White Bread

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

  This wasn’t just an East-West comparison. By the mid-1950s, Americans could increasingly compare their supermarket bread to the golden products of Western European bakeries. Subsidized by Marshall Plan money, U.S. tourists had begun traveling to France in record numbers. And they returned from those tours with stories of astonishingly good bread, sparking a fad for French bread in the United States.22

  Not everyone in the United States had access to French bread, which began appearing in big-city stores, or would want to pay the hefty premium price, but anyone who read could form an opinion about the difference between American white bread and its European counterparts. Nearly every newspaper and lifestyle magazine ran stories about the French bread craze during the mid-1950s, and a complicated message emerged from those articles. All agreed that French bread tasted divine. Its arrival in America was something to celebrate. At the same time, there was something off about French bread: the very hedonistic qualities that made it popular also made it suspect. American industrial bread might taste like doughy hot air compared to a good baguette, but American bread embodied strength and fortitude in a way that the French stuff didn’t. And for better or worse, in a dangerous world, system and fortitude had to trump taste.

  The once-pressing question of whether France’s bread had, as one woman remarked in a letter to the Los Angeles Times, caused the country to “lose vim and vigor” in the face of Nazi invasion didn’t concern U.S. observers so much anymore.23 Rather, it was the whole French food system that seemed off. As articles in Time and other national publications concluded, the French baking industry had too many inefficient subsidies, lax sanitation regulations, archaic distribution networks, and monopolistic guilds. France needed industrial baking and American-style competition.

  When ergotism, a rare form of hallucination-inducing poisoning caused by fungus-infected rye, sickened two hundred residents of the small village of Pont-Saint-Esprit during the summer of 1951, U.S. media reveled disproportionately in the sensational story. Tellingly, almost every story on the outbreak instructed U.S. readers that ergotism was a medieval disease, a remnant of a scarier age before industrial baking, and all congratulated American industrial bakers for single-handedly eradicating ergotism through vitamin enrichment. These claims were not exactly true on several levels—but that didn’t matter: Tales of bread-poisoned peasants, convinced they were jet planes, leaping from windows and rumors that “the village idiot had hexed the baker” seemed to confirm the larger sense of French baking: it was irrational and archaic. French foodways were “charming” and something to “keep … happily in mind while we survey most of the other half of mankind,” one observer noted, but certainly no model for global security.24

  This attitude didn’t just emanate from Francophobes. Francophiles also replicated the divide between taste and security, pleasure and fortitude. An article by New York Times food editor Janet Nickerson exemplified this trend. Pitting American white bread against its European counterparts, Nickerson argued that opposition to American white bread divided into two camps, one based on health and the other on flavor. The epicurean critics held a special place in her heart; indeed, they were incontrovertibly correct. Fluffy, limp-crusted, and bland industrial white bread couldn’t hold a candle to crisp, nutty-flavored French and Italian breads. Alas—and one can almost hear her sigh echoing across the decades—“health values deal with fact while flavor considerations deal with opinion.” Thus, in the end, readers were better off buying industrial white bread, for their family’s health.25

  Armed with this confident and urgent vision of good food, America set out to transform the world’s bread, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. U.S. corporations, with government support, built American-style industrial bakeries in Iran and struggled (without much success) for similar footholds in Western Europe. But what happened when the iron triangle of wheat, industrial baking, and global security set down in countries where bread was not the staple food? The results were far more complicated than both proponents and critics of American industrial foodways acknowledge, as the case of Japan reveals.

  RATIONALIZING RICE EATERS

  In the early 1950s, U.S.-trained public health officials and agribusiness representatives combined forces to spread the gospel of white bread to the conquered rice eaters of Japan. Their efforts—particularly the targeting of Japanese schoolchildren’s palates through school lunch programs—are frequently held up as the ultimate example of U.S-backed agribusiness forcing its industrial foods on defenseless populations, of the premeditated destruction of healthy, “holistic” eating.26 But the story is quite a bit more complicated than that, not least because the Japanese taste for white bread long predates the end of WWII. Indeed, occupation officials under the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) faced an imperial conundrum: Japan welcomed white bread and industrial baking technology with open arms, but fiercely resisted cultural assumptions about the nutritional and political superiority of a white bread diet.27 This two-sided response divided occupation officials, creating room for debate about white bread’s role in securing the Asian front against Communism. While some officials argued for rebuilding Japan on a foundation of rice and fish protein, others insisted on bread and milk.

  Japan had been home to a small but flourishing baking industry since the late nineteenth century, with white bread serving as a popular novelty food and sometimes status symbol.28 Indeed, occupation officials quickly discovered that the most forceful complaint levied by the Japanese against U.S.-supplied bread was that it was not white enough. As one fifty-year-old housewife polled by SCAP sociologists in 1950 recalled, “We have always liked bread before the war, and always ate it on Sundays. So we can get used to it [as a new staple], but if it is not white bread we will be very unhappy about it.”29

  After the devastation of war, however, bread of any color was nothing to scoff at. The final years of the war had been a nutritional disaster for the islands’ population, as Japan lost control over food-producing territories abroad. The average weight of Japanese children plummeted and even affluent children suffered marked deficiencies of vitamins B, C, and D. After the war, the United States had far greater sympathy for starving white Europeans than it did for the Japanese, and the great food aid machinery doled out stingy rations to the East until the crisis in Europe was resolved. Thus, early school lunch programs consisted of less than an ounce of dry milk per child, thin miso broth, scavenged military surplus rations, and whatever vegetables parents could provide. Schools struggled to meet their goal of five hundred calories per child.30

  When, in 1949, officials could finally announce, “Owing to the goodwill of SCAP, the complete lunch program will be carried out by providing each child with pure white bread and butter,” one hundred grams of bread per child twenty days a month at a heavily subsidized price looked extremely good. Children protested at the “odious flavor” of many SCAP-imported foods—especially dry milk, which students flat out refused to drink—but white bread was popular. Students and parents overwhelmingly praised the school lunch program and lobbied for its continuation.31

  At the same time, Japanese consumers balked at the idea that bread could sustain a nation, despite the fact that, even before the war, Japanese leaders had tried to connect wheat diets with modernization and military might.32 Sounding not unlike a European American complaining about sushi, one housewife spelled out the problem: “With a bread diet, one becomes hungry immediately; with a rice diet it lasts longer.” “With bread alone,” another housewife bemoaned, “people like my husband, who does carpentry work, get tired.” Although, thanks to subsidized ration coupons, 93 percent of the islands’ population ate bread once a day and the majority told pollsters that they enjoyed it, few would choose bread over rice if given a choice.33

  This attitude generated debate among occupation officials, public health officers, and agribusiness representatives. From early on in the occupation, public health officials—whose cultural understandings o
f what constituted a “real meal” had a tendency to mix freely with their understanding of scientific nutrition—saw the occupation as a watershed chance to “rationalize” and “improve” the Japanese by liberating them from their polished rice staple. Officials’ frustration and disappointment are palpable in documents complaining of the inability to provide a “complete” or “real” lunch for Japanese school-children—by which they meant that they could not provide bread and butter along with what they recognized as a more culturally appropriate table of miso stew, fish protein, and vegetables.34

  Only when school districts finally had the flour, baking facilities, and cooking fuel to produce bread would they deem their program a true success—the school lunch program had much loftier goals than mere calorie distribution. Its larger mission was to “correct” the Japanese diet while fostering “the scientification of the Japanese kitchen; [and the] permeating of democratic thought.” “Democratic spirit,” SCAP headquarters insisted, could be nurtured in school cafeterias through the “substitution of reason and scientific practices in place of local customs and superstitions regarding cooking practices.”35 Propagating American meals was part of a strategy of forging civilized citizens, and without bread—the perceived core of a civilized diet—a local school official complained, how can we teach these lessons to our children?36

  In 1950, J. L. Locke, a U.S. milling industry representative, summed up these cultural assumptions in an appeal to “improv[e] the health and attitude of the Japanese people by supplementing their diet with enriched white bread”: “There is some reason to believe that a change in diet might so change the health and attitude of that warlike people that we could live with them in improved peace and harmony.” Locke’s self-interested motives were transparent, and occupation officials, hoping to develop a domestic milling industry in Japan, roundly rejected the U.S. milling industry’s appeals.37 But in many ways they accepted the basic premise of Locke’s argument. The occupation offered a historic opportunity to transition Japan toward wheat, and this, in turn, had important political ramifications. As SCAP commander general Douglas MacArthur wrote in 1950, finding a reliable substitute (that is, wheat) for rice was a key to “block[ing] the rapacious encroachment of Communism” in the region.38 In 1958 Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson visited Japanese schools, where he reported seeing “kiddies at their desks—each kiddie … with a big wheat roll made of American-grown wheat.” In Benson’s account of the trip, Japanese schoolchildren eating wheat wasn’t merely a gift for U.S. farmers. It was a good sign for world peace.39

  An age-old belief in the moral and physiological superiority of wheat bread had found a new home in Cold War rhetoric: the conservative columnist George Sokolsky, for example, worried that rice would not fortify Asia against Communist incursions, and urged the government to deploy America’s genius for advertising in the service of shifting Japan toward more vital foods. To support this idea, Sokolsky pointed to the popular radio adventure character Jack Armstrong, “the All American Boy,” who so effectively cemented connections between fortitude and Wheaties in the 1930s.40 This, in turn, might have reminded readers of the central plotline of many Jack Armstrong shows: the handsome, wheat-fueled All-American Boy travels to an exotic, non-Western land where he accomplishes heroic feats unimaginable to the natives.

  Reporting on an eleven-fold increase in Japanese wheat consumption during the occupation, a widely reprinted 1957 news story gave this plot a new twist: thanks to the presence of bread in Japanese school lunches, “Japan’s youth is literally outgrowing and outweighing its parents.” This effect could also be observed in Japanese beauty pageants, where bread was producing “long-limbed beauties.”41

  Although white bread remained popular, most Japanese were not so convinced that they owed their improved lives to it. U.S.-sponsored bread subsidies, school lunch programs, bread festivals, baking classes, advertising campaigns, and sandwich recipe contests had only marginal impact. Bread production increased dramatically during the 1950s, but the association of bread with vigor and civilization did not stick. Even the founder of one of the country’s largest postwar bakeries—a pioneering force behind the Americanization of Japanese baking—complained in 1967, “I find myself the only one in my family who stubbornly sticks to eating bread. … My children, who went off to study overseas, have come home and now won’t touch anything but rice. What’s a father to do?”42

  Officials connected with the USDA and farm lobby continued to present wheat exports and bread habits as central to peace, but others wavered. By the 1960s, talk of transitioning Japan to a wheat diet had faded, and rice supplies topped the list of food security concerns. Wheat exports and American bakery technology transfer continued, but with fewer of the trappings of a civilizing mission. The association between American bread habits and military strength was durable, but not unshakable.43

  In corn tortilla-eating Mexico, however, a new paradigm for food power was taking shape. It would replace the focus on acute famine relief with a longer-term emphasis on tackling problems of poverty and agricultural productivity. Born out of a specific combination of U.S. and Mexican government interests, the new paradigm would eventually spread throughout the world, helping to cement associations between industrial eating, economic development, and social stability.

  REVOLUTIONARY BREAD

  One of the most memorable photographic images of the Mexican Revolution depicts Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa, surrounded by rough peasant soldiers, eating breakfast at Mexico City’s elegant Sanborn’s Café. The two leaders have just hammered out a truce and triumphantly occupied the capital. They appear dazzled by camera flashes, and their barefoot troops, accepting service from tuxedoed waiters, evince a mixture of pride and discomfort. Although Zapata and Villa’s sojourn at the center of Mexican government lasted less than a year, the image of them sprawled in the capital’s most refined palace of aristocratic dining has endured in national memory for almost one hundred years. More than any other single image, it seemed to crystallize the revolution’s challenge to class and racial hierarchies. What usually gets forgotten about that famous breakfast, though, is the menu. The generals and their troops didn’t eat corn tortillas and beans that December morning in 1914; they ate sweet white rolls.44

  Although corn tortillas never risked displacement from the center of Mexico’s diet, white bread has been a fixture in the country since the earliest days of Spanish conquest. And for just as long, eating it has been an act of social positioning. As historian Jeffrey Pilcher explained, in colonial Mexico “Creole gentlemen … paraded their status within New Spain’s racial hierarchy by wearing ruffled collars and eating wheat bread. One 18th-century English visitor to the remote southern state of Chiapas even noted that aspiring gentlemen would stand conspicuously in their doorways, ‘to see and be seen … shaking the crumbs of bread from their clothes.’ ”45

  If anything, the status of white wheat bread increased after independence, particularly during the late nineteenth-century dictatorship of Porfirio DÍaz. With the regime’s governing ideology of white supremacy and avid emulation of European fashions, bread baking boomed under DÍaz. The “French-style” bolillo roll emerged as an edible incarnation of Mexico’s progress. Reflecting on “the Future of the Hispanic American Nations,” prominent Porfirian senator Francisco Bulnes gave the old preference for bread a modern spin grounded in the emerging “science” of racial improvement. “The race of wheat is the only truly progressive one … maize has been the eternal pacifier of America’s indigenous races and the foundation of their refusal to become civilized.” While U.S. food reformers inspired by Grahamism tried to suppress enflamed passion with whole wheat diets, Pilcher notes, late nineteenth-century Mexican elites “sought the opposite effect, to ignite vigor in the Indian masses through the consumption of [white] wheat.”46

  The Mexican Revolution of 1910 toppled Porfirio DÍaz and challenged the privileges of the country’s light-skinned aristocracy, but
the social dualism of modern wheat bread and backwards corn tortillas proved more immutable. Intellectuals and artists of the post-revolutionary period like Octavio Paz and Diego Rivera waxed eloquent about corn, casting it as the embodiment of Mexico’s authentic, pre-Hispanic cultural essence. But for post-revolutionary rulers and their working-class cadres, wheat still symbolized the country’s urban, industrial future.

  Robert Weis, a historian of Mexican baking, argues that by 1929, white bread—particularly bolillos—had become a key symbol of the revolution’s promise to ordinary consumers.47 Heavily subsidized by the government, white bread baking boomed. Even President Lázaro Cárdenas—who revived the revolutionary spirit of Zapata and Villa between 1934 and 1940 with sweeping land reforms, anti-imperialist rhetoric, and the expropriation of foreign oil companies—preached the superiority of wheat bread.48

  There was only one problem. Even as World War II ended, Mexico was still very much a peasant country without the capacity to supply a large urban industrial workforce with cheap bread. In the country’s traditional wheat-growing regions, overtaxed soils produced meager crops and declining yields. New farmland in the north, opened up for wheat cultivation by ambitious government irrigation projects, offered better prospects, but endemic plant disease—a plague of black stem rust—continued to cripple production.49

  Meanwhile, in the cities, technology for turning wheat into bread had not advanced much since the eighteenth century. Even the capital city supported only one large industrial bakery—la PanaderÍa Ideal—well into the 1930s, and the Ideal Bakery certainly didn’t live up to its name: thanks to antiquated wrapping equipment, Ideal loaves tended to reach customers’ hands covered in mold. As a 1939 survey revealed, despite the promises of revolutionary governments, “wheat bread is almost a luxury good in Mexico, destined almost exclusively for the middle and upper classes.”50