White Bread Read online

Recognizing the tragic bias of its past efforts, the MAP initiated a new project in 1970—the Plan Puebla—targeting small-scale peasant corn producers.62 It had some success, but by that point the association between large-scale industrial agriculture, progress, and national security was too deeply engrained to turn back.

  THE PROBLEM WITH MORE FOOD

  In India, where the Mexican Green Revolution model was exported first, the results were even more ambiguous. Indeed, the Punjab region—considered a “success story” of South Asian agricultural development—has emerged as the ultimate case study in the failings of a productivity-focused approach to rural poverty. There, Green Revolution wheat programs helped food supplies increase at double the rate of population growth. Yet, as even one pro-Green Revolution scholar acknowledged soberly, “There may have been no improvement at all in human nutrition, in the proportion of poor people, or in the average severity of their poverty.” Ardent Green Revolution critic Vandana Shiva put it more bluntly: the introduction of new agricultural technologies in Punjab, she argued, displaced farmers, created intractable rural unemployment, increased the proportion of people living in poverty, and sparked violent conflicts over resources.63

  By the 1970s, knowledge of the Green Revolution’s negative effect on rural equality and its failure to alleviate poverty had become widespread, thanks in large part to work done around the world by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.64 U.S. policy makers, agribusiness, and many development practitioners, however, had a hard time seeing beyond the mantra of higher yields. They saw a world where exploding population growth threatened to outrun food supplies and trigger revolution at every turn. The answer was obvious: the world needed more food to feed more mouths.

  What this perspective ignored, however, was the crucial question of food access. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen demonstrated powerfully, it wasn’t just the amount of food produced that matters, but whether people could access the bounty. More efficient food production didn’t always result in greater food access—particularly when it increased inequality and undercut small farmers’ ability to earn a living. All too frequently, hunger and plenty went hand in hand.65

  Green Revolution technology was not inherently bad. Indeed, a more grassroots approach to biotechnology could achieve important changes in the Third World. But Green Revolution technology was hampered by the social and political context in which it was deployed. This was a classic case of a good story gone out of control: accepting the intuitive Malthusian narrative of “Too many mouths, not enough food” proved far more appealing to policy makers than wrestling with the complicated dynamics of rural poverty.66 A large part of the appeal of dreams of peace through industrial food lay in the fact that the single-minded focus on increasing productivity through industrial agriculture allowed policy makers to ignore sticky questions of power and resource distribution. In theory, as long as food production continued to grow, it didn’t matter that a small percentage of the planet controlled most of the world’s resources and consumed the vast majority of its calories. The ideology of industrial agriculture held out the attractive fantasy that hunger could be alleviated through purely technical means—without needing to challenge power relations or alter the economic status quo.

  HOME TO ROOST

  Crowded in with the glass offices of Mexico City’s exclusive Santa Fe business district, Grupo Bimbo’s white stone headquarters look—there’s no getting around it—like a giant loaf of sliced white bread set on its end. As with many places in Mexico, contrasts between rich and poor leap out in Santa Fe. Chauffeured cars slide through the gates of Amgen, IBM, Bancomer, and Kraft, around armed guards who shoo away street vendors. Carlos Slim, one of the world’s two or three richest men, lives a couple of miles away, enjoying a fortune built in part by acquiring state-owned companies on the cheap, while more than 15 million Mexicans survive on less than $2 a day. Staggering inequality is a fact of life here, but perhaps more than any other company in Mexico, Grupo Bimbo has thrived because of it.

  Not that Bimbo is one of the country’s most exploitative companies. In fact, Bimbo’s founding family places Catholic social teachings in the company’s mission.67 As a result, Bimbo is regarded by many for its charity work, code of labor ethics, and environmental commitments. Nevertheless, Bimbo owes its ascendance to inequality because, from the very start, it literally fed national dreams of reduced class conflict and upward mobility. To be sure, the company innovated in other ways, but none of that would have amounted to much if Bimbo hadn’t offered the country affordable, edible aspiration. By the end of the 1960s, the company had spread this dream to nearly every remote corner of Mexico. Eventually the extraordinary dreams embodied in white bread evolved into the stuff of taxi drivers’ humdrum breakfasts. Today, Mexican elites eschew Bimbo for authentic brick-oven-baked European breads—even in Mexico, soft white bread has lost its association with high-class status.

  But for Bimbo, the impulse to expand hasn’t stopped. During the 1990s, Bimbo expanded to Central America, then Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. It also looked north, first shipping Mexican-made production to U.S. border states and then, in 1996, buying the company’s first U.S. factory in Escondido, California. Having grown accustomed to nearly absolute control over Mexico’s packaged bread market, the company was surprised at first by stiff competition in the United States. Lorenzo’s son Roberto Servitje reflected that in South America, the challenge was convincing people to eat packaged bread. In the United States, it was “ferocious competition” from “monstrous” companies like Interstate Baking, Sara Lee, and Weston Foods. But Bimbo took enormous risks in the United States, aggressively buying up its competition’s routes, factories, and brands.68 Today, if you buy Arnold bread in the East or Orowheat in the West, Freihofer in Pennsylvania or Mrs. Baird’s in Texas, Stroehmann’s in the mid-Atlantic or Old Country in Arizona, not to mention Roman-Meal, Sun-Made, and Francisco sourdough, it’s Bimbo. White bread imperialism has come home to roost.

  On the other hand, the dream of building world peace and security through industrial food production has never left the United States. More than a half century later, even as critiques of industrial food mount from all directions, Cold War-era beliefs about a hungry planet’s need for ever-more-industrial food production still seem commonsensical to most Americans. Indeed, this geopolitical urgency often underpins attempts to defend large-scale industrial food production against proponents of slow, local, and organic eating. Viewed through the lens of Cold War Malthusianism, supporters of small-scale nonindustrial food production can be painted as dangerously insular and elitist. Evoking the humanitarian legacies of U.S. food power, supporters of industrial agriculture can pose themselves as heroes of the poor, calling for a “Second Green Revolution” to meet the challenges of the future.69

  We would do well to not dismiss a Second Green Revolution out of hand, particularly if it could realize its advocates’ promises of raising productivity with fewer chemical inputs. But we should also remember the key lesson of the first Green Revolution: a technology is only as good as the power relations in which it is deployed. If the seeds and inputs of a Second Green Revolution are monopolized by large chemical companies like Monsanto intent on selling expensive inputs (as they are today), we should brace for many more tragic outcomes.

  It’s easy to make sport of rich locavores, but we shouldn’t forget the myriad ways in which industrial abundance often makes hunger worse, not better. What remains to be seen is whether and how advocates of food system change can counter the deep and potent associations between industrial food and the security-driven urgency of feeding a dangerous, hungry world.

  6

  HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH

  Dreams of Resistance and Status

  You’re scum, you’re fucking white bread.

  —David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross

  WHITE TRASH REBELLION?

  Somewhere between the Cheez Whiz hors
d’oeuvres and the looped Jerry Springer clip, it hit me: the “white trash party” trend of the 2000s was a cultural phenomenon best forgotten, and quickly. Sadly, you can’t hold back a fad this debauched. Fueled by books like White Trash Cooking and White Trash Etiquette, White Trash Nation websites, college students’ love of Daisy Duke cutoff shorts, and hipsters’ apparently innate affection for trucker hats, the trend only grew. And it grew until, in the words of one awestruck journalist, it shined “brighter than a big, fat ‘skeeter getting fried on a bug zapper.”1 For all that zap-blue brightness, though, white trash chic turned out to be a decidedly murky affair—starting with the strange bedfellows it attracted.2

  Reporters, mostly caught up in the pleasure of dabbing the pages of staid venues like Metropolitan Home with lines like “Jes’ belly up to the trough and dig in,” or inflecting New York Times style with “shonuffs” and “hons,” depicted the trend as a unified phenomenon. In fact, it arose from two very different places. The props were the same for both—a hodgepodge of white bread, processed cheese, southern rock, cheap beer, and pregnant teen costumes. They both reveled in stylized poverty. They both cultivated vulgar ugliness. And both, at some level, attempted to subvert the pretensions of an imagined elite. But the politics and participants were different.

  On one hand, urban hipsters chugging Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in upscale dives dreamt of working-class authenticity, rebelling against high-class consumerism with aestheticized poverty. Hipster white trash chic embraced the “simplicity” of mass-produced commodities as an ironic antidote to yuppie consumption. It assembled cool style out of the kitschy trappings of poverty, but in doing so reinforced the line between hipsters and actual low-income consumers.

  On the other hand, segments of the white working class—fans of the comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s self-mocking “You might be a redneck if …” brand of humor—took tongue-in-cheek pride in the iconography of trailer parks, beer bellies, and kissing cousins meant to stereotype them.3 Here the dream was a different kind of resistance: armed with “shit on a shingle” (canned corn beef on white bread) and Confederate flags, white trash parties threw what Foxworthy called “a glorious lack of sophistication” in the face of an imagined enemy of uptight liberal elites.4 In this vein, white trash parties, for all their carnivalesque hilarity, were deadly serious. They appropriated a demeaning insult, turning it into a celebration of “authentic” white Americans fighting for their rightful place in a culture supposedly poisoned by liberal multiculturalism.

  Industrial bread played a key role in both versions of white trash fun. It was both a ubiquitous menu item and a visual stand-in for a whole range of assumptions about low-class consumption. Industrial white bread called up a lack of pretension—unfussy and authentically American—but also irresponsibility and shame. To eat white bread at a white trash party was to proclaim, “I never really eat white bread.” And of course, as should be clear by now, none of that symbolism would have been possible, even imaginable, for most of the twentieth century.

  To make the Wonder bread-laden gags of white trash chic legible, America’s “best invention” had to become an icon of poor choices and narrow lives. This historic upending was a relatively recent phenomenon. It played out between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, in the cultural trajectory from hippie to yuppie. During that remarkable twenty-year period, “white bread” became an adjective as well as a noun—an adjective with two related but different meanings that still compete with each other today. In the early years of the 1960s counterculture, “white bread” came to signify all that was bland, homogeneous, and suburban. White bread was establishment, plastic, and corporate—everything the counterculture in all its manifestations hoped to destroy. This meaning remains: you know that music described as “white bread” will be funkless pablum. A TV show set “in a white bread cul-de-sac” will deal with life in cookie-cutter tract mansions.

  By the early 1980s, however, another usage had emerged. In this case, “white bread” signified almost the opposite: not bland, affluent suburbia, but white trash. In movies and fiction white bread, like broken-down trailers, came to denote poverty of a white and rural kind—the world described by residents of TV’s South Park as “a quiet, little, white-bread, podunk, white-trash, redneck corner of the U.S.A.” The writer James Salter evoked the despair and grim prospects of this kind of white bread life in his story “Dirt.” The story turns around a waitress who is young and beautiful now, but beginning to feel the walls of inescapable poverty closing in around her. As Salter sums up her sparse future, “She would be living in the trailer park. … Her kids would eat white bread in big soft packages.”5

  This association between white bread and white trash endures, even as African Americans and Latinos make up an ever-larger portion of the market for Wonder bread and pan Bimbo. So how did white bread become white trash? In very much the same way white trash parties work—through a complex play of cultural subversions, rebellious aesthetics, rituals of social status, and protests against mass consumption. The outcomes of this process have been just as ambiguous as any white trash party: in 2009, for the first time in U.S. history, whole wheat bread sales topped white—presumably a healthy development. And yet the same anti-elitist attacks on industrial eating that set that change into motion during the late 1960s had by the 1980s generated new alimentary elites, new forms of social distinction. Dreams of good bread as an antidote to an oppressive and unhealthy social structure became the stuff of ultra-high-end consumption.6

  FIGHT THE WHITE

  In 1954, the legendary industrial designer Raymond Loewy, commissioned to study bread packaging, observed that there was pretty much only one color combination that moved loaves off shelves—red, white, and blue, and maybe golden yellow. Ten years later, a young Catholic nun named Sister Corita with a fast-growing reputation for making edgy pop art, hijacked the classic red, white, blue, and yellow Wonder bread package design for decidedly different purposes. In a series of prints drawing inspiration from the Wonder bread label, Sister Corita proclaimed that radical Christian commensality and social justice could be snatched even from the heart of mass-consumer society. In one of Sister Corita’s Wonder bread prints, text from the French existentialist Albert Camus followed the iconic words “Enriched Bread Wonder” like an ingredient list: “Great ideas,” it read, “come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a first flutter of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope. Helps Build a Body Twelve Ways.”7

  In the years that followed, the country saw much uproar of empires and nations—race riots, mechanized slaughter in Vietnam, assassinations, and toxic spills—but also the birth of new social movements, civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, farm workers’ rights: the gentle, and not so gentle, stirrings of life and hope. Amidst all that roar and counter-roar, however, it was increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to associate industrial bread with anything living or hopeful—even as a subversive jest. Store-bought white bread combined the two most hated motifs of the era: industrial origins and whiteness. As food historian Warren Belasco wrote, “For Theodore Roszak, who popularized the word ‘counterculture’ in his 1969 bestseller, white bread was a perfect metaphor for the regime of experts and technocrats who, for the sake of efficiency and order, threatened to rob us of all effort, thought, and independence.” “Only in Amerika could people want their food bleached … all bleached to match the bleached-out mentality of white supremacy,” another counterculture writer proclaimed.8 Good food was rustic, unrefined, and brown, ideally with roots in peasant society. “Don’t eat white; eat right,” the saying went, and Dr. Clark’s 1920s-era ditty, “The whiter your bread, the quicker you’re dead,” experienced a dramatic revival.

  The counterculture—itself a diverse collection of movements, philosophies, impulses, and ideals—strained against the homogeneous, the artificial, and the mechanical in myriad ways. Factions and subgroups ofte
n spent more time denouncing each other’s shortcomings than they did fighting the Man, but they could all agree about one thing: white bread. It was, for the counterculture, an instructive commodity—a familiar, accessible way to comprehend any of the binaries that gave shape to the movement and animated revolt: authentic vs. artificial, natural vs. chemical, brown vs. white, healthy vs. poisonous, real vs. plastic, peaceful vs. militaristic. As a 1973 essay in the Minnesota counterculture magazine North Country Alternatives explained, “Bread is a good focal point because its story, from grain grown on giant factory farms to technologically-produced Wonder Bread, is a very clear illustration of where power lies, and how it is used against us.”9 The sterile, chemically laced, and homogeneous substance of white bread could stand in as a synecdoche for social conformism, the environmental costs of industrialism, racism, bland suburbia, or cultural imperialism abroad. Establishment archenemies such as Robert McNamara or Earl Butz weren’t like white bread, they were white bread.10

  This political allegory had deep roots in American culture, and 1960s counterculture drew heavily on earlier food reform movements. Rumblings of the countercultural revolt against white bread could even be felt during the 1950s golden age of industrial eating. Most consumers happily ate six slices of industrial white bread a day during the 1950s, but sporadic and short-lived waves of anxiety were not uncommon. During those outbursts, fanned by popular radio health advisors like Carleton Fredricks, the FDA or USDA received thousands of letters decrying “unnatural” chemical additives in bread.11 Congress responded through the 1950s with hearings on the makeup of industrial bread and the safety of chemical emulsifiers, dough conditioners, softeners, and other additives. In 1951, for example, Congress gathered seventeen thousand pages of testimony on the bread question and headlines across the country asked, “Are We Eating Poisoned Bread?”12