White Bread Read online

  Today, of course, the bread supply is not so central to the physical survival of most nations, nor to the politics of life and death. My two breadaholic kids have been known to chant, “We demand baguettes!” like some Parisian mob, but even they don’t get 30 percent of their calories from bread. On average, Americans today get less than a quarter of their calories from grain, and much of that takes the form of breakfast cereals and snacks. No single item accounts for anything close to a third of the U.S. diet anymore—not even high fructose corn syrup.11

  Nevertheless, the history of bread has a lot to teach us. Good bread is more than just the stuff of sepia-toned sentimentality, of hearth and home, of wholesome life. It has a more worldly and disquieting side; a side where bread and power intertwine. The story of bread is the story of how social structures shape what we eat, and how what we eat shapes social structures.

  The same could be said about many staple foods. Milk, meat, rice, tortillas, and sugar will all appear briefly in this book, and are the subject of other excellent books on the intertwining of food and power.12 But there’s something about bread—it’s so basic. No other food has been so central to so many regional diets, nor has any other food borne the weight of so much symbolism and cultural connotation, at least in the West and despite its unnoticed background nature. In this sense, bread provides an especially good lens through which to understand the larger relationship between food and politics.

  The word “companion” isn’t so simple after all. Yes, it speaks to bread’s role in forging bonds and connecting groups, but eating also divides. A companion isn’t just someone you share bread with; it is someone you are willing and permitted to share bread with.

  Bread consumption has long marked hierarchies of social status. From the very first city-states, bread sustained serfs, merchants, slaves, kings, and gods alike—but they did not all eat the same bread. They ate loaves assigned to their specific segment of society, either by formal decree, as in imperial Rome and Assyria, or by implicit custom, as in late twentieth-century America. For bread-eating peoples, the very act of eating bread defined boundaries between “civilized” and “savage.”

  In most times and places throughout history, the social order of bread arrayed itself in a spectrum from the lightest, whitest, and most wheaten for elites to darker, chewier, and more admixed loaves for the rest. In early twentieth-century America, for example, it would have been almost impossible to escape the message, conveyed by food advertising, scientific studies, political cartoons, foreign correspondents, and even church sermons, that only savage peoples and unwashed immigrants ate dense, dark bread. Eating white bread was said to “Americanize” undesirable immigrants, and a few social commentators even claimed that eating white bread literally changed newcomers’ complexions.13

  And yet, in many places and times, food experts, philosophers, and ordinary eaters contested that ancient order. Whether white or dark bread constituted the best foundation for a vigorous, moral society was quite possibly the first great food fight. Plato debates this question in The Republic, concluding that the ideal polis must be built on dark, hearty rural loaves, not soft, citified white ones.14 So too some ancient food writer probably waxed lyrical about Gilgamesh’s decision to eat “authentic” peasant barley cakes instead of overcivilized einkorn wheat.

  This points to something else important about status and the staff of life. While the type of bread one eats has long marked one’s social position, more abstract ideas about what counts as “good bread” shape the very ground on which social groups interact. When we define what counts as “good bread,” we are talking about a lot more than food. Dreams of “good bread” are statements about the nature of “good society.” Such dreams come with unspoken elaborations of who counts as a responsible citizen and how society should be organized.

  When, for example, Americans debate, as they have periodically since the 1800s, whether “Mother’s bread” or store-bought loaves are more virtuous and authentically “American,” they are also making claims about the proper place of women in society. When robber barons of the late 1800s Gilded Age lauded abundant and inexpensive white bread churned out by factories as the foundation for social harmony, they were also arguing against a society of labor organizing and government regulation. And when back-to-the-land movements of the 1840s and 1960s contended that hearty whole wheat bread baked on independent family farms was a bedrock of democratic society, they rarely stopped to ask themselves who got left out of this invariably white and propertied vision. Yet these abstract dreams of good bread and good society had real consequences for real people.

  For these reasons and more, this isn’t really a book about the history of bread. It’s a book about what happens when dreams of good society and fears of social decay get tangled up in campaigns for “good food.”

  More specifically, it traces six different deeply felt notions that have defined America’s relationship to bread at different moments: dreams of purity and contagion; control and abundance; health and discipline; strength and defense; peace and security; resistance and status. In doing this, the book’s scope is limited to the era of standardized, mass-produced industrial bread, from about 1840 to the present. Although a relatively small piece of world bread history, the story of American industrial loaves and their political lives offers a unique vantage on a question that concerns growing numbers of people in the early twenty-first century: What’s behind our fraught relationship with industrial food and, by extension, how does our relation with industrial food reflect our messy relations with one another?

  By “industrial food,” I’m referring to the products of capital-intensive agriculture, processed into homogeneous, standardized edibles designed to maximize efficiency and profit over other values such as taste or sustainability. And industrial food has, for the better part of two centuries, stood at the center of Americans’ fears and aspirations about eating and its relation to good society. Mass-produced white bread, in turn, has long epitomized our contradictory relationship to industrial food, simultaneously embodying the promise of industrial abundance and the dangerous hubris of science.

  Not surprisingly, then, nearly every diet guru, health expert, food activist, gourmet tastemaker, government official, and social reformer concerned with how the country ate had something—often a lot—to say about industrial bread. Scratch the surface of any public figure, government official, or social movement interested in changing how the country ate during the past 150 years, and you will almost certainly find a powerful vision of good bread standing in for a larger vision of good society.

  So what can we learn from this history? Or, more urgently, how can reflecting on what now seem like strange and outdated efforts to change America through its bread inform the way we think about food today? Concern about the country’s food—where it comes from, how it is grown, what it contains, and how it affects our bodies, environment, and society—mounts every day. Stories about obesity, food safety, carbon footprints, and conditions on farms and in food factories appear daily in the media, heightening the growing sense that something is wrong with the U.S. food system. In the face of this, an energetic new social movement—often called the “alternative food movement”—has exploded onto the scene. A diverse assemblage of locavores, farmers’ market lovers, community-supported agriculture subscribers, fair trade coffee sippers, New Agrarian back-to-the-landers, artisanal food enthusiasts, home cheese makers, backyard chicken raisers, community garden organizers, neo-traditionalist advocates for “eating like Great-Grandma,” hardcore and occasional organic food purchasers, co-op shoppers, and Slow Food gourmets, the alternative food movement is hard to pin down.15 But one thing is clear: millions of Americans are, once again, setting out to change the way the country eats.

  Thanks to an explosion of politically charged food writing and reporting that began in the late 1990s, members of the alternative food movement have access to a great deal of information about why and how the food system nee
ds to change. Much less is known about the successes and failures of such efforts in the past. Even less is known about the rich world of attachments, desires, aspirations, and anxieties that define American’s relations to the food system as it is.

  This book tackles both of those lacunae, and regardless of what your own vision of good food and good society may be, I hope that the story of industrial bread and its discontents will unsettle it a little. This is a critical book, but my hope is not to naysay social change, or belittle the efforts of food reformers in any era. Indeed, I hope that my affection for people concerned about the politics of food in the past and present shines through, even as I dwell on the limits and dangers of their efforts. That sympathy is the product of my own experiences trying to change the world through food—and a hard-learned awareness of the limits and dangers of my own actions.

  The idea for this book took form in three very different places that I’ve called home over the past few decades—a cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona, the “Gourmet Ghetto” of Berkeley, California, and the upstart wine tourism town of Walla Walla, Washington. In each of these three places I encountered people working to change the American food system in different ways. I participated in many different manifestations of the alternative food movement and I absorbed elements of remarkably different visions of the relationship between good food and good society. As much as I’ve grown critical of all those dreams, each one deeply shaped the way I think about the history of industrial bread and what that history can teach present-day foodies.

  CHANGING THE WORLD THROUGH FOOD?

  A few months after my stint as village baker, my wife and I left Tucson to apprentice on a humane-sustainable cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. There, we lived in a trailer with rattlesnakes under the front steps. Under the tutelage of Jim Corbett—a Quaker rancher from Wyoming with a Harvard philosophy degree, a history of political activism, and a deeper appreciation of the spiritual connections between human community and the natural world than anyone I’ve ever met—we learned to gently move cattle through the range on foot. We practiced an ethic of compassion for animals and the land, protected riparian areas, cared for pasture, and sold what may have been the first meat advertised as “local grass-fed beef” in Tucson. My wife started an informal raw milk collective and I baked a lot of bread. It was the one thing on this list of jobs that I was actually qualified to do. It also gave me a way to connect with folks on the ranch, and over many fresh, crusty loaves of pain au levain, we talked endlessly about the politics of food.

  During that time, I set myself to understand global food politics and history. Books like Fast Food Nation and its heirs were still years away, so I read what I could find: dry agricultural economics textbooks, even drier treatises on trade policy, and their colorful antithesis, counterculture food manifestos of the 1960s and 1970s. For fun, I soaked up food histories—accounts of grain traders, sugar merchants, and, yes, old English bakers. Books by feminist food historians, like Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad, taught me that food politics wasn’t just about big business and government policy. It included more intimate struggles over gender, race, and class.

  Even then it was clear that labels like “organic” and “sustainable” could easily be co-opted by big companies with almost oligopolistic control over markets. What really mattered was not what we ate as much as the distribution of power that brought us that food. Seen from that light, raising humane-sustainable cattle on the Saguaro-Juniper Ranch seemed like a small way of redistributing power and resetting the terms of the food system. By avoiding the oligopolistic middle, we were forging a true alternative based on direct connections between land, animals, and people. What happened in a small community of ranchers, livestock, and grasses in southeast Arizona could have global ramifications.

  The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had just passed and a specter loomed just south of the ranch. Cheap U.S. corn, exported by multinational grain traders subsidized by the U.S. government, threatened to displace a million or more small farmers in Mexico. This would leave them few options other than picking crops and working construction in el Norte. Breaking the cycle of corn and beef oligopoly in Arizona seemed part of a larger struggle to give the world’s food producers, farm workers, and consumers more options—not just the illusion of choice offered by big agribusiness.16

  Eventually, my wife and I left the ranch and Arizona altogether so I could go back to graduate school in the Bay Area. In that milieu, I encountered a kind and intensity of desire to change the way the world eats that I couldn’t have imagined in Arizona. We lived in a Berkeley grad student ghetto of WWII-era barracks and decommissioned public housing blocks that made our ranch trailer seem luxurious. Luckily, we were too busy eating to notice. We couldn’t afford to eat at Chez Panisse, the culinary epicenter of California’s alternative food movement, but we could revel in local organic produce from the Berkeley farmers’ market and subscribe to a weekly box of food from a farm in Yolo County. When we had a daughter a few years later, we could take her to milk her first goat at the open house of one of America’s best artisanal cheese makers. Like other folks then forging what David Kamp called “the United States of Arugula,” we discovered artisanal olives and practically took out student loans to buy artisan cheese.17 With Acme Bakery, one of the world’s best bread makers, only a few blocks from our apartment, I stopped baking. And I began to notice what an affluent white project alternative food was.

  It wasn’t just the high price tags, pale skin tones, or collective sensibility of the comfortably liberal, comfortably professional populace. In many ways, the thing that made me realize how affluent and how white the alternative food movement could be was the strenuous, back-bending-Berkeley-yoga-studio effort it made to insist that it wasn’t (or didn’t have to be). For, if there was one thing besides sheer hedonistic pleasure that marked Berkeley food politics, it was the mantra “We need to make this more inclusive.” If only “we” could bring the virtuous spirit of good food to “them,” everything would be okay.

  It’s a seductive attitude, buttressed by the language of nutrition science and America’s intuitive belief in the moral virtue of small farms, but I slowly came to realize that it often reinforced injustices as much as it challenged them. While increasing dietary options for less fortunate others isn’t bad per se, it can bolster social hierarchies and strengthen inequality—particularly when expressed as an enlightened “Us” helping “Them” to sit at our preset table. As Julie Guthman, a keen observer of the Berkeley food scene, has noted, there is a difference between inviting others to sit at the table you’ve laid and engaging with people about how the table got made in the first place. The latter requires tackling tough questions about how power is distributed in society, often obscured even in the most well-meaning efforts to make “good food” accessible.18

  In Berkeley I learned that my own dreams of changing the world through good food were complicit in an elitism that I didn’t support. This has been a difficult realization, and it’s tempting to hide from its implications. The mantra “It might not be perfect, but at least I’m doing something” provides a partial rejoinder—but glosses over the real consequences of acting without critical self-reflection. Critique is important. At the same time, I wouldn’t want my critiques of the alternative food movement to align me with conservative voices ranging from right-wing cable TV pundits like Glenn Beck to chemical company lobbyists lining up to defend America’s industrial food against the threat of “liberal elites.” How can I critique a movement that I care about deeply without undermining its efforts?

  DREAMWORLDS AND FOOD POLITICS

  History—a good tool to think with—offers a way out of this dilemma. Reflecting on the sometimes laughable, sometimes infuriating dreams of changing America’s bread in the past can help us grasp the possibilities and limits of efforts to change the way America eats in the present a little more clearly. In tracing the combinations of anxiety, longing, desire, habit,
fear, benevolence, and greed that have propelled the history of industrial bread, I hope to show that dreams of good food are powerful social forces. They animate the actions of consumers, industry executives, advertisers, government officials, and food reformers. They have real material consequences. At the same time, they do not appear out of nowhere. Dreams of good food arise out of particular constellations of power and interests that can be analyzed and understood. To this end, the book is not arranged chronologically. Instead, it follows specific dreams of good bread through time. Each of the book’s chapters centers on one particular dream of good bread and the arrangements of power that underpinned it. Each chapter then reflects on the consequences—intended and unintended, serendipitous and unfortunate, immediate and slow burning—brought on by that particular dream of good bread.

  The past is not passed in this history. Even seemingly archaic ideas about saving the world through food have afterlives. They linger in the preoccupations of the present. To capture that play of the past in the present, each chapter of the book begins and ends with a contemporary story, a bridge of sorts between the concerns of the present and the ideas of the past.

  Industrial bread, as defined in this book, began in embryonic form during the 1840s and exploded in the 1890s and 1900s amidst widespread anxiety about germs, gender roles, and “dirty” immigrants (chapter 1: dreams of purity and contagion). In this moment of upheaval, industrial bread was a perfectly shaped, perfectly clean, perfectly white spectacle of modern progress (chapter 2: dreams of control and abundance). During the Roaring Twenties it became the target of considerable anger and anxiety: modern bread appeared to be too pure, too perfect—and critics said that it was making the country fat, dumb, and lazy. “Responsible” citizens would have to demonstrate their social fitness through strict dietary discipline and white bread avoidance (chapter 3: dreams of health and discipline).