ABSTRACT
This article explores U.S. policymakers and consumers’ engagements with global bread politics in the early Cold War. This provides a glimpse into the making of a particular form of postwar “American alimentary exceptionalism” premised on the universal choice-worthiness of industrial foodways. This alimentary exceptionalism did not assume that the U.S. industrial diet was gastronomically superior to other countries’ diets, but rather that it offered a unique foundation of strength, stability, choice, and abundance on which world peace could rest in the uncertain postwar world. Thus, the article contends that Americans’ confidence in industrial foodways and industrial food production systems—something whose legacies we still grapple with today—was forged, in part, on the imperial landscape of Cold War competition. In that sense, the article traces the largely unexamined flipside of postwar food imperialism: how the exercise of food power abroad shaped Americans’ understandings of their own diet and its place in the world.
