Better (and Worse) Living through Agribusiness
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In an episode from the fifth season of The Americans, a recent television drama about Soviet spies living undercover in the United States during the 1980s, an officer from a Soviet bureaucracy visits a Moscow supermarket to investigate corrupt practices in the supply chain. As he explains to the store manager, rumor has it that she receives choice products to sell while many other local markets go without. The manager nervously deflects the officer's questions before trying to buy his silence with a bag of shiny tangerines; the officer politely declines. As he leaves, the camera pans to another character in the series—an American forced into exile in the USSR—who, beneath the wan overhead lighting, scans the barren shelves as other downtrodden customers quietly pick over the sad inventory. And this, the audience infers, is one of the better stores.
The scene channels an idea long popular in the United States: namely, that American agricultural abundance—as much as nuclear weapons or stern presidential rhetoric—was an essential factor in U.S. victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The stockpiles found in places like Kroger and Albertsons confirmed the superiority of free-market capitalism in delivering vast quantities of appealing and inexpensive food to the average consumer. Many Americans now take for granted the bounty of the typical U.S. supermarket, a glibness challenged only by the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020.1 Practically overnight, anxious shoppers—terrified by the prospect of dearth—cleared out supplies of cleaning products and toilet paper, but they also made runs on staples such as flour, yeast, pancake mix, and all manner [End Page 432] of frozen food. Several weeks into the crisis, many stores responded to fears of a looming scarcity by restricting the purchase of meat.
Considering that it took the worst global health crisis in a century to shake American faith in the supermarket—or at least the vast and unseen network of supply chains that supports it—the dominance of this ubiquitous institution may seem inevitable. In this telling, a place like Safeway (or its many equivalents) is the natural result of U.S. ingenuity across the decades, characterized by inventions like the mechanical reaper and then the combine, grain elevators, and refrigerated transportation. But a pair of important and engaging new books about the rise and maturation of American agribusiness suggests the limitations of this triumphalist narrative. Together, they highlight some of the improbable twists along the road to the U.S. supermarket and the availability of one of its most popular products: cheap, plentiful beef. And they point to the indispensable (and often hidden) role of the federal government in making it all possible.
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Joshua Specht's Red Meat Republic comes in a plain brown wrapping, brilliantly evoking the look and even the feel of the butcher paper used to package a slab of store-bought beef. Based on his 2014 doctoral dissertation, Specht's first book takes its place among a recent spate of commodity histories which purport to see the world—or at least the United States—in a grain of sugar, a boll of cotton, or, in this case, a sirloin steak. Such extrapolation poses no small challenge for the author, given that the story of the U.S. cattle industry, particularly the open range era that flourished after the Civil War, has been often told, captured in countless contemporary memoirs as well as a raft of scholarly and popular writing ever since.
The first half of the book, with its requisite scene-setting, thus breaks little new ground. In "War," his opening chapter, Specht recounts the familiar tale of the industry's brutal origins, as ranchers—with a critical assist from the U.S...
