Abstract
The simple yearning for enough food, and the freedom to choose what tastes best: these were among people’s most fervent wishes in war-ravaged Europe. The inhabitants of Nazi-occupied countries—and eventually the Germans themselves—had been forced to adopt the Nazi austerity food regime’s poor diet: cereals, potatoes, and vegetables instead of animal products such as pork, beef, and mutton. Indeed, Europeans’ hope for peace was inseparable from their longing for more—and for better—food.1 Of the two superpowers that emerged from the Second World War, only the United States possessed the capacity to provide food aid for easing the transition towards peace. In fact, it was during the Second World War that the United States began planning Europe’s food provisions to be made after the projected Allied victory.2 The connection between food and peace was complex for the United States. The European need for food aid opened a channel for distributing American agricultural surpluses, a result of the postwar spike in agricultural productivity.3 The American government also responded to European food requirements as a means of shaping Europe’s postwar reconstruction process.4 To the United States, this meant much more than exporting surplus agricultural products. U.S. government officials strove to modernize European food chains—the processes by which food was grown and produced, sold, and eventually consumed.
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Notes
Food Consumption Levels in OEEC Countries: Report of the Working Group on Food Consumption Levels (Paris: OEEC, 1950). For more detail on diets in Europe as well as wartime and postwar nutrition programs, see Paul Lamartine Yates, Food, Land and Manpower in Western Europe (London: Macmillan, 1960), chaps 2–3.
Whereas a single farmer provided food for ten people in 1930 and for eleven people in 1940, a farmer could feed fifteen people in 1950. Wayne D. Rasmussen, “The Impact of Technological Change on American Agriculture, 1862–1962,” The Journal of Economic History 22 (1962): 583.
Working within the framework of the Marshall Plan, American farmers shipped huge amounts of food to Europe. The U.S. Department of Agriculture expected food exports to become a booming business for American farmers. Wayne D. Rasmussen and Jane M. Porter, “Strategies for Dealing with World Hunger: Post-World War II Policies,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 63 (1981): 810–18.
Jean D. Kinsey, “The New Food Economy: Consumers, Farms, Pharms, and Science,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 83 (2001): 1113–30.
See one of the most influential books in the vast literature on consumer culture: Mary Douglas and Baron C. Isherwood, The World of Goods (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
Marshall Sahlins, Kultur und praktische Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), 296.
Barbara E. Willard, “The American Story of Meat: Discursive Influences on Cultural Eating Practice,” Journal of Popular Culture 36 (2002): 116.
Helen H. Gifft, Marjorie B. Washbon, and Gail G. Harrison, Nutrition, Behavior, and Change (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 27.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Das kulinarische Dreieck,” in Strukturalismus als interpretatives Verfahren, ed. Helga Gallas (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1972).
One of the first—and still one of the best—explorations of the mechanization of food and of cultural tastes in food: Giedion Sigfried, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). Since this book’s publication, a range of dissertations have tackled this subcategory of the history of technology.
For more detail on the United States, see Mark W. Wilde, “Industrialization of Food Processing in the United States, 1860–1960” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1988);
Gabriella Petrick, “The Arbiters of Taste: Producers, Consumers, and the Industrialization of Taste in America, 1900–1960” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2006);
Shane Hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Warren James Belasco, Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 174.
Vaclav Smil, Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 141.
For more on Nazi-German food politics—especially in relation to Nazi ideology—see Gustavo Corni and Horst Gies, Brot — Butter — Kanonen: Die Ernährungswirtschaft in Deutschland unter der Diktatur Hitlers (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1997).
Rebecca L. Spang, “The Cultural Habits of a Food Committee,” Food and Foodways 2 (1988): 378.
William Fielding Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1922);
Rudi Volti, “William F. Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature,” Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 396–405.
George S. McGovern, War against Want: America’s Food for Peace Program (New York: Walker, 1964), 45.
Ibid., 24. McGovern’s figures are slightly higher than those from other sources. On food aid to Poland, see also Stephen S. Kaplan, “United States Aid to Poland, 1957–1964: Concerns, Objectives and Obstacles,” The Western Political Quarterly 28 (1975): 147–66.
Lorraine Bluche and Kiran Klaus Patel, “Der Europäer als Bauer: Das Motiv des bäuerlichen Familienbetriebes in Westeuropa nach 1945,” in Der Europäer — Ein Konstrukt: Wissensbestände, Diskurse, Praktiken, ed. Lorraine Bluche, Veronika Lipphardt, and Kiran Klaus Patel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009).
Erwin Hilck and Rudolf Hövel, Jenseits von minus Null: Die Geschichte der deutschen Tiefkühlwirtschaft (Cologne: Deutsches Tiefkühlinstitut, 1979);
Hans Jürgen Teuteberg, “Zur Geschichte der Kühlkost und des Tiefgefrierens,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 36 (1991): 139–55.
Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel, eds., Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management in Postwar Europe and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Matthias Kipping and Ove Bjarnar, The Americanisation of European Business: The Marshall Plan and the Transfer of US Management Models (London: Routledge, 1998).
On productivity policy, see Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 3.
Jacqueline McGlade, “Americanization: Ideology or Process? The Case of the United States Technical Assistance and Productivity Programme,” in Americanization and Its Limits, 53–75; Bent Boel, The European Productivity Agency and Transatlantic Relations, 1953–1961 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2003).
See also Karin Zachmann, “Atoms for Peace and Radiation for Safety — How to Build Trust in Irradiated Foods in Cold War Europe and Beyond,” History and Technology 27 (2011): 65–90;
Zachmann, Risky Rays for an Improved Food Supply? Transnational Food Irradiation Research as a Cold War Recipe, Preprint 7 (München: Deutsches Museum, 2013).
Ibid., 264–5. On the Western European trend of pursuing agricultural policies as social policies, see also Guido Thiemeyer, Vom “Pool Vert” zur Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft: Europäische Integration, Kalter Krieg und die Anfänge der Gemeinsamen Europäischen Agrarpolitik, 1950–1957 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), 25–50.
Ann-Christina L. Knudsen, “Ideas, Welfare, and Values: Framing the Common Agricultural Policy in the 1960s,” in Fertile Ground for Europe? The History of European Integration and the Common Agricultural Policy since 1945, ed. Patel Kiran Klaus (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2009).
Karin Zachmann and Per Østby, “Food, Technology, and Trust: An Introduction,” in “Food, Technology, and Trust,” special issue, History and Technology 27 (2011): 1–10.
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Zachmann, K. (2015). Forging Europe’s Foodways: The American Challenge. In: Lundin, P., Kaiserfeld, T. (eds) The Making of European Consumption. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374042_4
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