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In recent years, the integrity of food production and distribution has become an issue of wide social concern. The media frequently report on cases of food contamination as well as on the risks of hormones and cloning. Journalists, documentary filmmakers, and activists have had their say, but until now a survey of the latest research on the history of the modern food-provisioning system—the network that connects farms and fields to supermarkets and the dining table—has been unavailable. In Food Chains, Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz present a collection of fascinating case studies that reveal the historical underpinnings and institutional arrangements that compose this system.
The dozen essays in Food Chains range widely in subject, from the pig, poultry, and seafood industries to the origins of the shopping cart. The book examines what it took to put ice in nineteenth-century refrigerators, why Soviet citizens could buy ice cream whenever they wanted, what made Mexican food popular in France, and why Americans turned to commercial pet food in place of table scraps for their dogs and cats. Food Chains goes behind the grocery shelves, explaining why Americans in the early twentieth century preferred to buy bread rather than make it and how Southerners learned to like self-serve shopping. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the value of a historical perspective on the modern food-provisioning system.
1. Making Food Chains: The Book
—Roger Horowitz
PART I. OVERVIEW
2. How Much Depends on Dinner?
—Warren Belasco
3. Analyzing Commodity Chains: Linkages or Restraints?
—Shane Hamilton
PART II. ANIMALS
4. Lard to Lean: Making the Meat-Type Hog in Post-World War II America
—J. L. Anderson
5. The Chicken, the Factory Farm and the Supermarket: The Emergence of the Modern Poultry Industry in Britain
—Andrew C. Godley and Bridget Williams
6. Trading Quality, Producing Value: Crabmeat, HACCP, and Global Seafood Trade
—Kelly Feltault
PART III. PROCESSING
7. Anchovy Sauce and Pickled Tripe: Exporting Civilized Food in the Colonial Atlantic World
—Richard R. Wilk
8. What's Left at the Bottom of the Glass: The Quest for Purity and the Development of the American Natural Ice Industry
—Jonathan Rees
9. Provisioning Man's Best Friend: The Early Years of the American Pet Food Industry, 1870-1942
—Katherine C. Grier
10. Empire of Ice Cream: How Life Became Sweeter in the Postwar Soviet Union
—Jenny Leigh Smith
11. Eating Mexican in a Global Age: The Politics and Production of Ethnic Food
—Jeffrey M. Pilcher
PART IV. SALES
12. The Aristocracy of the Market Basket: Self-Service Food Shopping in the New South
—Lisa C. Tolbert
13. Making Markets Marxist? The East European Grocery Store from Rationing to Rationality to Rationalizations
—Patrick Hyder Patterson
14. Tools and Spaces: Food and Cooking in Working-Class Neighborhoods, 1880-1930
—Katherine Leonard Turner
15. Wheeling One's Groceries Around the Store: The Invention of the Shopping Cart, 1936-1953
—Catherine Grandclément
Notes
List of Contributors