Cold War and the US Food System: Culture, Gender, and Consumerism in Postwar America

냉전시대와 미국의 푸드시스템: 전후 미국의 문화, 젠더, 소비주의

This essay investigates how the industrialization of the US food system was closely linked to US foreign policy, gender issues, and the rise of consumerism in the Cold War era. While many scholars in American studies and women's studies over the past few decades have paid increasing attention to the interrelationship of gender politics and the media industry in shaping US domesticity, they have seldom studied how and why reading gender issues in relation to environmental discourse in general and the industrialized US food system in particular can help us better understand the complex relationship between environmental and social problems that we are facing today, both collectively and individually. In this context, this essay shows how US national politics have not only created the ideal of American domesticity that promotes traditional gender roles and consumerism at the expense of gender equality, but also negatively affected women's somatic and mental health writ large. By closely examining the cultural implications of Nixon's and Khrushchev's Kitchen Debate in the 1950s alongside newspapers, photographs, advertisements, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), I argue that reading Cold War consumer culture in relation to the US food system leads readers to see the invisible links between gender politics and today's environmental and social problems in comparative and global contexts.