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Episode: How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Update)

Author: Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher
Duration: 00:38:53

Episode Shownotes

Last week, we heard a former U.S. ambassador describe Russia’s escalating conflict with the U.S. Today, we revisit a 2019 episode about an overlooked front in the Cold War — a “farms race” that, decades later, still influences what Americans eat. SOURCES:Anne Effland, former Senior Economist for the Office of

Chief Economist in the U.S.D.A.Shane Hamilton, historian at the University of York.Peter Timmer, economist and former professor at Harvard University.Audra Wolfe, writer, editor, and historian. RESOURCES:Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, by Audra Wolfe (2018).Supermarket USA: Food and Power in The Cold War Farms Race, by Shane Hamilton (2018).“Association of Higher Consumption of Foods Derived From Subsidized Commodities With Adverse Cardiometabolic Risk Among US Adults,” by Karen R. Siegel, Kai McKeever Bullard, K. M. Narayan, et al. (JAMA Internal Medicine, 2016).The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, by Robert J. Gordon (2016).“How the Mechanical Tomato Harvester Prompted the Food Movement,” by Ildi Carlisle-Cummins (UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences Newsletter, 2015). EXTRAS:"Is the U.S. Sleeping on Threats from Russia and China?" by Freakonomics Radio (2024).

Summary

In this episode of Freakonomics Radio, Stephen J. Dubner revisits the Cold War’s agricultural rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, known as the 'farms race.' He highlights how advancements in farming techniques, such as the 'Chicken of Tomorrow' initiative, became tools of U.S. propaganda to showcase American abundance. Experts discuss how the competition influenced agricultural policies and economic outcomes, ultimately giving the U.S. an edge. The episode critically examines the consequences of such policies, including standardization in food production and the health implications of U.S. diets driven by government subsidies.

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Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_06
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner with a bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio. Our most recent regular episode was an interview with John Sullivan, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

00:00:14 Speaker_06
We didn't really talk about the Cold War, but as a result of that conversation, I've been thinking a lot about the Cold War. And that got me thinking about an episode we made some years ago called How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War.

00:00:28 Speaker_06
So I went back and listened to it. I really liked it, if I do say so myself. And I thought you might like to hear it again, too. So here it is. We have updated facts and figures as necessary. As always, thanks for listening.

00:00:44 Speaker_06
When you think about propaganda campaigns, I am guessing you don't think of this.

00:00:49 Speaker_05
After World War I and World War II came the Cold War between the U.S.

00:01:07 Speaker_06
It featured a space race, an arms race, and a farms race.

00:01:13 Speaker_01
Things like chicken breeding and hybrid corn took an outsized and somewhat surprising role in U.S. propaganda in the early 1950s. The farms race had an obvious winner.

00:01:24 Speaker_06
We clearly won the abundance war. But the American victory was, to some degree, a Pyrrhic victory, whose after-effects are still being felt.

00:01:33 Speaker_03
— Economists who don't do U.S. agricultural policy are horrified by what they see in terms of distorting markets.

00:01:45 Speaker_06
— Today on Freakonomics Radio, how a sprawling system of agriculture technology, economic policy, and political will came to life in the supermarket.

00:01:56 Speaker_05
Tell me, who could possibly afford to buy food in a place such as this? Well, this is just an ordinary food market. Competition and big volume keep prices down. Utterly impossible.

00:02:19 Speaker_02
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

00:02:37 Speaker_06
The supermarket is so ubiquitous today that it's hard to imagine the world without it. But of course, such a time did exist.

00:02:44 Speaker_04
There's some debate about when supermarkets actually started, but usually we pin it at around 1930.

00:02:48 Speaker_06
That's Shane Hamilton. He's an American historian who teaches at the University of York in England.

00:02:55 Speaker_04
I am the author of Supermarket USA, Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race.

00:03:00 Speaker_06
Was the supermarket a purely American invention?

00:03:04 Speaker_04
I argue, yes. The easy answer is that the first declared supermarket was built in the United States.

00:03:12 Speaker_04
I think the broader answer is that what makes a supermarket a supermarket is the industrial agriculture system that enables the affordability of mass produced foods.

00:03:25 Speaker_06
The predecessor of the supermarket was the dry goods store.

00:03:29 Speaker_04
So they didn't have fresh produce. They didn't necessarily have milk or meat or a bakery in-house. That's what a supermarket did is it put all those food items and often many other things you could get, you know, auto parts.

00:03:42 Speaker_04
You could get your shoes shined in the early supermarkets. It was a kind of one-stop shopping and service emporium.

00:03:48 Speaker_06
Another big difference, supermarkets were self-serve. In a dry goods shop, you'd ask a clerk for something and they'd fetch it. In a supermarket, you could ogle the meat and produce yourself, even handle it, and then put it in your basket.

00:04:03 Speaker_06
The supermarket chain Piggly Wiggly is credited with having pioneered the self-service retail model. It is still operating today in 18 states.

00:04:13 Speaker_06
The biggest supermarket chain for much of the 20th century was A&P, the great Atlantic and Pacific tea company.

00:04:19 Speaker_04
A&P, as of the 1940s, was the world's largest retailer by any measure, by sales volume, by number of outlets and so forth.

00:04:29 Speaker_06
Between 1946 and 1954 in the US, the share of food bought in supermarkets rose from 28% to 48%. By 1963, that number had risen to nearly 70%. ANP had so much market power that the Department of Justice went after it for anti-competitive practices.

00:04:50 Speaker_06
This was an interesting development, considering that the U.S. government played such a significant role in the creation of supermarkets in the first place.

00:04:59 Speaker_04
The original goal had been to use the supermarkets to drive down the cost of food for urban consumers.

00:05:06 Speaker_00
The U.S. becomes a majority urban nation by, I think, 1920. And there's a lot of anxiety among leaders, political leaders, thought leaders, about whether or not U.S. agriculture is going to be productive enough to feed this growing urban population.

00:05:24 Speaker_06
That is Anne Efflund, a former senior economist at the USDA. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, established in 1862, had a long history of funding and conducting scientific research.

00:05:36 Speaker_00
You know, a lot of the seed development and livestock breeding. One good example would be the research done in the 1890s on animal disease, on bovine tuberculosis, for example.

00:05:49 Speaker_00
to identify the causes of those diseases and then to develop ways to treat that. There was also research on developing new kinds of machinery that would, you know, be less heavy on the ground or less damaging to crops.

00:06:03 Speaker_06
The USDA's promotion of agriculture went even further than farm machinery and animal breeding.

00:06:09 Speaker_00
There was a need for better transportation from the farms to the cities. So USDA had a unit that did engineering research on the best road materials and road construction methods. The Rural Electrification Administration was part of the New Deal USDA.

00:06:27 Speaker_00
The private electrical companies didn't see a profit in expanding out into rural areas, and so that was taken on by USDA.

00:06:36 Speaker_06
But perhaps the biggest changes to American agriculture were mechanization and automation.

00:06:42 Speaker_03
If I may say so, I lived through the structural transformation of the agricultural economy.

00:06:49 Speaker_06
That's Peter Timmer, an economist who used to teach at Harvard.

00:06:53 Speaker_03
I'm a retired professor, have worked on agriculture and food policy, poverty reduction, economic development for well over 50 years now.

00:07:04 Speaker_06
And before that, Timmer was a farm boy in Ohio. He worked for the Tip Top Canning Factory, which was founded by his great-grandfather, and the factory's tomato farm.

00:07:14 Speaker_03
I'm old enough to remember when we hand-picked all of our tomatoes and we hand-peeled all of our tomatoes. But that, of course, changed. When I was in grade school or junior high school,

00:07:28 Speaker_03
If we could pack 40 or 50,000 cases of canned tomatoes and product in a year, that was a pretty successful year. By the time I had graduated from graduate school, the company was putting out a million cases a year.

00:07:45 Speaker_06
This was thanks in large part to a mechanical tomato harvester, which came out of the engineering school at the University of California, Davis, with the help of federal research money.

00:07:56 Speaker_06
It had taken years to get the harvester right, mostly because they first had to get the tomato right, breeding a new variety that could withstand the rough treatment of the mechanical harvester.

00:08:06 Speaker_03
I remember when we bought our first one, it was a huge expense and it just revolutionized our operation. I was just in a microcosm of what turned out to be very general trends in the entire U.S. food system at the time.

00:08:26 Speaker_06
The general trends could best be characterized as high-volume and standardized agriculture. If you would describe U.S. agriculture policy as aggressive in earlier decades, than in the Cold War era. It was pretty much on steroids.

00:08:42 Speaker_06
And this wasn't just about feeding a growing U.S. population. This had a political thrust, meant to show the Soviet Union and the rest of the world just how mighty the U.S. was. Shane Hamilton again.

00:08:56 Speaker_04
I don't mean to deny the power and the might of these weapon systems that were deployed in the space race and all that. But fundamentally, This was a contest to demonstrate that either communism or capitalism was a superior political economic system.

00:09:12 Speaker_01
After Sputnik, when the United States was trying to understand why it was falling behind in the space race, or why it thought it was falling behind in the space race, many of the commentators said, the problem is we're not funding basic research.

00:09:26 Speaker_01
So after 1957, the budgets of not only organizations like the National Science Foundation, but also specific government departments like the Department of Agriculture, their budgets for research increased dramatically.

00:09:39 Speaker_01
on the theory that this is how the United States would win the Cold War, by doing the best science. And it really looks at the ways that science as an idea became a tool for propaganda in the Cold War, especially on the American side.

00:10:04 Speaker_01
There's this idea that you can change hearts and minds and you can establish a climate of opinion that makes people more willing to accept the American way of life as the better choice.

00:10:14 Speaker_06
And one of the things that made America so great, its agricultural system.

00:10:19 Speaker_01
Things like chicken breeding and hybrid corn took a outsized and somewhat surprising role in U.S. propaganda in the early 1950s.

00:10:28 Speaker_06
But there was a tension.

00:10:29 Speaker_01
The United States wanted to promote personal exchanges, scientific and technical exchanges as a way to promote American values.

00:10:37 Speaker_01
But at the same time, it was very, very nervous that by doing so it would lose the advantages that it had, particularly in grain production.

00:10:44 Speaker_06
In 1955, the U.S. government unexpectedly had its hand forced.

00:10:49 Speaker_01
A newspaper editor in Iowa named Lauren Soth invited Khrushchev to the United States to see the wonders of American agriculture.

00:10:56 Speaker_06
That's Nikita Khrushchev, then leader of the Soviet Union.

00:11:00 Speaker_01
And somewhat to everyone's shock, Khrushchev said yes. Now, Khrushchev didn't come himself until 1959. But in 1955, a group of 12 Soviet agricultural experts came to the United States to see the wonders of American agriculture.

00:11:15 Speaker_01
They saw how contour farming worked. They saw the wonders of hybrid corn. They saw the chicken breeders.

00:11:23 Speaker_06
And what were those chicken breeders working on? The chicken of tomorrow. That's coming up. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

00:11:44 Speaker_04
Chicken in the 1920s was pound for pound as expensive as lobster. By the 1960s, it was so cheap that it was quickly becoming America's most popular meat.

00:11:54 Speaker_06
That, again, is Shane Hamilton, a historian and the author of Supermarket USA, Food and Power in the Cold War Farms Race. In the book, he tells the story of a project called the Chicken of Tomorrow.

00:12:08 Speaker_04
Really, the Chicken of Tomorrow is the chicken of today in that we're all eating the kind of genetic progeny of the original Chicken of Tomorrow. What it was, was a contest to produce the most efficient chicken using genetic techniques, basically.

00:12:24 Speaker_04
It not only had to be an efficient chicken, but very heavy breasts, very light colored feathers so that when it's plucked it would look good under cellophane and then later plastic packaging.

00:12:36 Speaker_04
And the birds had to be relatively disease resistant so that they could be put in intensive rearing operations without dying too quickly.

00:12:47 Speaker_06
This agricultural bounty, those heavy-breasted cheap chickens, those millions of cases of tomatoes, all this was a good candidate for the U.S. propaganda machine.

00:12:59 Speaker_04
The U.S. Information Agency were searching for concrete forms of propaganda to display America's wealth.

00:13:07 Speaker_06
Enter one of the most concrete forms of display imaginable, the supermarket.

00:13:13 Speaker_04
A supermarket is not just a retail box, but actually the endpoint of an industrial agriculture supply chain. A supermarket can't exist without the inputs of mass-produced foods.

00:13:26 Speaker_04
The farms race was about how do you get the food from industrially productive, technologically sophisticated farms to, you know, this display of abundance. And the display was really crucial.

00:13:38 Speaker_06
Since the average citizen living under communism wouldn't have access to a Piggly Wiggly or an A&P, the U.S. government brought the supermarket to the communists.

00:13:49 Speaker_04
The 1957 Supermarket USA exhibit in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, which was then a communist country, was a fully operational 10,000 square foot American supermarket filled with frozen foods and breakfast cereals and everything else.

00:14:02 Speaker_04
They airlifted in fresh produce from the U.S. because they didn't think Yugoslavian produce was attractive enough. It was about this display of affordable abundance available to American consumers.

00:14:13 Speaker_06
For anyone who didn't get the message, there was also a sign touting, quote, the knowledge of science and technology available to this age. In other words, if you like our breakfast cereal, just think how much you like the rest of our capitalism.

00:14:27 Speaker_04
There were quite a few people who thought that

00:14:29 Speaker_04
If you showed that American consumers could access affordable food, you know, strawberries in December without having to wait in line, that that might actually cause the whole communist system to collapse.

00:14:41 Speaker_06
The Supermarket USA exhibit proved tremendously popular. More than one million Yugoslavs visited. Some received free bags of American food.

00:14:51 Speaker_04
Immediately after seeing it, Marshall Tito, the leader of the country at the time, ordered the whole thing to be purchased. And it was bought wholesale from the United States exhibitors and used as a model.

00:15:01 Speaker_04
They hired a consultant from an Atlanta supermarket firm to come over and teach them how to build their own chain of socialist supermarkets.

00:15:10 Speaker_06
So Yugoslavia, along with other European countries, started building American-style supermarkets, which created new buyers for processed and frozen foods from America.

00:15:20 Speaker_06
This did not, however, lead to a wider embrace of American culture, much less the downfall of communism. But just a couple of years later, the Americans took another shot, this time in Moscow, at the American National Exhibition.

00:15:35 Speaker_06
They built a split-level, ranch-style American house, its kitchens stocked with food and the latest labor-saving appliances. The message was clear.

00:15:45 Speaker_06
The American economy, based in free-market capitalism, was capable of producing things that the Soviets' command-and-control economy simply couldn't. The exhibition opening was attended by Nikita Khrushchev and then U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon.

00:16:03 Speaker_06
They engaged in what came to be known as the kitchen debate.

00:16:06 Speaker_05
You must not be afraid of ideas. That's what we're telling you. Don't be afraid of ideas. We have nothing to fear. The time has passed when ideas scared us. Well, then let's have more exchange of it.

00:16:21 Speaker_04
Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev They are two of the most explicit users of this Cold War farms race language.

00:16:29 Speaker_04
Khrushchev declared that by outproducing the US in per capita meat and milk production, that would be the Soviet equivalent of hitting American capitalism with a torpedo.

00:16:40 Speaker_04
Nixon retorted that if there was going to be a torpedo fired, it was going to be by America's farmers and ranchers. to which the farmers and ranchers listening to his speech applauded very mightily.

00:16:49 Speaker_06
A few months afterward, Khrushchev finally visited the U.S. and he got to see for himself the sprawling cornfields of Iowa. But this was of little help to the Soviet farmers back home.

00:17:01 Speaker_03
The fact is, they were unable to modernize Soviet agriculture with the economic structure and strategy that they were following.

00:17:12 Speaker_06
The economist Peter Timmer again.

00:17:15 Speaker_03
It was not a technological problem. It was a management and marketing problem. There was a total divorce between what consumers wanted and what the managers of the big state farms were told to produce.

00:17:29 Speaker_06
Timmer was part of a World Bank team that visited the Soviet Union. He saw for himself their agricultural system and supermarkets.

00:17:37 Speaker_03
Oh, gosh. I mean, the shelves were empty. It just it was just weird. We stayed at a government hotel And there was hardly anything to eat.

00:17:47 Speaker_03
You talk with the staff of the research agencies and places like that, who would struggle just to come up with basic foods, they knew it could be better than that.

00:17:58 Speaker_06
Khrushchev, despite his bravado, was ultimately forced to buy imported grain from the US.

00:18:05 Speaker_04
Some historians would argue that this was one of the crucial factors that led to his downfall.

00:18:09 Speaker_04
that it was just embarrassing on the world stage for the Soviet Union, this vast country with enormous agricultural resources, having to turn to its arch enemy for grain.

00:18:19 Speaker_06
Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, continued the policy of importing food from the US to cover domestic shortfalls If the two countries had been normal trading partners, this wouldn't have been a big deal.

00:18:32 Speaker_06
But they weren't normal trading partners. They were Cold War adversaries, the global icons of capitalism and communism. And it was becoming clear which system would prevail, at least on the food front. Peter Timmer's final analysis?

00:18:48 Speaker_03
It was a fundamentally failed strategy for agriculture that brought down the Soviet Union. They didn't grow enough and they didn't grow the right things. And there were no price signals telling you what's expensive and what's cheap.

00:19:01 Speaker_03
They wasted a lot of what they were producing on the land. It never got into the supermarkets. Timur was actually in Moscow when the Soviet Union collapsed.

00:19:12 Speaker_03
The neat thing is I have a passport going in stamped Soviet Union, but my passport coming out the exit stamp is Russia. People were so optimistic about what was going to happen. They knew that American supermarkets were a miracle.

00:19:32 Speaker_03
They had seen it on television. That point had clearly gotten through, at least to everybody that I talked to.

00:19:42 Speaker_06
And so it seems as though the mighty supermarket may indeed have played a role in America's Cold War victory.

00:19:48 Speaker_04
Yeah, I mean, this is it's central to the kind of lie, really, of the supermarket as a weapon.

00:19:55 Speaker_06
The historian Shane Hamilton again.

00:19:57 Speaker_04
So when the supermarket is upheld as this, you know, effectively missile this concrete consumer weapon against the claims of communism, it's built on this idea that supermarkets are producing this affordability just through the workings of supply and demand, that, you know, it's

00:20:15 Speaker_04
unfettered markets that are somehow making food so affordable for American consumers.

00:20:21 Speaker_04
Where the reality is, for everything from milk to beef to grain to processed foods of all kinds, there's massive government investment in the science and technology that enables the productivity of American farms, from fertilizers to frozen food processes to distribution and so forth.

00:20:42 Speaker_04
And that's all erased. The image is that it's just the supermarket itself that is the source of abundance.

00:20:48 Speaker_06
So when you describe it like that, it's certainly I mean, you use the word lie and you talk about the hidden components and you make it certainly sound nefarious.

00:20:56 Speaker_06
But couldn't you argue that, you know, the role of a government is to invest in science and technology that will benefit private industry and ultimately the citizenry?

00:21:06 Speaker_04
Yeah, I actually don't have a problem with the U.S. government investment in science and technology and encouraging, you know, more productivity. The concern is with that being disguised as a free market when it's not particularly free.

00:21:22 Speaker_04
I mean, taking that to a propaganda level and attacking another country for not having free markets, it's just duplicitous, right?

00:21:31 Speaker_06
You may or may not be as disturbed as Shane Hamilton is by what he calls the duplicity of the U.S. government for promoting the supermarket as an emblem of free market capitalism. To me, the big question is this.

00:21:44 Speaker_06
What was the ultimate cost of this supermarket victory? What are the economic and political and health consequences of more than 100 years of agriculture policy that encouraged industrialization, standardization, and low prices?

00:22:00 Speaker_06
That's coming up right after this. So the U.S. won the so-called farms race with an industrial approach to agriculture that was heavily influenced by government policy and funding. What were the long-term results of that victory?

00:22:27 Speaker_06
We need to go back about 100 years to figure that out. That is on the advice of Anne Eflind, the former USDA economist we've been hearing from. Eflind thinks there's one key event that really drove U.S. food policy.

00:22:41 Speaker_00
And that is production increases around World War I. Farmers expanded their production to meet wartime goals.

00:22:49 Speaker_00
And there were some price supports during that time that provided incentives for increased, especially wheat and pork and some of these other staple commodities.

00:22:57 Speaker_00
But there was no real planning for the aftermath after the increased demand and the price supports that are set up for war go away.

00:23:06 Speaker_00
And it left a number of farmers who had, in good faith, developed larger farms and more productive farms with very low prices.

00:23:14 Speaker_06
So after the war, farmers were producing more food than was necessary. Then came the Great Depression. The economist Peter Timmer.

00:23:22 Speaker_03
I mean, demand collapsed. But agricultural productivity did not. And what that meant was prices just collapsed. And so that so totally set the mind frame for U.S. agricultural policy.

00:23:41 Speaker_00
That's when we see the beginning of real price policies for agriculture.

00:23:46 Speaker_06
Price policies for agriculture would take many forms over the ensuing decades, from crop insurance to loans and direct payments and many more.

00:23:56 Speaker_06
Now, you can understand why the government would want to make agriculture financially viable and remove some of the uncertainty. A national food supply is a pretty important thing.

00:24:06 Speaker_06
One key policy tool the government used was a price support system, guaranteeing farmers a certain minimum price for a specific crop at a specific time.

00:24:16 Speaker_00
There was an idea of something called parity, which was that the price should be such that it would give farmers the same purchasing power in comparison to workers and others in the economy that they had had before World War I. And that was the guideline for what those price support levels ought to be.

00:24:33 Speaker_06
But if you increase the price being paid without limiting the amount being produced, well.

00:24:40 Speaker_00
One of the problems with this is that it leads to a large surplus.

00:24:45 Speaker_06
This would leave the federal government to buy and store excess produce. In the early 1930s, when the U.S. government guaranteed farmers 80 cents per bushel of wheat, the government wound up buying and storing more than 250 million bushels.

00:25:00 Speaker_00
These things all take place in the context of their own times. Having policies that found a way to increase farm incomes in the 1930s, I think would be seen as a good thing. But there are also consequences of that over time as they get embedded.

00:25:16 Speaker_06
If you ever wonder why the USDA's old food pyramid, the diagram of recommended servings of different foods, why the biggest category at the bottom of the pyramid was bread, cereal, rice and pasta. Well, the U.S. had an awful lot of all those foods.

00:25:34 Speaker_06
And if you ate as the USDA instructed, there's a good chance you put on a few pounds. You can't think about nutrition without thinking about agriculture policy. And U.S.

00:25:45 Speaker_06
agriculture came to be driven by financial incentives, incentives that, given how government funding often works, weren't always entirely sensible.

00:25:56 Speaker_03
You know, economists who don't do U.S. agricultural policy are usually horrified

00:26:06 Speaker_03
by what they see in terms of distorting markets, picking, okay, corn, soybeans, wheat, you guys get big subsidies, apples, grapes, fresh fruits and vegetables, you're on your own.

00:26:23 Speaker_03
incredibly regulated both federally and at the state level, just a mess, just an awful mess.

00:26:30 Speaker_06
With price guarantees for certain crops and the resultant glut of supply, the government sometimes paid farmers to plant fewer crops. But even this wasn't fully successful.

00:26:41 Speaker_00
So we have controls on how much can you plant on an acre, but not on how much your yield is on the acres you are planting. There's a huge boom. Lots of new chemicals, fertilizers, machinery that make farms more productive.

00:26:55 Speaker_00
So even though we're trying to control by reducing the acreage, there continues to be increasing production and surpluses don't go down.

00:27:05 Speaker_06
But Anne Eflin says this was a problem the USDA wasn't all that unhappy about.

00:27:10 Speaker_00
problem-solving on the scientific and technical and engineering side tends to run on its own track and be seen as a positive outcome.

00:27:19 Speaker_00
I don't think there's ever a point at which the policy side is saying, oh, stop providing good science and better agricultural practices so we don't have these surpluses, because when you do that, what you're saying is then

00:27:32 Speaker_00
stop this economic development, solving problems and making farming more efficient are still seen as good projects to continue.

00:27:42 Speaker_00
The fact that they also create these surpluses is sort of a different track of problems that the farm policy then is trying to figure out solutions to.

00:27:53 Speaker_06
One solution was to use surplus grain for animal feed. Shane Hamilton again.

00:28:00 Speaker_04
Those massive surpluses of cheap corn and later soybeans, encourages the rise of, you know, industrial meat production, concentrated animal production, livestock feeding operations, where, you know, that's that's enabled by cheap grain production.

00:28:15 Speaker_06
Industrial meat production fueled by cheap grain meant cheap meat, too, and helps explain how the U.S. became one of the world's biggest consumers of meat per capita. Today, more than 30% of corn and more than 50% of soybeans grown in the U.S.

00:28:33 Speaker_06
goes toward feeding cattle and other livestock. But even that left a lot of surplus production. So what happened?

00:28:41 Speaker_03
High fructose corn syrup. Yep. You've got surplus corn. And you've got a demand for easy, convenient sweetener in the food sector. And that was just a perfect storm.

00:28:55 Speaker_03
That syrup revolutionizes food processing because instead of a powdery sweet thing, it's a liquid, and liquids are way easier to handle. in food processing.

00:29:06 Speaker_03
If I had only one thing to say about the impact of our agricultural programs on what you see in the supermarket and subsequent health issues out of the diet, I would have said the fact that we use so much high fructose corn syrup, that's the example of how things can go badly wrong, even if well intended.

00:29:27 Speaker_03
I mean, don't get me started on ethanol because that's the next step. in reducing the surpluses, but I don't want to go there.

00:29:39 Speaker_06
The rise in agricultural productivity tended to favor larger, more industrial farms. It didn't hurt that they often received the government price supports designed for smaller family farms.

00:29:51 Speaker_06
As you can imagine, this began to put a lot of small farms out of business.

00:29:56 Speaker_03
We didn't manage that process very well. But I think just basic economic forces would have pushed us in that direction. It just wouldn't have pushed us as far.

00:30:08 Speaker_06
Peter Timmer, you will recall, grew up working on the tomato farm and cannery founded by his great-grandfather. You'll also recall when the Tip Top Canning Company got their first mechanical tomato harvester. It just revolutionized our operation.

00:30:23 Speaker_06
When the mechanical harvester was introduced, there were around 5,000 tomato growers in the U.S. Within five years, 4,400 had gone out of business. The Timmer family farm and canning factory made the cut, and they lasted for decades.

00:30:40 Speaker_06
But between 1940 and 1969, 3.4 million American farmers and their families stopped farming.

00:30:49 Speaker_04
Quite a few historians suggest that, you know, this all out push to productivity killed the family farm effectively. Shane Hamilton again. And it's hard to deny that.

00:31:01 Speaker_04
On the other hand, we don't apply the same kind of metrics to, you know, industrial manufacturing. where similarly there's been massive US government investment in science and technology to support economic growth and productivity.

00:31:14 Speaker_04
I'm sympathetic to those who see it as overall a net positive gain. However, you know, the pain is real.

00:31:23 Speaker_06
Peter Timmer says this massive consolidation on the production side was driven by what was happening on the consumption side, the growth of supermarket chains.

00:31:33 Speaker_03
Supermarkets were able to manage the supply chains all the way back. to farmers, but they didn't want little tiny farmers. Just one supplier, please. It's just way too complicated to contract with 50 or 100.

00:31:47 Speaker_03
That has changed, then, the nature of production. right down at the level of Tip Top Canning Company and how we would be able to provide the kind of regular quality and supply and low price that a Walmart or a Kroger or a Publix would need.

00:32:07 Speaker_04
I mean, Walmart really came in and looked at the landscape of American supermarkets and saw inefficiencies everywhere. What Walmart did was build on its successful model of general merchandise sales.

00:32:20 Speaker_04
with hyper-efficient logistics and distribution brought that into the supermarket industry and really shook things up.

00:32:27 Speaker_03
I used to ask my class, I'm talking 1985, where is the world's largest supercomputer? And the correct answer was it's at the Pentagon. Okay, where is the world's second largest supercomputer? Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Walmart.

00:32:48 Speaker_03
They used that computer to track every single item on every single Walmart shelf. That information technology is what revolutionized food marketing, and it was pretty much invented by Walmart.

00:33:06 Speaker_06
This technology would spread across the world, affecting not just the demand side, supermarkets, but the agriculture supply side.

00:33:14 Speaker_03
So the U.S. experience is formative. And it's formative for two reasons. U.S. universities train so many ag economists, food scientists, food policy people to go back to other countries that the U.S. model is pretty well ingrained intellectually.

00:33:37 Speaker_03
But the other thing, of course, is the biological and mechanical technologies mostly came out of the United States.

00:33:48 Speaker_06
Another consequence of the scaling up of American agriculture, more standardization and less variety.

00:33:55 Speaker_04
So apples in the early 20th century, consumers in, say, New York state would have access to literally hundreds of varieties. You know, even in mass retail markets by the mid 20th century, it's down to just a handful.

00:34:09 Speaker_04
And, you know, Red Delicious really dominates the whole market. And apples became remarkably tasteless by the mid 20th century. you know, so certain qualities were given up in order to gain that advantage of price and abundance.

00:34:23 Speaker_03
Well, you know, we clearly won the food wars in terms of supply and abundance. We won the abundance war. What we may be in the process of losing is the health and quality dimensions going forward.

00:34:44 Speaker_04
I think today we're certainly witnessing, perhaps especially among millennials, an attempt to kind of reconfigure values. You know, what are you actually looking for when you go to a supermarket? And it's not just price.

00:34:59 Speaker_04
Price does not contain all relevant information for many shoppers in a contemporary supermarket. So the costs of pollution, of degraded animal welfare that are currently not being borne by either producers or consumers of food would have to be borne.

00:35:16 Speaker_03
If we had worried much, much more about the quality of farmland, of sustainability, about environmental side effects from heavy fertilization on corn, you know, we've got a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that is directly attributable

00:35:34 Speaker_03
to putting fertilizer on corn up in the Midwest. I accused my brothers of poisoning the Gulf of Mexico, and they said, well, what are we going to do? We have to get high yields. There was this sense of everybody being trapped in an old paradigm.

00:35:50 Speaker_03
And now, how do we break out of that?

00:35:53 Speaker_03
I hate to say it, but the current government seems to be trying to take us back to the old paradigm rather than a more sustainable, environmentally friendly, let's make agriculture do more on organic and natural processes.

00:36:05 Speaker_03
That doesn't seem to be the political driver right now, but it has to come back. We have to make agriculture green, which is a strange thing to say.

00:36:20 Speaker_06
Peter Timmer has seen a lot of change in the farming business over his lifetime, and who knows, maybe he'll see the change he's hoping for now.

00:36:28 Speaker_06
but it's going to be hard to break the status quo, at least in terms of how financial incentives drive food production.

00:36:36 Speaker_06
For instance, when the first Trump administration placed billions of dollars of tariffs on Chinese imports starting in 2018, China responded with their own tariffs on imported American crops like soybeans, alfalfa, and hay.

00:36:50 Speaker_06
American crop exports to China fell dramatically, as did, of course, farmers' revenues. In response, the U.S. government announced a $16 billion welfare package to U.S. farmers. That was followed by more farm aid tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.

00:37:07 Speaker_06
Together, the Trump and Biden administrations have authorized over $157 billion in direct government payments to farmers and ranchers. And now Trump is promising more tariffs in his second term, which means the cycle may start again.

00:37:29 Speaker_06
And that's it for this bonus episode from our archive. We will be back shortly with a new episode. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.

00:37:42 Speaker_06
You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Matt Hickey and updated by Tao Jacobs.

00:37:55 Speaker_06
The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Dalvin Abouagy, Alina Kullman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmine Klinger, Jason Gambrell, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnarz, Murek Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Caruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Zach Lipinski.

00:38:14 Speaker_06
Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers. Our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thank you for listening.

00:38:23 Speaker_03
When I was a Fulbright scholar and had to explain myself to the cohort when we got to London, I said, well, my background is tomatoes. Everybody just laughed. I hadn't realized that it was not such a normal background.

00:38:41 Speaker_02
The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.