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

本课题将现代超市作为一个技术系统来研究。在整个世纪，美国的超级市场不仅成为销售消费品的强大机器，而且成为农业生产科学和技术革命的机器。该项目的一个关键目标是解释美国饮食方式的转变如何与景观的变化直接相关。超级市场深入土壤，改变了农业实践的性质，创造了适合工业营销的新品种动物和植物，并激发了加工，包装和运输技术的创新。与更早的、更本地化的、规模较小的食品零售商（如夫妻杂货店和社区屠夫）不同，超市要求农民和食品加工商提供大量统一的供应。农民们开始依靠新的机械、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的食品。食品加工商开发出了更多经过高度加工的“方便”食品，将多变的消费者口味塑造成更可预测和有利可图的形式，使工业食品循环永久化。该项目的第二个目标是追踪超级市场如何促进美国在地球仪上不断变化的政治和经济关系。在20世纪50年代，超市是美国消费资本主义的标志，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，部分原因是美国商界领袖和政府官员努力引入“商品民主”，以避免左翼革命。然而，要做到这一点，就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系统。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力。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保持当地和季节性食品生产和消费传统的程度。通过探讨美国式超市在塑造欧洲农业和食品方面的成功和失败，该项目将参与正在进行的关于冷战期间欧洲社会“美国化”的辩论。知识产权PI建议使用技术历史来重新评估现代超市的历史和当代意义。商业历史学家将超市描述为零售箱，忽略了二战后将大众食品零售商与工业化农场联系起来的技术系统。社会和政治历史学家强调，超市是一个性别消费的场所，女性购物者获得了更大的经济自主权，但政治权威有限。文化历史学家将超市视为战后西班牙的一个缩影，一种狂欢式消费文化为消费者作为代理人的后现代重新配置提供了素材。这个项目将提供一个更综合、更综合、更坚实的分析，来分析超市在塑造现代美国政治、经济和社会结构中的作用。更广泛的影响拟议中的项目将远远超出学术界的兴趣，在肥胖已经成为一种官方流行病的时代，当记者和纪录片制片人引发了一场关于快餐文化和工业与有机农业困境的全国性讨论时。这项研究的结果将不仅在学术期刊上传播，而且还将在一本书中传播，预计这本书将面向广大的非专业读者。

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.