Supermarket USA

Reviewed by: Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race by Shane Hamilton Amrys O. Williams (bio) Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race By Shane Hamilton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. 288. The American supermarket has come to symbolize many things: abundance, consumer choice, industrial efficiency, and free enterprise. In Supermarket USA, Shane Hamilton uses the supermarket to investigate the inner workings of industrial agriculture and capitalism. His book is thus much more than the story of the supermarket: it is a history of supply chains, logistics, centralized purchasing, contract farming, the rise of agribusiness, and corporate power—in short, the globalized economy we inhabit today. It also demonstrates the important geopolitical role of food and farm policy in the Cold War and beyond. Hamilton begins by exploring the economic power that supermarket chains such as A&P amassed by the mid-twentieth century—power that, while touted as an expression of free enterprise, in fact relied on agricultural research supported by the federal government. Following the strategies and fortunes of A&P from the 1910s through the 1940s, he shows how the firm's network of purchasing agents came to exert enormous power in the agricultural marketplace. This was not monopoly but monopsony: the power of a single, big buyer. Companies like A&P were able to dictate what farmers grew—and growers who wanted to sell to them needed to meet their standards and volume. This catalyzed the industrialization of agriculture already underway. From there, supermarkets took on a key role in what Hamilton cleverly dubs the "Cold War Farms Race," the importance of food and agriculture in the economic contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. Farms Race rhetoric shared three components: an emphasis on food abundance and consumer choice, the potential of these to serve as a bulwark against communist expansion, and a belief in industrial agriculture as a means of exerting U.S. power internationally. Rooted in New Deal rural development, expanded through Point IV, and expressed in food aid programs, the contours of the Farms Race were drawn by the mid-1950s. By then, the question of whether this war would be waged by government or private enterprise had been settled in favor of corporations, who saw the potential for combatting communism while turning a profit. Hamilton then follows the supermarket model as it spread to other nations during the 1940s–60s. In Venezuela, Nelson A. Rockefeller sought to use supermarkets as an agent of rural modernization—a failure that revealed their dependence on state support for agricultural research. Yugoslavian officials saw in supermarkets a potential path to industrial agriculture that was neither collectivism nor capitalism and aimed to develop a "socialist supermarket" that could chart this middle way. In the Soviet Union, [End Page 895] officials condemned supermarkets as anti-Marxist, engaging in their own Farms Race rhetoric emphasizing socialist industrial agriculture. In each case, domestic food production and distribution took on outsized geopolitical significance. The notion that the American food system was a product and expression of free enterprise was a fiction in several ways. First, the technological and capital-intensive industrial agriculture upon which it relied was the result of massive state investment. Scientific research in plant breeding and livestock raising had produced a system for agricultural abundance that was hardly the work of free enterprise alone. Public money supported it at every step, and the government guided it through the work of the USDA and its network of land-grant colleges, experiment stations, and extension agents. When corporations or governments attempted to transplant supermarkets to countries without this infrastructure, the model faltered. Second, as supermarkets amassed enormous power over the terms of farm production, it became harder to argue that they expanded economic freedom, particularly for farmers. With the consolidation of grocery chains, the expansion of contract farming arrangements, and the growth of large agribusinesses, smaller growers had an increasingly tough row to hoe. Consumers, likewise, faced abundance, but in an increasingly homogenous marketplace. Supermarket USA is a welcome addition to the history of capitalism, agriculture, business, and the Cold War. Throughout, Hamilton works hard to connect production

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