White Bread

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

  64. Bernhard Glaeser, The Green Revolution Revisited: Critique and Alternatives (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Lipton and Longhurst, New Seeds and Poor People; Paré, El Plan Puebla; Pearse, Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want.

  65. Amartya Kumar Sen and Jean Drèze, The Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze Omnibus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). See also Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collin, and Peter Rosset, World Hunger: 12 Myths (New York: Grove, 1998).

  66. Warren Belasco and Eric Ross provide excellent accounts of the enduring appeal of Malthusian crisis narratives. Belasco, Meals to Come; Eric B. Ross, The Malthus Factor: Population, Poverty, and Politics in Capitalist Development (London: Zed Books, 1998).

  67. The history of Grupo Bimbo is drawn from Cherem, Al grano; Jaime Crombie, “Man of the Year: Leading Mexico’s Global Champion,” Latin Finance, March 2010; Roberto Servitje, Bimbo: Estrategia de éxito empresarial (Mexico D.F.: Pearson Educación, 2003); Weis, “Por la verdad del Osito Bimbo.”

  68. Cherem, Al grano, 319.

  69. For example, McWilliams, Just Food; Robert Paarlberg, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept out of Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Paarlberg, Food Politics.

  CHAPTER 6. HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH

  1. Bill Reed, “Redneck Chic: Endearment or Ridicule?” Colorado Springs Gazette, May 9, 2006, 1–3.

  2. My analysis of white trash parties draws inspiration from a number of sources, including John Hartigan, “Unpopular Culture: The Case of ‘White Trash,’ ” Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (1997): 316–43; Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism (New York: Basic Books, 2000); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Greg Smith and Pamela Wilson, “Country Cookin’ and Cross Dressin’: Television, Southern White Masculinities, and Hierarchies of Cultural Taste,” Television New Media 5 (2004): 175–94.

  3. Jeff Foxworthy and David Boyd, You Might Be a Redneck If . . . (Nashville: Rutledge Hill, 2004).

  4. Damian Whitworth, “Gutsy Rednecks Know How to Make a Splash,” Times (London), July 10, 1999.

  5. James Salter, Dusk and Other Stories (San Francisco: North Point, 1988).

  6. This chapter owes a great debt to Warren Belasco’s path-breaking history of counterculture food politics and its legacies, Appetite for Change. Other key sources informing this chapter include Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, “Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s,” in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, eds. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002); Craig Cox, Storefront Revolution: Food Co-ops and the Counterculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Stephanie Hartman, “The Political Palate: Reading Commune Cookbooks,” Gastronomica 3, no. 2 (2003): 29–40; Maria McGrath, “Food for Dissent: A History of Natural Foods and Dietary Health Politics and Culture since the 1960s” (PhD diss., Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, 2005); Stephanie A. Slocum-Schaffer, America in the Seventies (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003); David Steigerwald, The Sixties and the End of Modern America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).

  7. “Consumer Survey of Bread Wrapper Recognition,” 1954, Loewy Papers, MSS 62142, “Gordon Baking,” box 148; Sister Corita, Enriched Bread by Corita, Camus, Wonder Bread (1965).

  8. Quoted in Belasco, Appetite for Change, 48.

  9. Paula Giese, “The White Bread Scandal,” North Country Alternatives 9 (1973): 6.

  10. For example, Jerome Goldstein, “Earl Butz as Wonder Bread,” Clear Creed, no. 14 (1972): 53–54.

  11. Consumers also worried (erroneously) that federal bread regulations would prohibit the marketing of “health breads” containing soy protein and other nonsynthetic enrichment ingredients. Letters, news clippings, and reports related to these and other bread-additive anxieties are found in “General Subject Files, 1951–1953,” boxes 1435–1438, 1562, 1711, FDA-NA. See also “Your Bread: How Safe Is It?” Consumer Reports, October 1949, 460–61.

  12. On 1950s-era bread hearings, see Suzanne Junod, “Chemistry and Controversy: Regulating the Use of Chemicals in Foods, 1883–1959” (PhD diss., Emory University, Atlanta, 1994); “General Subject Files, 1951–1953,” boxes 1435–1438, 1562, 1711, FDA-NA.

  13. “General Subject Files, 1951,” box 1435–1438, FDA-NA.

  14. King called for the boycott against Wonder, Coca-Cola, and other food processors discriminating against African Americans in Memphis the night before his assassination. Although this took place in 1968, I consider it an example of the earlier approach to food activism because King’s roots lay solidly in the late-1950s and early-1960s civil rights movement.

  15. Crescent Dragonwagon, The Commune Cookbook (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972); Beatrice Trum Hunter, Beatrice Trum Hunter’s Baking Sampler (New Canaan, CT: Keats, 1972), 1. See also McGrath, “Food for Dissent.”

  16. Braunstein and Doyle, “Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.”

  17. Edward Espe Brown, The Tassajara Bread Book (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1973), 12; “Digger Bread,” Mother Earth News 1, no. 1 (1970): 1.

  18. Brown, The Tassajara Bread Book, 12.

  19. Mo Willett, Vegetarian Gothic (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1975), 87.

  20. Dragonwagon, The Commune Cookbook, 18–20, passim.

  21. Ibid., 128.

  22. Ibid., 127.

  23. Barbara Hansen, “A Harvest of Goodwill Celebrating Day of Bread,” Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1969, J1-2.

  24. E. J. Pyler, “Uniformity Vs. Conformity,” Baker’s Digest, October 1968, 7.

  25. “Whole-Grain Bread Sales Seen Higher,” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1977, J14; Rose Lee Cravitz, “Variety Bread Sales Slow after Hot ’76,” Supermarketing, June 1977; Charles A. Stillwell, “A Study on Current Trends of Bread Consumption Prepared for Prof. Dik Twedt, University of Missouri,” June 7, 1978, Ruth Emerson Library, American Institute of Baking, Manhattan, KS; “Sharp Gains Seen in Bread Consumption,” Milling and Baking News, July 12, 1977; Barbara Love, “Variety Bread Sales Gain,” Supermarketing, September 1976, 63.

  26. Fred Robbins and David Ragan, Richard Pryor: This Cat’s Got 9 Lives! (New York: Delilah Books, 1982).

  27. International Multifoods, Naturally Good Baking (Minneapolis: International Multifoods, 1970), 1.

  28. “Chicago’s Bread Shop: A Cooperative Business That Serves the People,” Rising Up Angry, March 17–April 7, 1974, 10; Ray Wagner, “Little Bread Company: A Socialist Working Collective,” Northwest Passage, April 1974, 8.

  29. Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey, Laurel’s Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition (New York: Bantam Books, 1976), 50.

  30. McGrath, “Food for Dissent.”

  31. Peggy Orenstein, “The Femivore’s Dilemma,” New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2010, 11.

  32. Ibid. Critiques of the piece include Laura Flanders, “The Femivore’s Real Dilemma,” Nation, http://www.thenation.com/blog/femivores-real-dilemma; Bonnie Azab Powell, “The ‘Femivore’: New Breed of Feminist or Frontier Throwback?” Ethicurean, http://www.ethicurean.com/2010/03/14/femivore/; Members of WAM! “Femivores in the Henhouse: Feminists Debate the Meaning of ‘Chicks with Chicks,’ “ In These Times, http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5914/femivores_in_the_henhouse/.

  33. Quoted in McGrath, “Food for Dissent,” 151.

  34. For more on this shift, see Belasco, Appetite for Change; McGrath, “Food for Dissent.”

  35. Bernard Pacyniak, “White Bread Poised for a Comeback,” Bakery, August 1985, 88–90.

  36. Leonard Sloane, “Baking Industry Is Rising above Its Past Conservatism,” New York Times, October 9, 1969; Walsh and
Evans, Economics of Change in Market Structure, Conduct, and Performance.

  37. “Control on Food Ads Asked of U.S. Agencies,” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1971.

  38. Examples include “Digger Bread”; Ed Minteer, “Our Slant: Order Certain to Prevail,” Albuquerque Journal, November 1, 1970, A4; John Nobel Wilford, “White Bread Diet Starves Rats, Scientist Reports,” New York Times, October 22, 1970, 32; “White Bread Fatal,” Alternate Society 3, no. 1 (1971): 1.

  39. Jeanne Voltz, “Faddists Do Some Good, Says Expert,” Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1972, F3.

  40. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Dietary Goals for the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977). Under pressure from the cattle, dairy, and other industries, the report’s recommendations were revised and tamed later that same year.

  41. “Sharp Gains Seen in Bread Consumption”; Cravitz, “Variety Bread Sales Slow after Hot ’76”; Love, “Variety Bread Sales Gain”; Patricia Wells, “In U.S. Kitchens Bread Baking Is on the Rise,” New York Times, April 19, 1978, C1; “Fiber Breads on the Move!” Bakery Production and Management, November 1976, 66–72. Baking Industry marked the fiber era with a series of articles in its December 1976 issue.

  42. This account of Pepperidge Farms draws on “Rudkin of Pepperidge,” Time, July 14, 1947; “Margaret Rudkin: Champion of the Old-Fashioned,” Time, March 21, 1960; “Bread Company Notes 25th Year,” New York Times, September 20, 1962, 37; “Henry Rudkin” (obituary), New York Times, April 23, 1966, 31; “Mrs. Margaret Rudkin” (obituary), New York Times, June 2, 1967, 41; Jean Hewitt, “New Breads Boast Natural Ingredients,” New York Times, March 20, 1972, 44; Clarence Woodburn, “Our Daily Bread,” Reader’s Digest, May 1945, 49–51

  43. This account of Arnold Bakers draws on Hewitt, “New Breads Boast Natural Ingredients”; Robert D. McFadden, “Paul Dean Arnold” (obituary), New York Times, April 6, 1985, 26; Mimi Sheraton, “If Bread Boredom Sets In, Try an Innovative Slice,” New York Times, February 22, 1976, 22.

  44. Pacyniak, “White Bread Poised for a Comeback.” See also Martha Shulman, “The Graining of America,” Texas Monthly, December 1978, 160–66; Cravitz, “Variety Bread Sales Slow after Hot ’76.”

  45. Mimi Sheraton, “The Good Foods of ’76 and Some of the Bad,” New York Times, December 27, 1976, 44; “Fiber Breads on the Move!” See also Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, 198.

  46. Sheraton, “If Bread Boredom Sets In, Try an Innovative Slice.”

  47. John L. Hess, “ ‘Plasticized, Tasteless Breads’ Give Rise to a Kitchen Revolt,” New York Times, October 4, 1973, 52. See also Wells, “In U.S. Kitchens Bread Baking Is on the Rise”; Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty; Karen Hess, “Boom … in Bread,” Vogue, April 1979, 272; Craig Clairborn and Pierre Franz, “For the Do-It-Yourself Baker,” New York Times, August 15, 1982, SM46; “Five Healthy Breads to Make from One Basic Recipe,” Glamour, January 1979, 41; “Fiber in New Bread Is Wood Pulp, Not Grain, McGovern Says,” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 1977, A30; Marian Burros, Pure and Simple: Delicious Recipes for Additive-Free Cooking (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 24; Donald Davis, “The Wheat in Bread,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1974, J11; Jean Mayer, “Investigating Charge of Adulterated Darker Bread,” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1974, K13.

  48. Hess, “Boom … in Bread.”

  49. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 25.

  50. Gary S. Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Ronald Butler spoke of the way baking followed this trend toward segmentation and niche marketing in a February 13, 1986, speech, “Trends in the Baking Industry,” at the American Institute of Baking, Manhattan, KS. Transcript available at the institute’s Ruth Emerson Library.

  51. Heather Brown, “Vying to Become the ‘Starbucks’ of Bread,” Modern Baking, September 1997, 70–78. See also “The New Multi-Unit Retail Bakeries,” Modern Baking, August 1995; “Artisan Bread Popularity Creates Challenges for Bakers,” Modern Baking, June 1997, 32; Margaret Littman, “Bread Rises to the Occasion,” Bakery Production and Marketing, May 15, 1996, 52–64; “The Rise of Speciality Bread,” Baking Buyer, August 1997, 26–29.

  52. Carol Meres Krosky, “Retailers Sharpen Focus on Specialty Products,” Bakery, July 1986, 120–32. See also Pacyniak, “White Bread Poised for a Comeback”; Stillwell, “A Study on Current Trends of Bread Consumption.”

  53. Mimi Sheraton, “A Toast to Ethnic Bakeries,” New York Times, April 20, 1977, 57.

  54. Bernard Pacyniak, “Making the Right Move,” Bakery, May 1989, 50–51.

  55. Nan Ickeringill, “Food: The Flavor of France in Bread,” New York Times, April 15, 1963, 52.

  56. Interview by author at the American Institute of Baking, Manhattan, Kansas, September 26, 2006.

  57. Dragonwagon, The Commune Cookbook, 17.

  58. Greg Beato, “In Our Foodie Culture, White Bread Is Toast,” Washington Post, August 15, 2010, B3.

  59. Ibid.

  60. Ernst Matthew Mickler, White Trash Cooking (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed, 1986); Connie McCabe, “KC BBQ,” Saveur, May 21, 2007.

  61. Crimson Spectre, “White Trash Manifesto,” lyrics, S/T (Fredericksburg, VA: Magic Bullet Records, 2004).

  62. Zimmers Hole, “White Trash Momma,” lyrics, Legion of Flames (West Yorkshire, UK: HevyDevy Records, 2001).

  CONCLUSION. BEYOND GOOD BREAD

  1. Sandor Katz, Wild Fermentations: The Flavor, Craft, and Nutrition of Life-Culture Foods (New York: Chelsea Green, 2003), 32.

  2. The original spark for this chapter emerged from a conversation with Melanie DuPuis.

  3. Ann Vaughan-Martini and Alessandro Martini, “Facts, Myths, and Legends on the Prime Industrial Microorganism,” Journal of Industrial Microbiology 14 (1995): 514–22. Organized use of yeasts for bread and fruit-wine production began around 6000 BCE, and what was probably the first “human-initiated” fermentation (the brewing of sickly sweet, slightly fizzy, mildly alcoholic wine from honey and water) may date as far back as 15000 BCE. Katz, Wild Fermentations; Isak Pretorius, “Tailoring Wine Yeast for the New Millennium: Novel Approaches to the Ancient Art of Winemaking,” Yeast 16 (2000): 675–729; Graeme Walker, Yeast Physiology and Biotechnology (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1998).

  4. Pretorius, “Tailoring Wine Yeast for the New Millennium”; Vaughan-Martini and Martini, “Facts, Myths, and Legends on the Prime Industrial Microorganism.”

  5. This operates through numerous pathways, but yeast’s importance in animal nutrition plays a key role. Drosophila melanogaster, for example, a fruit fly indigenous to even the cleanest winery, consumes prodigious quantities of yeast, blending Saccharomyces DNA in its digestive tract and spreading mutated yeast spores through the environment via its feces. Sandra Rainieri, Carlo Zambonelli, and Yoshinobu Kaneko, “Saccharomyces Sensu Stricto: Systematics, Genetic Diversity, and Evolution,” Journal of Bioscience and Bioengineering 96, no. 1 (2003).

  6. M. de Barros Lopes, J. R. Bellon, N. J. Shirley, and P. F. Ganter, “Evidence for Multiple Interspecific Hybridisation in Saccharomyces Sensu Stricto Species,” FEMS Yeast Research 1 (2002): 323–31

  7. Dominique Fournier, “A Gift from the Gods,” Slow: The International Herald of Taste, July–September 2001.

  8. On companion species, see Donna Jeanne Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003).

  9. On the biopolitics of fermentation, see Heather Paxson, “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Micropolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 1 (2008): 15–47.

  INDEX

  Please note that page numbers are not accurate for the e-book edition.

  abundance. See control and abundance, dreams of

  acidosis, 90

  Acme Bakery, 12, 184, 185–86

  adve
rtising: Bimbo Bread, 155; children in bread, 126; for enriched bread, 119, 120, 125–26; images of bread from 1920s and 1930s, 58; language of “clean” bread in, 40–41; promoting bread, 96; Wonder bread, 70, 178

  aesthetics: appeal of industrial bread and, 124; of control, 71; streamlined loaf and, 58; whiteness, 64–66

  agribusiness, 11, 71, 76, 77, 113, 144, 171

  agricultural development: in India, 158–59; Mexican Green Revolution model of, 155–58; in Mexico, 152–53

  aid, food, 135

  Albanese, Catherine, 82

  Alcott, Bronson, 84, 86

  Alcott, Louisa May, 84

  Alcott, William Andrus, 84

  Alsop bleaching process, 66, 67

  alternative food movement, 9–10, 203n15; as affluent and white, 12; criticism of, 71; elitism in, 12–13; as encompassing liberals and conservatives, 105–7; “the femivore’s dilemma,” 175–76; on knowing where your food comes from, 48–49; on national food security, 107. See also counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s

  American Bakers Association, 24, 100

  American Institute of Baking, 98, 99, 122, 154

  The American Woman’s Home (Stowe), 31–32, 60

  amylophobia (fear of starch), 78, 91, 103

  Amy’s Bakery (New York), 184

  Anatolia, 3

  Anderson, Lee, 124–25

  And the Risen Bread (Berrigan), 168

  “anti-inflammatory” foods, 73

  Antoinette, Marie, 5

  Armstrong, Lance, 73, 74

  Arnold, Paul Dean, 180

  Arnold Bakers, 161, 179, 180

  Arnot Baking Company, 56

  artisanal-industrial combination, 54–55

  artisan bakeries, 52, 53, 54, 183–85

  assembly-line bread making, 24, 26, 54, 55, 69, 185

  Assyrian Empire, 3–4

  Atlas, Charles, 91

  Au Bon Pain, 183

  automatic baking, 20–21, 24, 53. See also industrial bread

  B1 vitamin, 115