Shane Hamilton. Supermarket USA

In Supermarket USA: Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race, Shane Hamilton explores how policymakers and propagandists used agricultural productivity as a weapon in a Cold War “Farms Race” with the Soviet Union. Unlike the better-known arms race, the Farms Race made cornfields battlegrounds and supermarkets cudgels to beat the Soviets with images of overflowing shopping carts as expressions of American “freedom.” Supermarket USA introduces a new cast of Cold Warriors, putting farmers, shoppers, and grocery executives at the forefront of the conflict. Ranging across business, agricultural, technological, and diplomatic history, Hamilton’s conclusion is that the Cold War “can and should be understood as fundamentally an economic contest over living standards” (208). To challenge the Soviets across the globe, in this view, the abundance of America’s supermarkets constituted a weapon as effective as military hardware. From their introduction in the United States in the 1940s, supermarkets served as “machines for selling goods as well as ideas,” chiefly the superiority of “free enterprise” (5). As Hamilton argues, however, supermarkets stood at the end of a long supply chain that thrived because of substantial state support for industrializing agriculture. Supermarkets differed from earlier, smaller chain stores because they served as one-stop shops, places where consumers could pick up perishable items like produce, meat, and dairy alongside dry goods. State support proved crucial in developing the seeds, feed, and supply networks that permitted supermarkets to offer high-volume sales of perishable items. To advance high-volume sales with minimal markup, supermarkets demanded that farmers grow standardized produce that could be mechanically harvested, safely shipped, and neatly displayed. In this way, farmers sold their goods in a controlled marketplace with standards dictated by large supermarket firms like the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P). The much-vaunted choice available at supermarkets proved deceptive, since the heaps of tomatoes stacked in produce sections met exacting standards for durability, color, and shape—and thus for uniformity. For companies like A&P to truly demonstrate the superiority of supermarket retailing, they would first have to acknowledge that “the American system of food abundance was no mere product of free enterprise” (7).

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