White Bread

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

  Bad weather and poor corn and wheat harvests between 1943 and 1945 turned everyday grain scarcity into acute crisis. Even with government bread subsidies, prices soared beyond the reach of urban consumers. Roving gangs of frustrated consumers attacked bakeries in Mexico City, and bread riots spread throughout the country. In May 1945, protests against a 100 percent increase in the price of bread shut down the capital city of Veracruz state. That same spring, U.S. ambassador George Messersmith warned Washington that without emergency shipments of corn and wheat, Mexico would “fly a [Communist] red flag in three months time.”51

  U.S. officials responded with a mixture of anxiety and opportunism. A food crisis in Mexico threatened to destabilize a southern neighbor already perceived as unpredictable and prone to anti-imperialist outbursts. At the same time, hunger could also create opportunities for the furthering of U.S interests. The election of right-leaning Manuel Ávila Camacho as president in 1940 had signaled a turn away from Lázaro Cárdenas’s radical social reforms and anti-U.S. rhetoric, creating an opening for closer ties with the United States. A friendly display of U.S. food power could help seal that rapprochement.

  With war-ravaged Europe absorbing all the grain America could spare, however, the United States could not fight on another food front with exports alone. Rhetoric aside, U.S. farmers could not save the whole world. Industrial food power would have to expand to include other weapons beside direct exports of surplus grain. Henry Wallace, FDR’s secretary of agriculture and then vice president, understood this challenge as early as 1940. While representing the Roosevelt administration at President Ávila Camacho’s inauguration, Wallace observed the country’s need for agricultural improvement firsthand and listened to the new leader’s plan. Ávila Camacho pledged to steer Mexico away from radical land redistribution and support for peasant farmers. Instead, he would fight hunger and spur urban development through investments in capital-intensive agriculture. On his return to Washington, Wallace set out to convince policy makers that the United States must join in efforts to modernize Mexican agriculture, for the sake of hemispheric security—even if it threatened grain exporters at home.

  The Rockefeller Foundation, which had already begun to formulate similar ideas on its own, agreed to the vice president’s plea. As the foundation’s influential report “The World Food Situation” declared later, “The time is now ripe, in most places possibly over-ripe for sharing some of our technical knowledge with these people.” “Agitators from Communist countries,” the Rockefeller Foundation warned, were taking advantage of America’s failure to share its alimentary abundance. “Appropriate action now,” the foundation argued, “may help [Third World countries] to attain by evolution the improvements … which otherwise may have to come by revolution.”52

  EL TRIGO DE ROCKEFELLER

  What the Rockefeller Foundation proposed had never been tried before: a private U.S. foundation, in collaboration with Washington and a foreign government, would set out to transform the entire agricultural system of another country, from the ground up, in the image of the United States. Maybe U.S. farmers couldn’t save the whole world from Communist takeover all on their own, but U.S.-style farming practices might.

  In 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation established the Office of Special Studies (later called the Mexican Agricultural Program, or MAP) in collaboration with the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. Over the next eighteen years, the MAP’s twenty U.S. agricultural scientists and one hundred Mexican counterparts would tackle two fundamental priorities: creating high-yield, disease-resistant wheat seeds and raising the productivity of the country’s corn farmers. Work on improving vegetables, beans, barley, and sorghum would come later, but the Mexican government and Rockefeller Foundation agreed that wheat and corn were top priorities. Corn covered 65 percent of the country’s agricultural land, supplying the cornerstone of the Mexican diet. It was an obvious place to start. Wheat was less prevalent, taking up only 7 percent of the country’s farmland, but it was grown primarily by large commercial farmers and consumed by affluent urbanites. It suited the country’s modern image of itself—wheat and white bread were aspirational commodities. As a result, wheat received disproportionate attention. The payoff from this work was stunning and quick.

  By 1948, the American plant pathologist Norman Borlaug and his team had already developed and begun to distribute wheat strains resistant to Mexican stem rust. Their ultimate success came a few years later. In a series of genetic crosses conducted during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Borlaug successfully brought together the three Holy Grails of Mexican wheat improvement: rust resistance, of course, but also dwarf stature and heightened responsiveness to petroleum-based synthetic fertilizer. While Mexican wheat production couldn’t have grown without rust resistance, it was the latter two traits—dwarf stature and input responsiveness—that would truly change the world. On their own, the MAP seeds were only marginally more productive than traditional Mexican varieties. But, unlike traditional varieties, they were specially designed to thrive as part of a larger package of modern inputs—pesticides, intensive irrigation, mechanized harvesting, and, most importantly, large quantities of synthetic fertilizer. Given sufficient water and chemical pest control, the MAP seeds could efficiently convert massive quantities of fertilizer into ever-larger grain heads. This is what made them revolutionary. In fact, the new seeds were so good at converting synthetic nutrients into large grain heads that their stalks tended to collapse under their own weight, making mechanized harvesting impossible. Dwarfism solved that problem. The creation of wheat varieties with thick stalks and squat stature prevented collapse (called “lodging”) and ushered in the era of ultra-mechanized, high-yield grain farming.

  Of course, the promise of the MAP seeds could be realized only in conjunction with a full package of modern inputs. This was expensive and would have long-term consequences. In the short term, however, backed by subsidized credit, education programs, and infrastructure investment, “el trigo de Rockefeller”—Rockefeller wheat—spread faster than its creators could have imagined. By 1957, 90 percent of all wheat seeds planted in Mexico were the high-yield varieties supported by industrial inputs. Between 1940 and 1960, the index of Mexican fertilizer consumption soared 4,000 percent, while pesticide application increased eight-fold. In the space of just a few years, wheat yields more than doubled, and they would increase 400 percent over the next two decades. Despite the fact that Mexico experienced its highest ever population growth rates during the postwar period, wheat production far outpaced the number of new consumers. Indeed, from 1940 to 1970, thanks in substantial part to the MAP’s work, overall per capita food production in Mexico increased from 1,991 calories and 54 grams of protein per day to 2,623 calories and 80 grams of protein. Mexico quickly erased its wheat deficits and by the 1960s joined the ranks of exporting nations, at least for a while.53 So incredible were the results that the MAP model eventually came to be called “the Green Revolution.”

  THE WHITE REVOLUTION

  The first Bimbo Bakery emerged out of the same early-1940s crucible as the Green Revolution. At some inchoate level, the company’s founders understood something typically left out of histories of the Green Revolution: in order for Mexico’s dreams of modernization and consumer affluence to succeed, someone would have to turn mountains of wheat into inexpensive sliced white bread.

  Like nearly all Mexico City bakers, Lorenzo Servitje came from a tight-knit clan of Spanish immigrants. His father was born in Catalonia, and as a young immigrant in turn-of-the-century Mexico City, he worked his way up through a series of Spanish-owned bakeries. In 1928, Lorenzo’s father managed to open his own bakery, with support of the Spanish community. He called it el Molino, the Windmill, to evoke images of Don Quixote and the rolling plains of La Mancha. But even amidst all those European influences, young Lorenzo Servitje set his gaze firmly on the north. After taking over el Molino in 1936, he began obsessively studying American-style industrial baking, reading every U
.S. trade journal he could find and seeking out U.S.-trained bakery engineers. “I wanted to know every detail of the North American bread industry,” he recalled later, “[all] the newest technologies and cutting-edge machinery.” Eating U.S.-style industrial loaves, or pan de caja, “was not a tradition in Mexico,” Lorenzo acknowledged. But he believed he could change that.54

  Along with three other members of the Spanish baking community, including the first Mexican trained in modern industrial techniques at the American Institute of Baking, Lorenzo began scheming in 1938. Wartime machinery shortages in the United States delayed his plans for Mexico’s first American-style bread factory, but in 1945 Bimbo Bakery opened its doors with four bread lines: sliced white sandwich bread, an unsliced white “table” loaf, a soft rye, and packaged toast “for children and the sick.”

  The sparkling new bakery sported dough-handling machines from American Machinery and Foundry, high-speed mixers from Readco, two Flex-o-Matic seventy-tray ovens from Union Steel, and a temperature-controlled proofing room installed by the Chicago Metallic Corporation. Two of the very latest bread-wrapping machines from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, would ensure that, unlike Ideal bread, Bimbo reached stores mold free. With almost three times more Ford delivery vans than Ideal, Bimbo bread would get there faster, too.

  During Bimbo’s early years, many Mexican bakers avoided flour made from the new Green Revolution wheat. Modeled after U.S. wheat varieties and bred with the rigors of industrial processing in mind, flour made from el Trigo de Rockefeller didn’t work well with traditional Mexican baking practices. As one small-town baker complained to an anthropologist, “You have to be a chemist” to bake with the new wheat. Bimbo, on the other hand, had scientists on staff, and in keeping with its embrace of all things modern and North American, was the first major bakery in Mexico to embrace the nontraditional wheat varieties. By the mid-1950s, Bimbo had established strong ties with the most modern milling companies in northern Mexico, paving the way for widespread acceptance of the new wheat.55

  Lorenzo’s admiration for the U.S. baking industry also extended to its ingenious use of advertising, and from its first days, Bimbo plastered its name across newspapers, comic strips, and radio. Later, it would be the first Mexican bakery to appreciate the power of television. As a result, the cuddly bear mascot that bore the name Bimbo didn’t take long to become one of the most-loved characters in Mexican commercial pop culture. Beyond the bear, Bimbo’s campaigns touched all the same themes as early industrial bread advertising in the United States: the hygienic nature of factory bread, the importance of modern bread in building a strong nation, and the ultra-squeezable quality of industrially baked loaves.

  There was one thing, however, that Bimbo did better than any North American counterpart, right from the start: distribute its product to the far-flung corners of a rapidly expanding city. Bimbo delivery trucks relentlessly plied the city in search of new sales points, and within a few years soft packaged bread had saturated the nation’s capital. In 1947, Bimbo bought twenty-six new trucks and opened routes into nearby cities and state capitals. Photos from the period show Bimbo trucks sharing rutted roads with ox carts and being ferried across rainforest waterways on rafts. Oscar Lewis, in his classic ethnography of a small village outside Mexico City, noted that less than a third of townspeople ate bread in 1940. By 1950, according to Lewis, that had changed completely: almost everyone ate bread regularly.56

  THE MEXICAN MIRACLE?

  As pan Bimbo spread throughout Mexico and the country’s first (and only) wheat-export freighters set sail for distant lands in the early 1960s, so too did the Rockefeller-Mexico model. Heralding it as the template for successful agricultural development, U.S. government agencies, foreign governments, the United Nations, and nonprofit organizations such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations worked to replicate Mexico’s plant research program from India to Algeria. Following similar lines of government-private sector collaboration, researchers also turned their sights on other staples: rice in Asia, potatoes in the Andes, millet in Africa.

  Thanks to improved seeds and modern input packages, world per capita food supplies climbed steadily in the postwar decades. In the United States, fears that the world was about to run out of food still enjoyed considerable popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, appearing everywhere from apocalyptic Hollywood movies to best-selling nonfiction, but these Malthusian nightmares never came true. Recognizing the scale of this achievement, in 1970, the Nobel committee awarded Norman Borlaug its Peace Prize. “More than any other single person of this age,” the prize’s citation read, Norman Borlaug “has helped to provide bread for a hungry world.”57

  Humanitarian causes aside, policy makers in the United States credited the Green Revolution with staving off Red Revolution around the world, and Mexican officials saw it as a stepping-stone to even grander things. For them, rural-development programs held the key to dreams of rapid industrialization.58 Regardless of its effects on the countryside, Green Revolution wheat would ensure steady flows of cheap food into the country’s cities. Since Mexico’s growing urban industrial workforce still spent the majority of its wages on food, these flows would, in effect, subsidize factory owners, keeping labor costs low without provoking political unrest. Not having to import wheat would also free up currency that could be channeled to pay for even more direct industry subsidies.

  In many ways the Mexican government’s gambit worked. Orthodox economists today ridicule Mexican policies of that era, reveling in their inefficiencies and heavy-handed state interventions, but Mexican officials had grasped something important that mainstream U.S. economists often forget: no country in history had ever industrialized through laissez-faire and free trade. Active state intervention was necessary to achieve the promises of modernization. And despite their inefficiencies and limits, the government’s cheap food policies, promotion of basic education, investment in infrastructure, and extensive trade protections did, in fact, usher in Mexico’s most explosive period of economic growth. Automobile, steel, and electronics factories rose up in what had been a largely rural country. Modern highways, electrical grids, and ports connected its far-flung corners, and Mexicans could, increasingly, buy their own appliances instead of importing them. But the Mexican Miracle had an Achilles’ heel: the peasant countryside.

  Every member of the U.S. MAP team had been formed in American land grant universities and spent time in the USDA, bastions of industrial agriculture. The scientists brought with them a strong cultural bias toward large-scale projects, and they also faced stiff pressure from the Mexican government to produce dramatic results quickly. As a result, the MAP, and its descendants, often ignored the mandate to improve the lives of peasant corn farmers, focusing attention on the country’s few large commercial wheat farms. Rather than design technologies accessible to poor farmers, they pushed packages of expensive inputs. And they got exactly the results you would expect: a water-, machinery-, and chemical-intensive Green Revolution package capable of out-of-this-world yields—with out-of-this-world production costs. To realize the promise of Green Revolution technology, farmers didn’t just have to purchase new seeds; they also needed to install modern irrigation equipment, apply heavy doses of synthetic fertilizers, and control pests with chemicals.

  Paying these costs required continual access to credit. And in the Mexican countryside, that meant only larger farmers with disposable wealth and close ties to private banks or government bureaucrats could grow Green Revolution wheat over the long haul. Smaller farmers without access to subsidized credit could try, but this meant turning to rapacious moneylenders. So, as much as it increased productivity, the Green Revolution also reinforced rural inequality, creating a new class of wealthy U.S-style industrial farmers, coddled with subsidies, and masses of peasants who couldn’t compete in the debt-driven race. Worse still, the new mechanized and chemically dependent commercial farms required less labor—meaning fewer jobs and lower wages for rural workers, and these change
s impacted women disproportionately. The few jobs created by the spread of Green Revolution technologies—driving tractors or working with irrigation equipment—tended to be seen as “men’s work,” while traditional hand labor that women counted on for income shrank. As was the case in many countries adopting the new agricultural model, declines in women’s incomes had devastating consequences for family nutrition, health, and opportunities.59 Taken as a whole, Mexico’s efforts to facilitate industrialization and urbanization with Green Revolution seeds and U.S.-style farms resulted in what Harvard-trained biologist turned social scientist John H. Perkins called a “tragic irony”: increased hunger in the presence of rapidly growing agricultural productivity.60

  During the 1950s and 1960s, peasants and landless workers, displaced from the countryside by these forces, streamed into the cities faster than even the country’s record economic expansion could create new urban jobs. Mexican industrial policies bear some of the blame for this—they tended to favor more glamorous heavy industries over labor-intensive production, even though the former generated fewer jobs—but the U.S.-style approach to agricultural development exacerbated the problem. The glut of rural refugees—a classic army of surplus labor—kept wages low in cities, despite record increases in industrial productivity. This stymied the creation of a large, self-sustaining society of middle-class consumers.61