American Grocery Stores Research Articles

Native American agriculture and food systems: Challenges and opportunities presented by the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled deep and systemic weaknesses and gross inequalities in U.S. food and farming systems, compounding the effects of an already unjust food and agricultural system. Emergent studies reveal disproportionate effects of the pandemic on minority farmers and vulnerable communities, as well as inequitable access to critical relief programs. Less is under­stood about the experiences and responses of Native American producers, tribal governments, and tribal-led organizations to the COVID-19 cri­sis. As the nation’s primary Native American agri­culture and natural resources organization, serving 574 Federally Recognized Tribal communities throughout the United States, the Intertribal Agri­culture Council (IAC) received a resounding increase in inquiries during the pandemic pertain­ing to a number of challenges that tribal producers and governments face. In response, IAC launched a series of national surveys to assess the impacts and needs of Native American producers, tribal governments, and grocery stores in and near tribal communities, with the goal of identifying effective strategies to address tribal priorities in policy and programming. As we continue to learn about the causes and consequences of food system ruptures during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become abundantly clear that increased investment in and sovereignty over decentralized regional food and farming systems’ infrastructure and markets are needed to strengthen the economic viability and resilience of Native American agriculture and food systems.

A Study of Organic Food Labeling In the United States Compared to Denmark

Organic farming practices produce foods that avoid manufactured fertilizers, pesticides, growth regulators (GMOs), and livestock additives. The definition of what is considered organic in the United States is that 95 percent of the ingredient list must be free of synthetic additives and must not be processed using industrial solvents. The goal of the study was to compare organic labeling and certification between the United States and Denmark. The hypothesis is that labeling and regulation will be similar because the food economy is built on a global scale. Researching organic labeling was required in both the United States and Denmark. A study of one food item from each section of the US food pyramid was completed. Then, labeling data was collected in both Danish and American grocery stores. The work required visiting three grocery stores in both countries. The results were organic labeling requirements are different in the US and Denmark. Denmark has a much more stringent level of organic certification, store labels of studied products confirm these differences. The study demonstrated that organic labeling, is very complicated in both the US and Denmark, and there is not a common standard of organic labeling and certification between these two countries.

New perspectives on 20th-century European retailing

Retailers are often regarded as ‘intermediaries’, whereas in fact they are actors in their own right. They influence, and are influenced by, their local and national ‘ecosystems’, together with other national retailing ‘ecosystems’ with which they interact. The history of this process in 20th-century Europe has been incompletely explored, while the English-language litera- ture remains dominated by the ‘Americanisation’ model, whereby innovations pioneered in the United States gradually diffused to the more ‘backward’ countries of Europe, a process mediated by barriers to competition that varied in extent and severity between different European nations. In this essay, we re-evaluate this model in the light of the special issue authors’ contributions and other recent studies, including the new specialised journal History of Retailing and Consumption. The United States is often shown to have been a major source of knowledge transfer to Europe, but the information flows were more complex than many advocates of the Americanisation model acknowledge. For instance, while most marketing scholars see the sources of the ‘modernisation’ of European retailing in American department stores, chains and supermarkets, recent research has shown that such an innovation as self-service began in several small independent American grocery stores during the 1910s and ‘spread in small retail outlets, sometimes well before the advent of the large retail spaces which are tradi- tionally viewed as the origin of the self-service economy’. 1 Moreover, American-inspired formats were not always appropriate welfare-maximising models for European countries (and, arguably, in some cases, such as regional shopping malls, even for the United States).

Open-display and the ‘re-agencing’ of the American economy: Lessons from a ‘pico-geography’ of grocery stores in the USA, 1922–1932

This paper aims to describe marketization processes in terms of ‘market agencing’. The agencing framework is presented through the study of the Progressive Grocer, a trade magazine that presented new ideas about the grocery business and proposed novel ‘agencements’ for American grocery stores in the early 1920s. The case shows that agencing consists of combining the agency of grocers and market devices to shape a different retail environment; that is, a new ‘agencement’ as a situated and flexible combination of market equipment and managerial logics. The paper shows how the introduction of ‘open display’ – that is, providing a better visual access to the goods while preserving service – introduced new furniture and ideas, and thus eased the transition from counter service to self-service. The first section presents the agencing framework, the empirical source, The Progressive Grocer, and the method used to analyse it. This method is labelled ‘pico-geography’. The idea is to conduct analysis on an even smaller scale than micro-geography by focusing on spatial reconfigurations that occur at the indoor and store level. The second section presents the concept of the open display and describes how it contributed to ‘re-agence’ the grocery equipment, workforce and even consumers. The third section puts this journey into perspective, revealing that, though promoted by The Progressive Grocer, it was also part of a larger reconfiguration involving several other actors. The conclusion stresses the empirical, methodological and theoretical contribution of the paper.

Working Mothers and Happy Housewives: Grocery Stores, Mothers, and The Loss of Power

Working Mothers and Happy Housewives:Grocery Stores, Mothers, and The Loss of Power Katherine Leonard Turner (bio) Rebecca Jo Plant . Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. xi + 264 pp. Notes and index. $37.50. Tracey Deutsch . Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 352 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. In two recent books, Rebecca Jo Plant and Tracey Deutsch examine the twentieth-century transformation of women's traditional roles as mothers and food shoppers. Both find that women's power and authority diminished even as women were told that their horizons and personal freedoms were expanding. Plant narrates a fierce cultural conflict over the uses of motherhood during the twentieth century. She argues that the nineteenth-century cult of motherhood lasted longer than historians have previously thought, but also that the postwar critique of motherhood had deeper roots. In the early twentieth century, women drew political and social power from their identities as mothers. "Mothers of the nation" claimed political power based on the sacrifices they had made for and of their children, particularly sons who had died during war. Mothers were martyred by the inevitable suffering of childbirth and were sainted by the transformative experience of raising children; hence they claimed moral authority over the home and community. This political and social identity had been the basis of countless and varied women's organizations, from municipal reformers to temperance reformers, from pacifists to patriots. During the 1920s, however, numerous voices began to assail this formerly unassailable identity, and the chorus of voices grew stronger until it reached a climax in the 1950s. Plant demonstrates thoroughly that "antimaternalism" was not limited to misogynists, or indeed to any one group; "their critiques could sound strikingly similar, even when fueled by radically different motives and political visions" (p. 8). Some in the 1920s painted organized mothers [End Page 106] as meddling and sanctimonious; Plant tells the fascinating story of the controversy over government-funded pilgrimages to Europe so that "gold star mothers" could visit their sons' graves. Philip Wylie's 1942 Generation of Vipers attacked "momism" with a vicious critique of American mothers as parasitic, priggish, selfish "domestic tyrants." Plant points out that, despite Wylie's "breathtaking misogyny," many female readers wrote to agree that mothers didn't deserve social adulation simply on that basis. Many women, mothers themselves, told Wylie that they had adopted a less sentimental and more "modern" approach to parenting to avoid being identified with "momism." An influential new psychological perspective suggested that American mothers had been smothering their children to the point of damaging them, inflicting lifelong guilt complexes with their martyrdom, and pushing sons into neurotic helplessness or homosexuality. Overbearing mothers were blamed for the inability of soldiers to cope mentally with the stress of battle during World War II; far from raising soldiers, mothers were now accused of permanently damaging them. Motherhood lost its martyrdom in other ways as well. The increased availability of pain relief for childbirth weakened the "martial metaphor" that had compared women's suffering in childbirth to a soldier's suffering in battle. Finally, a wave of midcentury feminist critiques (led by Betty Friedan) argued that motherhood was a hollow, stultifying, and unsatisfying life choice. Friedan drew on the psychological critique to argue that women who passed up careers for full-time mothering would find only frustration, and their children would suffer as well with a bored, neurotic mom. Plant concludes her study with Friedan and a nuanced discussion of the implications of antimaternalism. As she emphasizes throughout the book, just as widely disparate groups of women had invoked motherhood as a source of political or social power, so too widely disparate groups attacked motherhood for their own purposes. Thus Friedan and many other progressive women found themselves in agreement with misogynists such as Wylie, piping an old tune, sneering at those who embraced motherhood as a full-time "career." Plant asks, "Was it necessary to launch a full-scale assault on the notion that motherhood and homemaking could be the basis...

Building A Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century by Tracey Deutsch (review)

Building A Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century by Tracey Deutsch (review)

Tracey Deutsch. Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 337 pp. ISBN 0-8078-3327-8, $35.00 (cloth).

Tracey Deutsch. Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 337 pp. ISBN 0-8078-3327-8, $35.00 (cloth). - Volume 12 Issue 3

Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. By Tracey Deutsch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. i plus 337 pp. $35.00)

Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. By Tracey Deutsch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. i plus 337 pp. $35.00)

Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century

Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century

Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century

Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century

Building a housewife's paradise: gender, politics, and American grocery stores in the twentieth century

Supermarkets are a mundane feature in the landscape, but as Tracey Deutsch reveals, they represent a major transformation in the ways that Americans feed themselves. In her examination of the history of food distribution in the United States, Deutsch demonstrates the important roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores. Deutsch's analysis reframes shopping as labor and embeds consumption in the structures of capitalism. The supermarket, that icon of postwar American life, emerged not from straightforward consumer demand for low prices, Deutsch argues, but through government regulations, women customers' demands, and retailers' concerns with financial success and control of the shop floor. From small neighborhood stores to huge corporate chains of supermarkets, Deutsch traces the charged story of the origins of contemporary food distribution, treating topics as varied as everyday food purchases, the sales tax, postwar celebrations and critiques of mass consumption, and 1960s and 1970s urban insurrections. Demonstrating connections between women's work and the history of capitalism, Deutsch locates the origins of supermarkets in the politics of twentieth-century consumption.

Driving a Shopping Cart from STS to Business, and the Other Way Round: On the Introduction of Shopping Carts in American Grocery Stores (1936—1959)

This paper proposes to address the `does STS mean business' debate by telling the weird empirical story of the introduction of shopping carts in American grocery stores from their early beginnings in 1936 to their ubiquitous presence by the end of the 1950s, based on a systematic reading of the trade journal Progressive Grocer over the period. Through this story, the author intends to show that `business studies' may benefit from an STS-derived symmetrical look at market actors and their objects based on an `archaeology of present times'. In stressing the ambiguities of the case, he also argues that STS should study contemporary flexible forms of organizing.

Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives

genre, in its most reductive form, seemed to have conquered all. Suddenly, you walked down the aisle and, instead of the cacophony of a hundred brands, each bearing its identifying bright colors and trademarks, each arguing for its uniqueness, saw endless rows of plain white or yellow packaging with black letters: Laundry Deter gent, Beef Stew, Pinto Beans, Beer. Every week, the invasion of generic products took over a larger segment of American grocery stores. It seemed the apotheosis of the generic was on the horizon. Soon, or so it then appeared, wild variety would be tamed, and we would all be buying the same plain packages. Category had prevailed; the borders were secured. I began to imagine that the generic revolution would inevitably take over the publishing world as well and that we'd soon enter a bookstore to see shelves of identical plain yellow covers with stark black titles: Poetry, Stories, Drama, Essays, Novel. If those generic books had come to exist (and, of course, they have, even if dressed in multicolored covers with various publishers' names on them, like Norton and Heath and Macmillan), I know how I would have found Walt Whitman. He would have been in the big yel low book with Poetry on the cover. But therein lies the problem. Our impulses always tend to funnel artists into one or another genre. Most authors work in multiple genres, but over time they get aligned with one category: not only do generic instincts pigeonhole literary works, they pigeonhole authors too. Rigidity is a quality of our categorical systems, not of the writers or usually the works we put into those sys tems. Most of my graduate students are still surprised to find Whit man wrote a novel and published fiction in some of the country's best journals; his stories appeared next to those of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Most are surprised to learn how he experi mented throughout his life with mixing poetry and prose, sometimes on the same page, testing the boundaries of genre and performing typographical experiments that forced readers to engage the printed ED FOLSOM is the Roy J. Carver Profes sor of English at the University of Iowa. The author or editor of numerous books and essays on Whitman and other Amer ican writers, he edits the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and the Iowa Whitman Series at the University of Iowa Press, and he coedits the online Walt Whitman

Food and Nutrition Policy: Challenges for the 1990s

Prologue: In March 1990, Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan announced a major new initiative to improve the labeling of food products sold in American grocery stores. The changes, to be proposed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), reflect response to consumer concern about the connection between foods they eat and diseases to which they succumb. Under public pressure, government public health officials have become increasingly vocal about the diet of the American public; recent statistics show that of the ten leading causes of death in this country, six are related to diet In the U.S. Public Health Service's 1990 health objectives for the nation, seventeen specifically focused on nutrition. In this article, Sushma Palmer examines federal food and nutrition policies from a historical perspective and proposes challenges for the next decade. She finds that, although government has published food and nutrition guidelines for over a century, “progress in the food and nutrition programs of various federal agencies is impeded most notably by fragmentation, insufficient coordination, and duplication and sometimes contradiction in policies and practices.” Despite recent advances, Palmer asserts, the science of nutrition still lags behind its better-funded counterparts in other disciplines. She states, “Little short of intimate cohesion among and a singular mandate from the academic community, the private sector, and the public would stimulate [a change of course].” Palmer received a master's degree in foods and nutrition from the University of Delhi, India, and a doctorate in applied biochemistry from the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. She is associate professor of pediatrics at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. From July 1 983 until September 1989, she was director of the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) of the National Research Council (NRC), National Academy of Sciences. She served as study director for the FNB's landmark Diet and Health report and the tenth edition of the NRC's report, Recommended Daily Allowances , which were both released in 1989.