Scholars' Award: Supermarket USA: Food, Technology, and Power in the American Century

本项目将现代超市作为一个技术系统进行研究。在二十世纪的过程中，美国的超市不仅成为销售消费品的强大机器，而且成为革新农业生产科学技术的机器。该项目的一个关键目标是解释美国美食的转变是如何与景观的变化直接联系在一起的。超市深入土壤，改变农业实践的性质，创造适合工业销售的新动植物品种，并引发加工、包装和运输技术的创新。与早期更本地化、规模较小的食品零售商，如夫妻店和社区屠夫不同，超市要求农民和食品加工商大量提供统一的供应。农民开始依赖新的机械、强大的化学品、杂交种子和科学饲养的牲畜来生产超市准备好的食品。食品加工商开发了更多经过高度加工的“方便”食品，以将反复无常的消费者口味塑造成更可预测和更有利可图的形式，从而延续工业食品循环。该项目的第二个目标是追踪超市如何为美国在全球范围内不断变化的政治和经济关系做出贡献。在20世纪50年代，超市是美国消费资本主义的标志性标志，就像1959年理查德·尼克松和尼基塔·赫鲁晓夫之间的“厨房辩论”一样。超市在战后改变了许多欧洲国家的食品经济，这在一定程度上要归功于美国商界领袖和政府官员为避免左翼革命而引入“商品民主”的努力。然而，要做到这一点，需要出口在美国背景下引入的紧密联系的工业化农场和加工食品生产体系。跟踪该系统的海外旅行将提供对美国和欧洲政治、文化和环境景观之间的对比的洞察。通过超市技术的社会和政治历史，该项目将揭示欧洲农民和消费者在多大程度上保持了当地和季节性的食品生产和消费传统。通过探索美国式超市在塑造欧洲农业和食品方面的成功和失败，该项目将参与关于冷战期间欧洲社会“美国化”的持续辩论。智力价值国际建议使用技术历史来重新评估现代超市的历史和当代影响。商业历史学家只把超市描绘成零售盒，忽视了二战后将大众食品零售商与工业风格农场连接起来的技术体系。社会和政治历史学家强调，超市是性别消费的场所，女性购物者在这里获得了更大的经济自主权，但政治权力有限。文化历史学家将超市视为战后郊区的缩影，一种嘉年华式的消费文化，为消费者作为代理人的后现代重构提供了基础。这个项目将对超市在塑造现代美国政治、经济和社会结构中的作用提供一个更全面、更综合、更扎实的分析。广泛影响拟议中的项目将远远超出学术界的兴趣，提供了一个新的视角，在肥胖已成为官方流行病的时代，当记者和纪录片制片人引发了关于快餐文化以及工业和有机农业困境的全国性讨论时，美国的工业食品文化。这项研究的结果不仅将在学术期刊上传播，而且还将在一本书中传播，以期接触到广泛的非专业读者。

IntroductionThis project will study the modern supermarket as a technological system. Over the course of the twentieth century, American supermarkets not only became powerful machines for selling consumer goods, but also became machines for revolutionizing the science and technology of agricultural production. One key objective of the project is to explain how transformations in American foodways were directly linked to changes in the landscape. Supermarkets reached ever deeper into the soil to transform the nature of agricultural practice, to create new breeds of animals and plants amenable to industrial marketing, and to spark innovations in processing, packaging, and transportation technologies. Unlike earlier, more localized, smaller-scale food retailers such as mom-and-pop grocers and neighborhood butchers, supermarkets demanded that farmers and food processors deliver uniform supplies in enormous volumes. Farmers came to rely on new machinery, powerful chemicals, hybrid seeds, and scientifically bred livestock to produce supermarket-ready foodstuffs. Food processors developed ever more highly processed "convenient" food products to mold fickle consumer tastes into more predictable and profitable forms, perpetuating an industrial food cycle. A second objective of the project is to trace how the supermarket contributed to America's changing political and economic relationships around the globe. In the 1950s the supermarket served as a defining symbol of American consumer capitalism, as in the 1959 "kitchen debate" between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. Supermarkets transformed the food economies of many European countries in the postwar era, in part due to efforts of American business leaders and government officials to introduce a "democracy of goods" meant to stave off leftist revolutions. Doing so, however, required exporting the tightly linked system of industrial farm and processed food production introduced in the American context. Tracking the system's trips abroad will provide insight into the contrasts between American and European political, cultural, and environmental landscapes. Through a social and political history of supermarket technologies, the project will reveal the degree to which European farmers and consumers maintained local and seasonal food production and consumption traditions. By exploring the successes and failures of American-style supermarkets in shaping European agriculture and foodways, this project will engage with ongoing debates regarding the "Americanization" of European society during the Cold War.Intellectual MeritThe PI proposes to use technological history to reappraise the historical and contemporary implications of modern supermarkets. Business historians have depicted supermarkets only as retail boxes, ignoring the technological systems that connected mass food retailers to industrial-style farms in the post-World War II era. Social and political historians emphasize the supermarket as a site of gendered consumption, where women shoppers gained expanded economic autonomy but limited political authority. Cultural historians have seen the supermarket as a microcosm of postwar suburbia, a culture of carnivalesque consumption offering grist for postmodern reconfigurations of the consumer as agent. This project will provide a more synthetic, more integrated, and more firmly grounded analysis of the supermarket's role in shaping modern American political, economic, and social structures.Broader ImpactThe proposed project will be of interest far beyond the academic community, offering a new perspective on American industrial food culture in an age when obesity has become an official epidemic, and when journalists and documentary filmmakers have sparked a national discussion on fast-food culture and the dilemmas of industrial and organic agriculture. The results of this research will be disseminated not only in scholarly journals but also in a book expected to reach a broad audience of lay readers.