Dissertation Research: Trucking Country: Food, Farms, and Freight in America's Rural Industrial Landscape, 1945-1975

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This is a Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant that explores how systems of mass food production and consumption came to depend on flexible highway transportation after World War II, transforming the lives and landscapes of rural Americans in the process. At the end of World War II the booming growth of suburbs, supermarkets, and highways created the conditions for a streamlined food economy. Food processors and supermarkets teamed up to rationalize the system for getting fresh food to suburban consumers. This dissertation argues that trucks and highways provided the flexible infrastructure that made this rationalization possible, connecting super-productive farms and high-tech food processors to suburban supermarkets. The dissertation uses three case studies (milk, beef, and frozen vegetables) to explore how and why these changes in America's food distribution network came about. Furthermore, long-haul trucks were part of an intricate web of technologies, businesses, and political networks that not only helped to feed Americans in new ways, but also helped to transform rural landscapes that had once been dependent on railways. Trucking bound together federal agricultural experts, food processors and supermarkets, truck manufacturers, and rural working-class truck drivers in a political and economic system dedicated to moving food smoothly to suburban consumers. "Trucking Country" seeks to bridge the gap between the history of technology and the history of agriculture by looking at the flow of food from producers to consumers. The dissertation contributes to studies of transportation, technological systems, and industrialization, which have constructed an incomplete history of industrial America by generally ignoring rural technologies and the period after WWII. Agricultural and rural historians, meanwhile, have tended to treat technological change as an autonomous force that deterministically reconstructs rural life. While historians of technology generally seek to understand technological change within a broad social context, historians of agricultural technology have generally focused only on technologies of production on farms. "Trucking Country" opens up the "black box" of agricultural technology while simultaneously pushing the history of technology farther afield. Importantly, this integration leads to a significant contribution to "mainstream" American history. Studying the flow of food between producers and consumers provides an empirically rich understanding of postwar suburban consumer culture and its consequences for the rest of the nation. The dissertation is thus intended to reach a broad audience of readers who have yet to see a rigorous scholarly treatment of the history of trucking in America. "Trucking Country" would furthermore make significant contributions to contemporary political debates about industrial agribusiness and transportation policies. An NSF grant would support the achievement of these goals by providing funds for archival research that would otherwise be impossible. Visits will be made to collect manuscript materials and oral histories regarding dairy, beef, and frozen food processing, agricultural organizations, federal agricultural transportation policymaking, and the trucking industry.