WHITE BREAD
A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf
Aaron Bobrow-Strain
BEACON PRESS BOSTON
’Tis a little wonderful . . .
the strange multitude of little Things required in . . .
Providing [and] Producing . . .
this one Article of Bread.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION Bread and Power
1 Untouched by Human Hands:
Dreams of Purity and Contagion
2 The Invention of Sliced Bread:
Dreams of Control and Abundance
3 The Staff of Death:
Dreams of Health and Discipline
4 Vitamin Bread Boot Camp:
Dreams of Strength and Defense
5 White Bread Imperialism:
Dreams of Peace and Security
6 How White Bread Became White Trash:
Dreams of Resistance and Status
CONCLUSION Beyond Good Bread
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
PREFACE
And which side does an object turn toward dreams? … It is the side worn through by habit and patched with cheap maxims.
—Walter Benjamin
IS THIS STUFF EVEN FOOD?
Supermarket white bread can pick up difficult bits of broken glass, clean typewriter keys, and absorb motor oil spills. Squeezed into a ball, it bounces on the counter. Pressed into my palate and revealed in a big gummy grin, it gets giggles from my kids, who can also use it to sculpt animal shapes. But should they eat it? Among its two dozen ingredients, the loaf on my desk contains diammonium phosphate, a yeast nutrient and flame retardant produced when ammonia and phosphoric acid react. Is this stuff even food?
Be careful how you answer that question. Perhaps more than any other food in the United States, what you think of sliced white bread says a lot about who you are. Over the past hundred years, it has served as a touchstone for the fears and aspirations of racial eugenicists, military strategists, social reformers, food gurus, and gourmet tastemakers. The 1960s counterculture made white bread an icon of all that was wrong with Amerika, and 1970s style arbiter Diana Vreeland famously proclaimed, “People who eat white bread have no dreams”—by which she meant that they don’t dream the right dreams, the up-to-date, hip dreams. Because, through its long history, few foods have embodied so many dreams as industrial white bread, particularly during times of recession, war, and social upheaval.
In writing this book, I set out to uncover the social dreams (and nightmares) played out in battles over industrial white bread. I wanted to understand how one food could inspire so much affection and so much animosity; how something so ordinary could come to symbolize both the apex of modern progress and the specter of physical decay, the promise of a better future to come and America’s fall from small-town agrarian virtue. And I wanted to know how those battles over bread shaped America and its fraught relationship with food.
This turned out to be quite difficult. As important as it has been—both as sustenance and symbol—bread is not something that typically gets written about in diaries, described in letters, or remembered in oral histories. As social reformer Eleanor Bang reflected in 1951: “Bread? Of course. There it is for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner in a rhythm as regular as the ticking of our electric clocks—so regular we’d notice it only if it stopped.”1 Unlike other bewitching icons of industrial eating that mark the past century and a half—unlike Twinkies, TV dinners, Jell-O, and Jet-Puffed anything—bread was, and is, just bread. Of course. Industrial white bread may have been as much a marvel of modern industry and space age food chemistry as any other product, but it was also the ultimate background food, rarely discussed—except when it went wrong.
As a result, uncovering bread’s place in American society required wide-ranging and creative detective work. My sources range from the letters of early twentieth-century food reformers to the records of Allied occupation forces in postwar Japan (detailing how teaching Japanese schoolchildren to eat white bread would improve their “democratic spirit”). Finding this material took me to far-flung libraries and archives where I read the personal papers of social reformers, advertising executives, food scientists, and industrial designers as well as the records of numerous government agencies. I traced the early history of industrial baking at the Brooklyn and New York historical societies, and spent a week in Manhattan (Kansas) immersed in the archives of the country’s oldest baking science school. I visited Chillicothe, Missouri (the “Home of Sliced Bread”), and Mexico City (the home of Grupo Bimbo, one of the world’s most powerful industrial baking conglomerates). Then I pored over more than a hundred years of bread advertisements and women’s magazine advice columns. Perhaps most importantly, small-town newspapers, consumer marketing studies, oral histories, and community cookbooks provided invaluable insight into the silent space between expert advice and daily diet. And, through all this, I began to understand that dreams of good bread and fears of bad bread are not innocent. They channel much bigger social concerns.
This is a book about one commodity—industrial white bread—that has played an incredibly important, and largely unnoticed, role in American politics, diet, culture, and food reform movements, but it is not another story of how one food “saved the world.” Rather, it’s a history of the countless social reformers, food experts, industry executives, government officials, diet gurus, and ordinary eaters who have thought that getting Americans to eat the right bread (or avoid the wrong bread) could save the world—or at least restore the country’s moral, physical, and social fabric. Sadly, this turned out to be the difficult story of how, time and time again, well-meaning efforts to change the country through its bread ended up reinforcing forms of race, class, and gender exclusion—even when they also achieved much-needed improvements in America’s food system.
Anyone paying attention to the rising cries for slow, local, organic, and healthy food today—the growing demands for food justice and restored community that mark our own exciting moment—will find the trials and tribulations of 150 years of battles over bread surprisingly contemporary. In them, you will see all the contradictory expressions of our own food concerns: uplifting visions of the connection between good food and healthy communities, insightful critiques of unsustainable status quos, great generosity of spirit, and earnest desires to make the world a better place—but also rampant elitism, smug paternalism, misdirected anxieties, sometimes neurotic obsessions with health, narrow visions of what counts as “good food,” and open discrimination against people who choose “bad food.” Fluffy white industrial bread may be about as far from the ideals of slow, local, organic, and health food reformers as you can get today. But, in many ways, we owe its very existence to a string of just as well-meaning efforts to improve the way America ate. Perhaps learning this history can help us avoid the pitfalls of the past.
INTRODUCTION: BREAD AND POWER
THE BREAD QUESTION
I don’t remember exactly when my bread baking crossed the line from hobby to obsession. The time I nearly destroyed my oven by lining it with construction bricks might have been a warning sign. Maybe it was when bubbling, microbe-oozing jars of sourdough starter crowded out the food in my fridge. I’m not sure. But I do remember exactly when I first thought about the political life of bread.
Twenty-five and living in Tucson, I had agreed in a fit of hubris to bake twenty large loaves of French country bread for a friend’s wedding. I had one cheap oven and no electric mixer. This was the mid-1990s and my friends and I were working as activists and community volunteers. “Low-paid” wouldn’t quite do justice to our income brac
ket—the wedding dinner would be soup and bread. Lots of bread. I was making the soup too, but, in my mind, everything depended on the bread. The bread would turn a soup course into a meal. A kind of leavened alchemy would complete the table; simplicity would become celebration.
The bride and groom were devout Christians, and bread radiated spiritual connection for them. For me, it evoked community and sharing. The word “companion” itself came into English from the Latin roots com and pan—“with bread.” To share bread, I thought, was to tap some ancient chord of togetherness. I wanted to knead all that sweet, golden emotion into my dough, and got myself up at three a.m. to do it.
By afternoon my thoughts had darkened. With only soup and bread on the wedding menu, I could not let the bread supply fail. The clock was ticking on twenty loaves, and, as finishing on time seemed less and less possible, visions of fellowship turned to cold calculation. If one emotion has defined humans’ relation to food over the millennia, I thought as the dinner hour loomed, it’s not pleasure or companionship. It’s anxiety. And if there is one food that has crystallized anxiety about food, across much of the world and in many different eras, it is bread.
I had only a slim grasp on world food history back then, but it was enough to know that unpopular bakers—maybe even ones who didn’t finish bread on time for important weddings—were wont to find themselves the subject of mob violence, late-night beatings, and unexpected ambushes. When the groom poked his head into my apartment “just to see how things are going,” I could only think of an old English engraving I had seen somewhere. It pictured a pair of bakers confined in wooden stocks surrounded by townspeople, jeering and brandishing hooks. The complete inscription escaped me, but there was definitely something in it about preparing a hemp noose for “the Jolly Oven-Rakers.”
I wondered how many loaves short on their wedding order those bakers had been to deserve such treatment. Do they hang bakers in Tucson?
My brick-lined oven fit only two loaves at a time and it had been cranking on high for six hours. Rick, my upstairs neighbor, lurked outside my open apartment door, dropping casual comments along the lines of “Boy, is it hot upstairs,” “I can’t figure out why my air-conditioner can’t keep up today,” and “My floor sure seems hot to the touch today.” “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread until you return to the ground,” I may or may not have quoted back at him.
In the end, however, I had twenty loaves ready just in time for dinner. They weren’t cool enough to develop a full flavor, but they were crisp-crusted and filled with bright holes. Time, temperature, and the sugar magic of Saccharomyces cerevisiae had turned pallid lumps of flour, water, and salt into something transcendent.
The soup, on the other hand, was terrible. If I didn’t get stoned or clapped in irons, it was thanks only to the bread.
These may sound like the ravings of a sleep-deprived baker, but as I would learn years later, the details bore me out. There is a reason why the word “bread” means “food in general” in so many languages and why it has carried so much weight for so many people. “The bread question”—how to make bread, whether there is enough, how much it costs, and whether it is good enough—has haunted social and political life for millennia.1
Despite the appeal of meat-centered “caveman diets” among denizens of the twenty-first century, even our late Paleolithic ancestors made something like bread. Since then, the lives of large swathes of the world’s population have depended on it. The world’s first class structures formed around bread distribution. Armies marched with it and formal religious ritual revolved around it. If I was desperately scrambling because I thought bread was important for a wedding celebration in Tucson, at least I had very good company.
Archeological evidence from Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic suggests that people were grinding plants into flour to make crude flat breads as early as 28,000 BCE. By 11,000 BCE, emmer and einkorn wheat along with barley were cultivated across Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant (modern-day Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel). There, Neolithic groups in the gray zone between hunter-gathering and settled agriculture subsisted largely on gritty bread cakes baked on hearthstones or in hot ashes.2
Although the degree to which bread formed the central component of human diet varied greatly by region, epoch, and social hierarchy, the biblical proverb simply didn’t hold up even in the time and place of its writing: man did subsist on bread alone, or at least fairly close to it in the ancient Middle East. Around 2500 BCE, Gilgamesh, god-king of the Sumerians and hero of the world’s first great epic literature, was described sitting down to what was probably one of the most common meals for kings and serfs alike for the better part of four millennia from North Africa to the steppes of Russia, from Egypt to the Indus River: bread and beer, both made from the same base of fermented barley dough.3
Not surprisingly, the bread supply has long been a crucial concern of states and rulers. Subjects of the Assyrian Empire ate a mixed diet of legumes, onions, greens, and meat from sheep and goats, but social order revolved around a centrally controlled bread ration. In Pharaonic Egypt, state workers received wages in bread and bread grains, and soldiers were known for eating so much bread—a ration of four pounds per day—that Greeks called Egyptians artophagoi, “the bread eaters.” Rome was no different, building its vast imperial reach on a foundation of sophisticated bakeries and highly developed bread distribution systems.4
During the European Middle Ages, bread remained central to culture, religion, and survival. In thirteenth-century Britain, for example, workers on feudal manors ate 70–80 percent of their daily calories in the form of bread and cheese. Beer, essentially liquid bread, made up much of the remaining 20–30 percent, with meat, fruit, and vegetables appearing as rare seasonal treats. During periods when labor was scarce and wages higher, such as after the great population decline caused by the Black Death, Europeans ate significantly more meat, but bread still anchored the diet in most places and vegetables were sparse.5
The advent of modernity didn’t do much to change Europeans’ reliance on bread. Residents of seventeenth-century Sienna consumed between two and three pounds of bread per person every day. Under Louis XIV, Parisian workers subsisted on three and a half pounds of bread a day, and not much else. Speaking very broadly, we can say that from the 1600s to as late as the 1950s, Europeans received between 40 to 60 percent of their daily calories in the form of bread.6
Even in the United States, a country big enough to grow almost anything, bread remained central. As one observer of the early Republic wrote, American “wage-earners … were probably better fed than laborers in Europe.” Still, “they rarely tasted fresh meat more than once a week. … They ate bread, one of the cheapest sources of energy.”7
From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Americans got, on average, 25–30 percent of their daily calories from bread, a figure that began to dip significantly only in the late 1960s. During times of war or recession (or in the ranks of the poor), the percentage rose even higher.8
Under conditions like these, governments perceived as neglecting the bread supply faced mob violence, bread riots, and worse. Marie Antoinette may never have actually said, “Let them eat cake” in response to her subjects’ demand for bread, but the French monarchy’s neglect of the bread supply did pave the path to Madame Guillotine.
In October 1789, it was French women’s outrage over, among other things, the monarchy’s lavish dining during a time of high bread prices that tipped the balance in favor of the masses. The Revolution had begun several months earlier with the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but the king and queen, lying low in Versailles, had remained largely insulated from the upheavals. Then, on October 5, six thousand women, marching on the monarchs’ summer residence armed with lances, pitchforks, and muskets, changed that. A number of different offenses triggered the march, but when the women reached Versailles, their
anger shifted to bread. Chanting, “Bread! Bread! Bread!” and facing little resistance from sympathetic National Guardsmen, the women ransacked the palace. They seized and distributed the royal bread stores and forced the king and queen to return to Paris, where they lived under virtual house arrest until their executions three years later. As the royal carriage left Versailles for the last time, thousands of women surrounded it, triumphantly brandishing loaves of bread speared on the tips of bayonets. 9
Across the channel, English peasants and workers also demanded bread, but where French officials’ efforts to maintain a moral economy of bread had collapsed, with disastrous results, British rulers maintained firmer control. From 1266 to 1863, the English Assize of Bread strictly regulated bread sales and bakery profits. But even that system wasn’t perfect, and bread riots regularly erupted during moments of waning faith in the benevolence of government.10
The modern English word “lord” still carries this political history in its bones. Lord derives from the Old English title “hláford”— “keeper of the bread”—a privileged status, but also a perpetually anxious one. Ruling has always meant a tense dance between the power of bread keepers and the demands of bread eaters.
The dance was even harder for bakers. Throughout history, the village baker was not the jolly, romantic figure we picture today. Not only was the baker the target of intense government regulation, but his almost absolute control over people’s sustenance made him socially suspect. Accused—often with good reason—of false weights, grain hoarding, hunger profiteering, and cutting flour with cheap whiteners like chalk, alum, or borax, bakers earned dubious reputations over the centuries. When things went wrong in town—even things unrelated to bread—the baker often got the blame.
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