Politics of Food in the Foreign and Domestic Spheres

Abstract

The US is a funny place: you can find a homeless person begging for food, an obese person using food stamps, and a multinational corporation that owns ten different brands of soft drinks all on the same street. For most people, food is something of an afterthought, something to think about only when they are eating out, or making their grocery list; however, food is more than just calories or nutrients, food is also a potent political weapon. Food is so powerful that it was the basis for Nick Cullather's famous article titled "The Foreign Policy of a Calorie." In Cullather's article, he argues that in the early 1900s, 'food' lost its subjective, cultural, character and had evolved into a material instrument of statecraft." Essentially, the calorie is not only an empirical, apolitical term but a tool that was often politicized to further the US' development goals. 1 Based on this sentiment, this paper explores how food was politicized and how the quantifying of food was a form of antipolitics. The 1960s was a juxtaposed decade due to the contrasting essence of foreign development and domestic turmoil. Abroad, US policymakers were allocating millions of dollars to developing new technologies to solve developing nations' domestic problems, all in the hopes that these nations would side with Western capitalism over Sovietbacked communism. At the same time, however, the domestic scene in the US saw the rise of the civil rights movement, tensions between different racial groups, and rising inequality, with almost one-fifth of Americans living in poverty at the time. 2 Antipolitics is defined by Cullather as the exclusion of people with inconvenient claims in development programs. 3 One of the ways Americans practiced antipolitics was by using statistics in development programs to "responsibilize" different tasks to the individual, the market, or the state. 4 For example, obesity and starvation can serve as an indicator that the state has failed to provide basic necessities for its citizens, or can be attributed to a personal failure. The nature of antipolitics within development has been studied extensively, as has the failure of development abroad to bring about positive change to a country's native inhabitants. Literature in the field has evolved over many periods: the first generation of historians studied modernization and development, followed by the second generation of post-Cold War historians who studied the colonialist aspects of the era, and now, recent books seek to provide a holistic view on development without bashing or romanticizing it. 5 Most of this literature, however, focuses on the foreign sphere of development without enough emphasis on the effects of domestic politics. This is a missed opportunity; especially as US policymakers would often use their international experiences as inspiration for domestic solutions. 6 Thus, the goal of this paper is to establish connections between the domestic and foreign spheres of US development through the lens of government policies regarding food in America an...