Making White Bread by the Bomb's Early Light
Anxiety, Abundance, and Industrial Food Power in the Early Cold War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5375122 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Aaron Bobrow‐strain (Whitman College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 74-97 |
| Publication date | 2011-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Food and Foodways (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0740-9710 • E-ISSN: 1542-3484 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/07409710.2011.544191 |
| OpenAlex | W2025517369 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
This article explores U.S. policymakers and consumers’ engagements with global bread politics in the early Cold War. This provides a glimpse into the making of a particular form of postwar “American alimentary exceptionalism” premised on the universal choiceworthiness of industrial foodways. This alimentary exceptionalism did not assume that the U.S. industrial diet was gastronomically superior to other countries’ diets, but rather that it offered a unique foundation of strength, stability, choice, and abundance on which world peace could rest in the uncertain postwar world. Thus, the article contends that Americans’ confidence in industrial foodways and industrial food production systems—something whose legacies we still grapple with today—was forged, in part, on the imperial landscape of Cold War competition. In that sense, the article traces the largely unexamined flipside of postwar food imperialism: how the exercise of food power abroad shaped Americans’ understandings of their own diet and its place in the world
American exceptionalism · Cold war · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Exceptionalism · Foodways · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Ecology
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,6 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2024 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |