by what they see in terms of distorting markets, picking, okay, corn, soybeans, wheat, you guys get big subsidies, apples, grapes, fresh fruits and vegetables, you're on your own. Dairy, Incredibly regulated both federally and at the state level. Just a mess. Just an awful mess.
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