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"Citizen Coke demostrate[s] a complete lack of understanding about…the Coca-Cola system—past and present." —Ted Ryan, the Coca-Cola Company By examining “the real thing” ingredient by ingredient, this brilliant history shows how Coke used a strategy of outsourcing and leveraged free public resources, market muscle, and lobbying power to build a global empire on the sale of sugary water. Coke became a giant in a world of abundance but is now embattled in a world of scarcity, its products straining global resources and fueling crises in public health.
Winner of the 2022 IACP Award for Food Issues and Matters Finalist for the 2022 George Perkins Marsh Prize Finalist for the 2022 Hagley Prize in Business History An authoritative and eye-opening history that examines how Monsanto came to have outsized influence over our food system. Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018—but its Roundup Ready® seeds, introduced twenty-five years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us. When researchers found trace amounts of the firm’s blockbuster herbicide in breakfast cereal bowls, Monsanto faced public outcry. Award-winn...
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize Winner of the PROSE Award in United States History Hagley Prize in Business History Finalist A Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year “Vaping gets all the attention now, but Milov’s thorough study reminds us that smoking has always intersected with the government, for better or worse.” —New York Times Book Review From Jamestown to the Marlboro Man, tobacco has powered America’s economy and shaped some of its most enduring myths. The story of tobacco’s rise and fall may seem simple enough—a tale of science triumphing over corporate greed—but the truth is more complicated. After the Great Depression, g...
The rural roads that led to our planet-changing global economy ran through the American South. That region’s impact on the interconnected histories of business and ecological change is narrated here by acclaimed scholar Bart Elmore, who uses the histories of five southern firms—Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America—to investigate the environmental impact of our have-it-now, fly-by-night, buy-on-credit economy. Drawing on exclusive interviews with company executives, corporate archives, and other records, Elmore explores the historical, economic, and ecological conditions that gave rise to these five trailblazing corporations. He then considers what each has bec...
Supersizing Urban America reveals how the US government has been, and remains, a major contributor to America s obesity epidemic. Government policies, targeted food industry advertising, and other factors helped create and reinforce fast food consumption in America s urban communities. Historian Chin Jou uncovers how predominantly African-American neighborhoods went from having no fast food chains to being deluged. She lays bare the federal policies that helped to subsidize the expansion of the fast food industry in America s cities and explains how fast food companies have deliberately and relentlessly marketed to urban, African-American consumers. These developments are a significant factor in why Americans, especially those in urban, low-income, minority communities, have become disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic."
This study analyzes the influence of big business on the economic, political, and social structure of twentieth-century America. The author examines the development of a mass production and consumption economy and argues that the corporation became a key institutional force in the United States.
"Captivating and brilliantly conceived. . . [The Hamlet Fire] will provide readers with insights into our current national politics." —The Washington Post A "gifted writer" (Chicago Tribune) uses a long forgotten factory fire in small-town North Carolina to show how cut-rate food and labor have become the new American norm For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses searching for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Food Products. The company paid its workers a dollar above the minimum wage to stand in...
Consuming with a conscience is one of the fastest growing forms of political participation worldwide. Every day we make decisions about how to spend our money and, for the socially conscious, these decisions matter. Political consumers "buy green" for the environment or they "buy pink" to combat breast cancer. They boycott Taco Bell to support migrant workers or Burger King to save the rainforest. But can we overcome the limitations of consumer identity, the conservative pull of consumer choice, co-optation by corporate marketers, and other pitfalls of consumer activism in order to marshal the possibilities of consumer power? Can we, quite literally, shop for change? Shopping for Change brin...
The Standard Oil Company emerged out of obscurity in the 1860s to capture 90 percent of the petroleum refining industry in the United States during the Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller, the company’s founder, organized the company around an almost religious dedication to principles of efficiency. Economic success masked the dark side of efficiency as Standard Oil dumped oil waste into public waterways, filled the urban atmosphere with acrid smoke, and created a consumer safety crisis by selling kerosene below congressional standards. Local governments, guided by a desire to favor the interests of business, deployed elaborate engineering solutions to tackle petroleum pollution at taxpayer expense rather than heed public calls to abate waste streams at their source. Only when refinery pollutants threatened the health of the Great Lakes in the twentieth century did the federal government respond to a nascent environmental movement. Organized around the four classical elements at the core of Standard Oil’s success (earth, air, fire, and water), Refining Nature provides an ecological context for the rise of one of the most important corporations in American history.
This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.