Food Power

The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System

Bryan L. McDonald

Analyzes how food was used as a tool of American foreign policy during the early Cold War.
Draws on the disciplines of food, agriculture, and American foreign policy.
Based on a range of archival sources including scientific and technical reports, government documents, and popular literature such as comic books, novels, and advertisements.

Food Power

The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System

Bryan L. McDonald

Description

There is a widespread assumption that the American food system after World War II was transformed-toward an increasingly industrialized production of crops, more processed foods, and diets higher in fat, sugar, and calories-as part of a unified system. In this book, Bryan McDonald brings together the history of food, agriculture, and foreign policy to explore how food was deployed in the first decades of the Cold War to promote American national security and national interests, a concept referred to as food power.

In the postwar years, Americans struggled to understand how an unprecedented abundance of food could be used to best advance U.S. goals and values. Was food a weapon, a commodity to be valued and exchanged through markets, or a substance to be provided to those in need? McDonald traces different visions of food power and shows how food formed an essential part of America's postwar modernization strategy and its vision of what it meant to be a stable, secure, and technologically advanced nation. Policymakers and experts helped build a new food system based around American agricultural surpluses that stabilized prices and food availability. This system averted a global-scale food crisis for almost three decades. The end of this food system in the early 1970s ushered in a much more precarious period in global food relations. By the late twentieth century, food politics had become a battleground in which the interests of security and foreign policy experts, farmers, businesses, and politicians contended with a growing social movement whose adherents worried about the role of food in contributing to conflict and inequality.

Food Power argues that the ways postwar American policymakers and experts politically linked people and places around the world through food illuminates both America's role in the world during the mid-twentieth century and sheds light on contemporary food problems.

Food Power

The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System

Bryan L. McDonald

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Food Power, the Food Network, and American Security
Chapter 1: Freedom from Want: Creating a Postwar Food System
Chapter 2: Fixed Stomachs and Convenience Foods: Abundance and Food in the 1950s
Chapter 3: Freedom to Farm: Prosperity, Security, and "the Farm Problem" in the 1950s
Chapter 4: What to Eat After an Atomic Bomb: Deploying Food Power Defensively
Chapter 5: Food for Peace and the War on Hunger: Food Power in the 1960s
Chapter 6: The World Food Crisis and the End of the Postwar Food System
Conclusion: The Past, Present, and Future of World Food Problems
Notes
Index

Food Power

The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System

Bryan L. McDonald

Author Information

Bryan McDonald is Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University.

Food Power

The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System

Bryan L. McDonald

Reviews and Awards

"Food Power is a valuable contribution to the conversation about our food network and reminds future scholarship of the lingering importance of government policy in a system dominated by a multitude of corporate hubs and nodes." -- Jayson Otto, Agricultural History

"Food Power is an interesting book that very usefully illuminates the relationship between American food and American power in the postwar period." -- Helen Zoe Veit, Journal of American History

"Food Power: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System takes this superfluity of food as its central concern, tracking the political dynamic by which surplus food was either a problem to be eliminated or a boon to international diplomatic strategies....It is a fascinating story that brings together a number of historical strands, including the effect of science and technology on both farming and food production, the role of World War II in creating an unprecedented food system, the challenges of electoral politics, and the various kinds of political philosophy and strategies that different secretaries of agriculture followed in wrestling with these problems....McDonald's book is important and accessible, and it sheds new light on the challenges governments face in balancing production, consumption, and political survival."--Deborah Fitzgerald, American Historical Review

"McDonald investigates how the US used surplus food to create an expansive global food system during the 25 years following World War II. Through historical and textual analyses, the author teases out the complex social, economic, and political forces impacting how the US used food to promote American values and agendas, both domestically and around the world....Ultimately, McDonald describes a transition from this postwar food system to the current food network, calling for a greater global focus on building food reserves. This book could be used in the disciplines of history, sociology, political science, business, and dietetics...Recommended."--CHOICE

"In this compact and accessible book, McDonald illuminates the policies and politics, both domestic and international, of American food. From the postwar food crises of the 1940s to the African famines of the early 1970s, the US caloric cornucopia provided Washington with super-sized leverage in foreign policy. McDonald deftly explains when and how the United States chose to deploy its unparalleled (and unsustained) food power."--J.R. McNeill, Georgetown University

"This brisk account of food and power reveals how US policymakers came to treat food as a strategic resource in the aftermath of World War II. McDonald has provided the critical backstory to current concerns about food security."--Kristin Hoganson, author of Consumers' Imperium

"In this thoughtful and well-researched book, Bryan McDonald considers the rise of a global food network from the long neglected perspectives of diplomacy and food security. His work is judiciously balanced but hardly hesitant to make convincing if controversial arguments that force us to rethink the emergence of Big Agriculture, as well as the alternative farming techniques that have come to challenge Big Food's defining premises. McDonald successfully opens the door for a counter-narrative that takes the edge off old-fashioned economic greed as the primary cause of our 'broken food system' and forces us to think more creatively, and historically, about what we eat."--James McWilliams, author of Just Food

Food Power

The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System

Bryan L. McDonald

From Our Blog

Why are world food problems so hard to solve?

More than 20 million people in Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, and northeast Nigeria are now facing extreme hunger, with the potential for not just widespread death, but also the deepening of long-term political and military crises in East Africa. United Nations humanitarian coordinator Stephen O'Brien has called this food crisis the world's greatest humanitarian crisis since 1945.

Posted on May 23, 2017

Read the blog post