The book argues that the invention and popularization of the shopping cart from the 1940s onward provided the final link in the chain for the new system of industrialized food flow. First in the United States and then around the world, these carts enabled supermarkets to move their goods even faster off their shelves—in a sense, completing the revolution in mechanized farming, electric refrigeration, and road distribution that had occurred during the 1930s. Yet the cart, a basic machine among modernity’s new systems, also recast the work of food shopping in ways that attracted ambivalence and ... More

The book argues that the invention and popularization of the shopping cart from the 1940s onward provided the final link in the chain for the new system of industrialized food flow. First in the United States and then around the world, these carts enabled supermarkets to move their goods even faster off their shelves—in a sense, completing the revolution in mechanized farming, electric refrigeration, and road distribution that had occurred during the 1930s. Yet the cart, a basic machine among modernity’s new systems, also recast the work of food shopping in ways that attracted ambivalence and unease. In urging customers to buy all their groceries at once, it radically accelerated the consumerist experience of self-service, creating a new mode of accelerated shopping on impulse that often felt, ironically, far from “convenient.” Above all, as a host of U.S. cultural responses have suggested, the sheer uniformity of the shopping cart has unsettled the individualistic rhetoric of the supermarket industry. Increasingly omnipresent in online shopping, its basic form, defined as a void waiting to be filled, uncomfortably reveals the parallels that exist between human and nonhuman participants in the modern circuit of food flow.