White Bread
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Orenstein’s article sparked a predictable debate. Many critics focused on a contradiction that even Orenstein acknowledged: the “tomato-canning feminists’ ” realm of self-sufficiency and autonomy assumed an income-earning spouse somewhere just outside the picture frame. How could “autonomy” be premised on financial dependence? As Orenstein wrote, “If a woman is not careful, it seems, chicken wire can coop her up as surely as any gilded cage.”32 Other critics dug into the more hidden assumptions of Orenstein’s piece: while feminists might disagree on whether femivore life was a cage or not, it was most definitely gilded. To suffer the femivore’s dilemma one must be relatively affluent. Like “the omnivore’s dilemma,” the femivore’s dilemma emerges out of the highly privileged position of having almost limitless life options, something that most women—and men—in contemporary America don’t experience.
This brings us back to Laurel’s Kitchen. For, while critics in the 1970s and today have noted the gendered contradictions of nostalgia for the lost days of Grandma’s cooking, less has been said about the vision of America smuggled in with the aroma of fresh bread. When counterculture food gurus like Flinders imagined the American past, they saw a halcyon world of independent cabins filled with nuclear families. Grandma didn’t slave in cotton fields or garment factories, nor did she struggle to save the farm from creditors. She didn’t campaign for suffrage or march for workers’ rights on May Day. Home was not a migrant farmhand’s wagon. Great Depressions only increased the “realness” of American food. And when immigrants or people of color appeared in this America, they were scrubbed of actual history, eagerly waiting to share exotic new ingredients or a bit of ancient wisdom with their white audience. This was a romanticized past.
In the enchanted broccoli forest of best-selling counterculture cookbooks, however, at least one author offered a glimmer of perspective. Mollie Katzen, perhaps the most influential cookbook author of the era, honestly admitted, “It is difficult to talk about bread-baking without lapsing into sentimentality.” “One is tempted to go on and on about how exhilarated and connected to the universe one feels, about how the kitchen atmosphere acquires sublime soulfulness, about how born-again breadmakers are magical, charismatic individuals,” she confessed. “[But] it is not my place to promise you a transformed existence. What I offer is one with more bread recipes. The rest is what you make of it.”33
By the late 1970s, however, it was clear that Americans were hooked on self-transformation. Even more than through their appeal to conservative nostalgia, counterculture bread tastes spread to mainstream America via the quest for perfect health.34 Healthy eating had, of course, been one important component of the counterculture since the mid-1960s, but by the mid-1970s it had been elevated to a supreme position in American life. Stripped of its political and social critiques, the counterculture’s fixation on wellness easily morphed into an individual-centered, consumer-driven bodily project. Health food stores, yoga studios, and exercise fads flourished across the country, permanently changing the way Americans thought about wellness. Bernarr MacFadden would have been proud: the counterculture’s search for bodily harmony had found its love match in 1970s self-actualization.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, counterculture food rebels believed that if Americans only knew about the dangers of industrial food and the goodness of healthy eating, they would change their diet. Changing the country’s relation to food would, in turn, bring about swift changes in economic and political relations. By the late 1970s, counterculture food gurus saw part of their dream fulfilled: more Americans knew about the dangers of industrial eating and aspired to counterculture visions of healthy eating than at any other point in the past century. By the early 1980s, a study revealed that six out of ten young singles thought that white bread was unhealthy and to be avoided.35 But it was also becoming clear that this consciousness wouldn’t necessarily set in motion the larger structural changes counterculture food activists had hoped for. In fact, the industrial food system could almost effortlessly assimilate health consciousness. The fixation on wellness emerging across large swathes of the U.S. population in the late 1970s could serve as a much-needed new engine for profit in the industrial food system.
This was clearly the case in the baking industry. The perceived moral and bodily goodness of whole wheat bread had helped lead the country toward health food, and the baking industry was ready to share in the bounty. In fact, the 1970s health craze couldn’t have come at a better time for the industry. Through the late 1960s and early 1970s, industrial bakers labored under low profits and a tattered image. After the great chemistry- and engineering-driven advances of the 1950s and early 1960s, even industry insiders conceded that their business had fallen into a state of torpor. Market studies revealed that bread itself had become so homogeneous that consumers had trouble distinguishing one brand from another. What little profits could be squeezed out of cheap white bread came mostly from mergers and oligopoly power, rather than innovation. A handful of companies—many the descendants of William Ward’s Bread Trust—jockeyed for market position using brute force instead of quality product. Constant investigations into price fixing by dominant firms marked the period, as market concentration increased.36 When wheat prices, and by extension bread prices, soared in the mid-1970s as a result of high oil prices and large sales of surplus grain to the USSR, it only heightened consumers’ sense that bakers were taking advantage of them.
Meanwhile, the public embrace of health foods and environmentalism exposed industrial baking practices to more condemnation. And the locus of this opprobrium had shifted from counterculture to mainstream, from Haight-Ashbury to Capitol Hill. In 1971, Ralph Nader launched a new round of Senate hearings on the baking industry and spurred the Federal Trade Commission to take action against misleading health claims in Wonder bread advertising.37
Accounts of early twentieth-century experiments feeding rats a white bread-only diet resurfaced, migrating from their traditional place on the mimeographed pages of alternative weeklies to the science sections of major newspapers.38 Even mainstream nutrition scientists, long reluctant to question the place of white bread in a balanced diet, joined in. As Hilda Swenerton, California state nutrition expert for the university extension service, admitted in the Los Angeles Times, “We’ve been so busy pointing out how the faddists are all wrong that we’ve failed to recognize some of the good faddists have done.” 39
In 1977 the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, backed by a stable of mainstream scientists, issued its landmark Dietary Goals for the United States. The report put a government seal on a set of recommendations not all that different from those found in Frances Moore Lappé’s radical 1971 Diet for a Small Planet: Americans should dramatically increase consumption of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, while cutting back on meat, dairy, and refined sugars.40 Even more importantly, mainstream nutrition science had discovered the paramount importance of fiber. Starting in 1975, scores of books, magazine articles, and news items touted the lifesaving benefits of roughage, ushering in “the fiber era” in American nutrition.41
While some in the baking industry fought back against this dietary heresy, most treated it as an opportunity. Two companies had already shown that health bread could be mass-produced with industrial methods at a high profit. Both begun out of Connecticut homes decades earlier, Pepperidge Farms and Arnold Bakers exemplified the way industrial producers could appeal to a health-obsessed nation without sacrificing scale and efficiency. By the late 1960s, Margaret Rudkin, founder of Pepperidge Farms, had built the company into a multimillion-dollar industry leader, but its origin was classic American health foodism.42 In the 1930s, asthma crippled Rudkin’s youngest son and doctors could offer little assistance. Convinced that diet played a role in the boy’s affliction, Rudkin set out to cure him with a diet of whole wheat bread, baked from her Irish grandmother’s recipe. It worked well enough to attract interest in the community. The boy’s doctor requested loave
s for his other patients and demand grew from there. Soon Rudkin had, with the help of two servants, started a small bakery in the family’s home kitchen.
The wife of a wealthy financier, Rudkin raised money to open one real bread factory, and then others. By the late 1950s, Pepperidge Farms baked more than a million loaves a week in its cutting-edge bakeries. Despite its dependence on high-tech production, however, the company’s advertising was self-consciously old-fashioned—even by baking industry standards. The combination was unbeatable. With its cutting-edge technology and homey image, the company soon dominated national markets for health bread, even though its loaves sold for more than double the price of regular bread. In 1961 the Campbell’s Soup Company bought Pepperidge Farms, and Rudkin died in 1967, but the company kept pace with the country’s emerging interest in counterculture food.
So did Arnold Bakers, a second multimillion-dollar company built on dark, dense loaves.43 Paul Dean Arnold had founded that company in 1940 out of his garage after quitting work at a Nabisco plant. Touting products like “Bran-Nola Bread,” the company had grown to more than $200 million in annual sales by the time of Arnold’s death in 1985. The Arnold “Health Loaf Natural,” a highly sweetened light brown mixture of stone ground whole wheat and unbleached white flour, was, in many ways, the iconic health bread of its time.
Through the 1970s, ingredients that seemed drawn straight from a commune kitchen—sprouted wheat, unsulfured molasses, raisin juice, and wheat germ—gave Pepperidge Farms and Arnold loaves exotic appeal. They were Woodstock in cellophane. Other companies quickly followed suit, and soon health breads were the fastest-growing segment of the entire baking industry. Between 1967 and 1982, white bread consumption plummeted 30 percent—but overall bread consumption, led by high-fiber brown loaves, actually increased.44
The advent of industrial health bread was not without hiccups. Few of the country’s major bread conglomerates shared Rudkin’s and Arnold’s attachment to the spirit of health food doctrines. Theirs was a purely instrumental embrace. If loaves could be made to look like brown health loaves by adding caramel color, it was fine. And why not rack up impressive amounts of fiber at a low cost by adding cheap wood pulp to industrial loaves? Wonder bread’s parent company, ITT Continental, advertised that its Fresh Horizons loaf, filled with “powdered cellulous” (aka wood pulp), had 400 percent more fiber than white bread, but “the same great taste.” Consumers didn’t buy it. Fresh Horizons and other wood pulp fiber breads earned a spot on the New York Times’s list of the worst foods of 1976—just under Tube-A-Goo, syringes filled with brightly colored syrup that looked and smelled “exactly like hair waving lotion.”45
In the end, consumer outrage and concerted action by government regulators reined in the early excesses of industrial health bread. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop many of the new mass-market health breads from tasting a bit like Tube-A-Goo. In order to achieve extended shelf life without the use of chemical preservatives, bakers jammed health loaves full of moisture-retaining natural sweeteners. The result, as New York Times food writer Mimi Sheraton noted, was sometimes less than pleasant: “cloying sweetness” and “a limp, wet texture.”46
Still, the baking industry pressed on. By the late 1970s, health breads weren’t just a lucrative niche market—they were the essential element of the industry’s battle against resurgent home baking.
REVOLT IN THE KITCHEN AND THE RISE OF YUPPIE BREAD
Thanks to the counterculture, conservative nostalgia, and spreading concern about wellness, home baking was more popular than at any time in the previous century. Guided by Laurel’s Kitchen, The Tassajara Bread Book, and James Beard’s Beard on Bread, millions of Americans were experimenting with their own doughs for the first time. And these were definitely experiments. Uncertain how to parse competing ideas about which new grain was the purest and most salubrious, 1970s home bakers crammed every grain they could get into their bread. The age of the whole-wheat-spelt-oat-amaranth-brown rice-millet-buckwheat-barley loaf was born. For good measure, 1970s bakers also threw in zucchini, olives, carrots, bananas, sunflower seeds, soya, whey, carob, and dates. Meanwhile, large doses of honey and molasses eased the unfamiliar taste and texture of whole grains onto the American palate.
Between 1973 and 1979, nearly every major newspaper, home magazine, and cooking monthly ran stories noting the boom in home baking and offering tips to first timers. John Hess, writing in the New York Times, called it a “kitchen revolt.”47 Bread making was in vogue. In fact, it was in Vogue: the style magazine’s April 1979 issue touted homemade bread as an easy way its readers could ensure less sugar and more fulfillment in their lives.48 That home bread making had made it from the food section to the fashion pages said something to the baking industry. It seemed as if the country’s bakers had to fight a small version of the early twentieth-century battle against home baking all over again.
In the 1900s bakers undercut home baking with fears of impurity and contagion, buttressed by a charismatic sheen of scientific authority. By the 1970s, however, counterculture gurus had effectively associated charismatic food science with hubris and destruction. A new strategy was needed. So, in the 1980s, the baking industry took back terrain from home baking with niche marketing and appeals to upscale chic.
This approach reflected larger shifts in the U.S. economy. Rocked by recessions, oil crises, and de-industrialization, the U.S. economy began to take on a new form in the 1970s. Manufacturing no longer served as the country’s driving engine. Financial services—making money from money—had begun to take their place at the center of the economy.
After steadily rising through the postwar period, real wages for most Americans began to decline. Even forty years later, average wages adjusted for cost of living still wouldn’t have returned to their pre-1970s level, but the financialization of the U.S. economy did produce enormous wealth for urban professionals. Wealth distribution in the country became, and remained, more polarized than at any other period since the Roaring Twenties. Affluent singles and childless couples reveled in unprecedented disposable incomes, giving rise to a world of “yuppie” consumption. And yet, across the country, households that could afford to maintain Carol Flinders’s dream of a dedicated homemaker were growing increasingly rare.49
These trends would have a marked effect on the very nature of consumption. During the postwar era of rising wages and decreasing inequality, consumption largely took the form of standardized, one-size-fits-all, mass-market commodities. As with enriched white breads on supermarket shelves, differences among competing commodities were relatively small. During the 1980s, however, fueled by the rapid segmentation of American society, consumer life diversified into ever-more precise niche markets. Massive department stores lost ground to boutique chains catering to narrow bands of consumers, who increasingly began to tie their identities to specific niche markets.50
Along with advances in transportation and packaging, this had a profound effect on the American diet. No longer would everyone eat the same iceberg lettuce. Increasingly, shoppers could choose the style of lettuce—shipped in from Mexico, if needed—that fit their status aspirations exactly. To survive, bakers would have to embrace real product diversification. And in this area, upstarts outpaced industry leaders. Small bakeries sprouted up across the country in record numbers during the 1980s. By the 1990s, some of them had grown into chains, “vying to become the ‘Starbucks’ of bread.”51 Au Bon Pain, La Vie de France, Great Harvest, the St. Louis Bread Company, and Breadsmith clones spread through suburban malls and city streets.
Many of the resurgent small bakeries paid the rent with sweets and sandwiches, not bread. Nevertheless, by the early 1990s, observers could point to a “new bread mystique” seducing the country. Like the new consumer economy in general, the small-bakery revival of the 1980s and 1990s targeted specific class and status groups. Supermarkets still sold industrial white bread, of course, but demand for fluffy loaves increasingly concentrated in lower-inco
me brackets. By the end of the 1970s, people buying supermarket white bread almost universally ranked low price as their top consideration in food purchasing. Middle- and upper-class consumers were increasingly willing to pay more for distinctive bread. Now “we can sell Cadillacs along with the Fords,” a Bakery Magazine writer beamed.52
Catering to middle- and upper-class consumers interested in health and charmed by novelty, supermarket chains opened in-store bakeries that made high-value specialty breads from scratch or “baked off” partially cooked loaves from central distribution centers. Comfortable suburbanites switched to health breads like Arnold and Orowheat and flocked to strip-mall chain bakeries.
Meanwhile, urban elites could select from a growing array of high-end bread bakeries—often with roots in the counterculture. In 1977, Mimi Sheraton had eulogized urban ethnic bakeries, lost to gentrification and suburbanization. According to Sheraton, San Francisco sourdough had become “practically extinct.”53 Within a decade, however, the situation had changed dramatically. On the West Coast, young urban professionals—yuppies—discovered the pleasures of European-style artisan loaves at Nancy Silverton’s La Brea Bakery or Steve Sullivan’s Acme Bread. In New York, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the opening of soon-to-be-institutions like Amy’s Bakery, Tom Cat Bakery, and the Sullivan Street Bakery.