5. America remained self-reliant for food through the first half of the 20th century
America shipped food products across its expanse, its borders with Mexico and Canada, and to overseas trade partners, but imported relatively little. One exception, bananas, grew steadily in consumption rates, nearly all of them imported from South America. In the early 20th century, large cannery operations began to purchase food from farmers, preserved it in cans, and sold canned food to distributors. More links began to appear in the chain connecting food from farm to table. Earlier, food manufacturing emerged in the United States. The meatpackers which once simply dressed animals for sale to butchers and grocers introduced their own products. Armour, Heinz, LeSueur, and many others were widely known brands in the first decade of the 20th century.
In 1925 Wonder Bread was introduced, bread arriving at markets already sliced and wrapped. By 1930 it was known nationwide. Wonder Bread was often served with Peter Pan, a peanut butter introduced in 1920 by Swift and Company, and sold in cans until World War II. In American communities, the concept of large grocery stores selling all foods under a single roof appeared with the first Piggly Wiggly store in 1916. Safeway and Kroger soon followed suit, the latter having existed as a local market serving Cincinnati since 1883. Americans’ food supply went from farm, to processors, to distributors, to stores, shipped by trains, trucks, barges, and ships. By the advent of World War II, the supply chain was complex, and vulnerable to disruption at many points.