Food Chains

by Belasco, Warren; Horowitz, Roger

• ISBN13: 9780812221343
• ISBN10: 0812221346
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-08-03
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

In recent years, the integrity of food production and distribution has become an issue of wide social concern. The media report frequently 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. InFood 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 inFood Chainsrange widely, 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 Chainsgoes 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.

Author Biography

Warren Belasco is Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. Roger Horowitz is Associate Director of the Hagley Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society and author of Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation.

Table of Contents

Making Food Chains: The Book	p. 1
Overview
How Much Depends on Dinner?	p. 9
Analyzing Commodity Chains: Linkages or Restraints?	p. 16
Animals
Lard to Lean: Making the Meat-Type Hog in Post-World War II America	p. 29
The Chicken, the Factory Farm, and the Supermarket: The Emergence of the Modern Poultry Industry in Britain	p. 47
Trading Quality, Producing Value: Crabmeat, HACCP, and Global Seafood Trade	p. 62
Processing
Anchovy Sauce and Pickled Tripe: Exporting Civilized Food in the Colonial Atlantic World	p. 87
What's Left at the Bottom of the Glass: The Quest for Purity and the Development of the American Natural Ice Industry	p. 108
Provisioning Man's Best Friend: The Early Years of the American Pet Food Industry, 1870-1942	p. 126
Empire of Ice Cream: How Life Became Sweeter in the Postwar Soviet Union	p. 142
Eating Mexican in a Global Age: The Politics and Production of Ethnic Food	p. 158
Sales
The Aristocracy of the Market Basket: Self-Service Food Shopping in the New South	p. 179
Making Markets Marxist? The East European Grocery Store from Rationing to Rationality to Rationalizations	p. 196
Tools and Spaces: Food and Cooking in Working-Class Neighborhoods, 1880-1930	p. 217
Wheeling One's Groceries around the Store: The Invention of the Shopping Cart, 1936-1953	p. 233
Notes	p. 253
List of Contributors	p. 295
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