Food Globalization Today

The modern supermarket, a retail format pioneered in the United States in the 1930s, above all by Michael Cullen's King Kullen chain, founded in 1930 on Long Island, and spread internationally after World War II, became the primary point of contact between ordinary consumers and an increasingly globalized food supply. Contemporary supermarkets typically stock produce sourced from dozens of countries simultaneously, offering shoppers in temperate northern climates fresh strawberries in January (grown in Chile or Mexico), bananas from Ecuador, and salmon farmed in Norway or Chile, a level of year-round variety and geographic reach that would have been unimaginable, and in earlier centuries would have required the resources of royalty, to achieve.