White Bread Read online

  At the same time, this uniquely Mexican story can be understood only in a much larger context of cheap food, wheat bread, and Cold War geopolitics. Whether they knew it or not, when Lorenzo Servitje and his three Catalonian immigrant collaborators opened the first Bimbo factory in 1945, they formed part of a bigger web of global food politics and superpower struggle that would define the postwar period. As much as the story of Bimbo bread reveals about Mexico, it is also a story about how the United States understood its place—and the place of its industrial food production system—in a dangerous world. It is a story about how a particular approach to growing, processing, and eating industrial food got fused with hopes for world peace and security—and what that has meant for the United States and the world.

  This chapter’s globe-trotting exploration of Grupo Bimbo’s origins provides a glimpse into the making of a particular form of postwar “American alimentary exceptionalism” premised on the universal desirability of industrially grown and processed food. This alimentary exceptionalism did not assume the U.S. industrial food system was gastronomically superior to the rest of the world’s foodways, but rather that it offered a unique foundation on which world peace could rest in the uncertain postwar world. Although this vision had deep roots in the United States, we can trace its postwar origins to successful famine relief—mostly in the form of massive shipments of wheat and flour to Europe and Asia—during the first years of the Cold War.

  During the early Cold War, shipments of U.S. bread grains to famine-torn Europe and Asia served two purposes: at home, they prevented rural recession by absorbing farm surpluses. Abroad, U.S. grain shipments saved millions from starvation, buttressed friendly governments, and generally served as one of the United States’ most effective weapons against the spread of Communism. As the Cold War wore on, U.S. reliance on “food power”—the strategy of using the United States’ undisputed dominance in the arenas of industrial agriculture and industrial food processing as a carrot and a stick on the global stage—deepened. Shipments of U.S. grain as food aid continued, becoming a permanent cornerstone of both domestic farm support and foreign policy. At the same time, direct grain shipments were supplemented and eventually superseded by efforts to remake world agriculture in the American image.

  This Cold War history has enduring legacies—not just in the form of globally competitive Mexican bakers. As scholars of U.S. “dietary imperialism” have noted, the export of industrial food and industrial agriculture during this period radically changed the way the world ate. Less noticed is that the exercise of food power also left a deep impression on the way Americans themselves emotionally connect with industrial food: every time a chemical manufacturer tells PBS viewers that its newest high-yield seeds are needed to fight poverty in some conflict-ridden country, every time a grain industry spokesperson warns that only industrial agriculture can keep famine and food riots at bay, every time some environmentalist excuses the social and ecological consequences of new biotechnologies out of fear that population growth will outstrip food supplies, they are deploying a dream forged in the crucible of Cold War anxiety.1 Understanding that historical context—tracing it through its origins in the European famine of 1946–48 to key laboratories like occupied Japan, Main Street 1950s America and, of course, postwar Mexico—won’t resolve decades-old debates about poverty and food, but it will highlight hidden cultural assumptions and unacknowledged shortcomings in the dream of peace and security achieved through industrial eating. The story of bread and the Cold War reminds us that, even when couched in a language of humanitarianism and world peace, the present-day eliding of industrial food production and global security establishes a state of emergency in which the enormous social, economic, environmental, and health costs of industrial food production must be accepted without question or critique.

  IF BREAD DOESN’T COME, BOMBS WILL

  During the winter of 1945–46, while the United States celebrated peace by consuming three thousand calories a day per person and singing, “Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!” with Vaughn Monroe, severe weather nearly destroyed Europe’s entire bread grains crop. Historic drought that summer followed by another bad winter finished the job. In a region where most people got 40–55 percent of their daily calories from bread, nearly 125 million Europeans faced starvation.2 Bread riots rocked France, which had seen its worst wheat harvest in 132 years. Italy’s flour stocks dwindled, and Britain reported that its bread situation was worse than in the darkest days of the war. Wheat stocks were so low in the U.K. that government officials were forced to extend and deepen wartime bread rationing, despite fierce popular opposition. Winston Churchill called the decision “one of the gravest announcements [he] had ever heard in the House in time of peace.”3

  Things looked even more dire in Asia. China faced a massive rice crisis, famine gripped Korea, and millions of conquered Japanese survived on 520 calories per day. In total, the United States estimated, 500 million people—one in five people on the planet—faced famine conditions between 1946 and 1948.

  Some relief supplies shipped to Asia, but for racial and geopolitical reasons Truman’s attention—and the country’s—was riveted on Europe. Making use of his bully pulpit, grain exporters’ eagerness to exploit new markets, and almost every Liberty ship in the U.S. Navy, Truman mobilized the largest movement of wheat and flour in world history—almost 900 million bushels between 1946 and 1947, enough to bake, conservatively, 70 billion loaves of white bread.

  The United States’ role as the postwar world’s most important source of bread did not take policy makers by surprise. Even before Pearl Harbor, military strategists commonly argued that food “would win the war and write the peace,” and agriculture officials planned for that peace even as they mobilized to fight. Most importantly, they wanted to make sure that the country avoided a devastating rural recession like the one triggered after WWI when war-stimulated grain production collided with a large postwar drop in demand for U.S. wheat. This time around, the country would use its agricultural advantage strategically, killing two birds with one stone: supporting farmers at home while projecting food power into the uncertain political terrain of the future. The fact that the United States emerged from the war as the only power in the world with its agricultural system not only unscathed but in peak form did not surprise the Truman administration. What shook Washington was just how quickly America’s responsibilities as the most important player in the world food system thrust themselves on the country.

  To free up wheat for the world, Truman called on the country to voluntarily conserve bread, prohibited the use of wheat in alcohol production, and mandated a higher extraction rate for white flour. When Americans complained about the new, supposedly “gray” high-extraction loaves, Truman scolded them, saying that not getting “exactly the kind of bread that many prefer” was a tiny price to pay for saving lives and establishing lasting peace.4 Publications like Life, Look, Parents’ Magazine, Time, and American Home backed the president, running heart-wrenching stories of hunger in Europe and offering readers advice on how to conserve wheat. Thousands of women signed pledges to conserve bread in their households, and food magazines went back on a war footing, publishing tips and recipes for saving bread.

  While Americans felt generally sympathetic toward humanitarian efforts aimed at allies and even former enemies in Europe, public support for wheat conservation, high-extraction loaves, and possible bread rations was short-lived.5 Letters to newspaper editors reveal widespread skepticism about Americans’ willingness to suffer bread restrictions for altruistic reasons. Instead, humanitarian concern for starving European children segued into self-interested thinking about wheat exports and national security. As Consumers’ Guide assured readers, when they “cast [their] bread on the waters,” it would return “in the form of preventing a generation of rickety European children from growing into a sickly, embittered and grasping people bent on war. It will, in other words, return to us in the form of the better
chances of peace and security in our own homes which only a healthy and peaceful Europe can assure.”6

  An August 10, 1947, article in the Los Angeles Times summed up the new attitude in the headline “Bread: It Is the First Concern of a Hungry World. Trouble Looms for the Nations Which Cannot Provide It.” If bread doesn’t come, the article continued, “bombs—in one form or another—will.” The Farm Journal, which, granted, had its own interest in food exports, put the matter bluntly: “Better to win friends now with flour, than have to face their guns later.” H. R. Baukhage, a nationally syndicated D.C. pundit and popular radio personality, made the case even more explicit in his Associated Press column: “The history of Europe since the war is that every government falls when the bread ration is reduced. … The free world is at stake.” The only thing that can “save Europe for democracy,” he continued, is “the American farmer.”7

  The news from France appeared particularly grave. The country’s 1947–48 wheat harvest was as disastrous as the previous year’s, and even with emergency shipments from France’s North African colonies, the government could not maintain its basic bread ration at 300 grams per person. Foreign Agricultural Service field officers in France wrote urgent telegrams to the State Department in Washington warning officials to expect a general breakdown of the French food distribution system by the end of May 1948 if even larger U.S. wheat shipments weren’t forthcoming. This would likely trigger widespread protests and strikes, as it had in 1946 and 1947, but the situation might get even worse. Opposition groups were already using the country’s puny bread ration as a central wedge issue. French Communists, in particular, had made impressive political hay out of a single five-thousand-ton wheat shipment from Russia, and U.S. officials complained that the country didn’t seem to appreciate the United States’ far greater contributions. If bad harvests forced the government to lower the bread ration to 250 grams, they predicted, it might tip France’s delicate political balance toward Communist forces.8

  In Paris, the May Day parade that year featured a contingent of workers carrying placards reading, “Give us a slice of bread.” Meanwhile, back in the United States, syndicated columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop warned readers that “if France starved, it would go Communist. … If France goes to the Communists … the great struggle for Europe between the Soviet and western political systems will almost certainly be ended in Russia’s favor.” The fate of Europe seemed to hang on French bread rations.9

  Whether those fears were reasonable or not, the United States responded with stepped-up wheat shipments. On May 10, 1948, after two years and nine hundred shiploads of stopgap aid to France, the Liberty ship John H. Quick docked at the Port of Bordeaux bearing the first official Marshall Plan wheat. Lavishly praising the United States for its help, government officials announced that the bread ration could be maintained. This averted full-fledged crisis in France, although bread-related protests and political instability would continue into the 1950s.

  In Iran, another quickly emerging Cold War battleground, U.S. and Soviet strategists mobilized bread grains in the fight for control over oil. Through the late 1940s, with bad wheat harvests in Iran’s Azerbaijan breadbasket triggering bread riots throughout the country, Soviet propaganda spread rumors that Tehran was selling scarce wheat to the United States to pay for arms. U.S. officials worried even more about the Soviets’ promise to provide Iran with one hundred thousand tons of wheat in 1949. Luckily for U.S. strategists, however, the Soviet wheat traveling overland trickled into the country, while American Liberty ships filled with wheat arrived with great fanfare.10

  Bread and flour shipments were also credited with undermining Communist forces in Greece where, in 1948, 96 percent of the nation’s staple was made from U.S. flour or wheat.11 Turkey followed a similar pattern. And the Berlin blockade, for its part, confirmed policy makers’ sense of the strategic importance of fresh bread, giving civil defense experts a firsthand glimpse of the effects of bread deprivation on civilian populations. Although it would have made more sense to airlift light, nutrient-dense foods instead of heavy flour and the heavier fuels needed to bake it, officials observing the situation in Berlin quickly concluded that, in times of crisis, “ample freshly baked bread … was essential to civilian morale.” Later, they would apply this lesson to U.S. civil defense planning, which stressed the importance of bread supplies.12

  Things did not go as well in Czechoslovakia. In 1948, Truman’s failure to extend bread grain shipments to East-leaning Czechoslovakia was credited with pushing the country definitively into the Soviet camp, and the president publicly vowed never to allow something like that to happen again. In a watershed speech, the president demanded quick passage of the Marshall Plan, which at first consisted largely of stepped-up bread grain shipments. In the same speech, the president called for universal peacetime military training and the reestablishment of the Selective Service system. With bread grains leading the way, the country was going to (cold) war.13

  SOMETHING BETTER

  In a June 1952 commencement address, President Eisenhower, despairing at the country’s decline into Red-baiting and book banning, implored Dartmouth College graduates “to fight Communism with something better.” But, as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles noted, increasingly visible poverty and racial tensions were “ruining” the United States’ image abroad. The country’s Cold War propaganda machine was struggling to speak convincingly of America’s lofty ideals. It was getting harder and harder to point, concretely, to what “something better” America could offer the world.14

  To make matters worse, by the end of the 1950s, the United States appeared to be losing ground to the Soviets in almost every arena that mattered—education, science, technology, weapons. Every arena except consumer goods and food production, that is. In this context, visions of domestic consumer affluence displaced Freedom and Equality as the most important weapon in U.S. propaganda efforts.15

  U.S. efforts to combat the appeal of Communist “workers’ paradise” with glamorous images of life in a “consumers’ paradise” filled with sleek Chevrolets, color TVs, automatic dishwashers, and Populuxe living room sets have been well documented.16 The important role that industrial food played in creating the image of America as the land of plenty is less well known, and it is unclear how much U.S. food-related propaganda affected target audiences in the USSR, Western Europe, Asia, and Latin America. It did seem to work on Americans: even as confidence in the superiority of U.S. military readiness, technology, and education wavered at home and abroad, Americans picked up on the idea that their ability to produce and consume abundant food set them apart. Industrially produced food was “something better” the United States could offer a hungry world.

  During the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, where Vice President Richard Nixon famously accused Nikita Khrushchev of making lousy dishwashers, U.S. newspaper headlines across the country positively crowed over the way American food “dazzle[d] Ivan.” Modern food processing was “our secret weapon”—“the newest weapon in America’s fight against communism.”17 “Johnny” might not be able to read as well as “Ivan,” as Rudolf Flesch warned in his best-selling attack on the U.S. educational system, but few Americans doubted that Johnny could eat better than his Soviet counterpart. Speaking at a U.S. Information Agency symposium on food and the Cold War, Campbell’s Soup Company president William B. Murphy captured this spirit: “The best example of the American dream of plenty is in food. … Communism is utterly incompatible with the production of food.”18

  To be sure, U.S. food propaganda typically focused on more glamorous modern food concoctions—TV dinners and ready-mix cakes—but industrial bread was basic and U.S. industrial foodways were often juxtaposed with the Communist world’s scarce “dark bread.” A 1946 Woman’s Home Companion feature on “life behind the iron curtain,” for example, held white bread up as a key example of the pruducti Russian people craved, but only America could provide. While some critics of fluff
y American bread praised hearty Soviet loaves, they generally conceded that the U.S. baking system was still better at providing affordable abundance. Even as the United States fretted about its own soaring bread prices, the Los Angeles Times could proudly declare that “a Soviet worker must work half a day or longer to earn enough money to buy a kilogram of rye bread, while an American needs to work only 12 minutes.”19

  From Gaston, North Carolina (“Reds Stand in Breadlines”), to Lima, Ohio (“Bread Scarce in Soviet Cupboards”), the U.S. press triumphed in stories of Soviet bread shortages.20 Accounts of daring escapes from the Soviet bloc run frequently by popular magazines during the early 1950s invariably mentioned bread prices and bread lines as a motivating factor in the flight from Communism. And even when American reporters in Russia observed abundant high-quality and nutritious dark bread, industrial white bread was still a symbol of U.S. superiority: the Russian food system was so inefficient, they argued, consumers had few other options and could afford little else beyond dark bread. Finally, with Soviet military technology advancing at frightening speeds, newspapers could still reassure readers that bread shortages periodically brought the Red Army to a screeching halt.21

  In this way, abundant modern food, including industrial white bread, constituted one of the Cold War’s most reassuring dreams: the idea of alimentary affluence in the West and dark Soviet bread lines in the East. In industrial bread, U.S. policy makers, manufacturers, and consumers had definitively fused the assumed universality of their foodways with the imperatives of national security.