Industrial diet in white bread world
WALLAWALLA, Wash. — Thanks to an explosion of socially and environmentally aware food writing, readers in the United States have access to a great deal of information about the shortcomings of our industrial food system as well as a growing collection of often simplistic ideas about how to change it. Little has been written about the complex world of habits, desires, aspirations and anxieties that define Americans’ relationship to eating — the emotional investments that frustrate reformers and help keep the industrial food system as it is.
Most foodie discourse assumes that once people have knowledge about the difference between “good” and “bad” food, along with improved access to the former, they will automatically change their diets. But what about those who know and could change, but don’t?
I wrote a book about ultrasoft, mass- produced, sliced white bread because I wanted to understand America’s fraught relationship to industrial eating in all its contradictory ferment. Over the last 100 years, few foods have been as revered and reviled as industrial white bread. It has served as a touchstone for the fears and aspirations of racial eugenicists, military strategists, social reformers, gourmet taste makers, health experts, philosophers and food gurus.
From the 1860s to the 1960s, Americans across class, gender and, to a certain extent, racial lines got more of their daily calories from bread than any other single food: 25 percent to 30 percent, on average, and higher during times of war and recession. What people thought about bread said a lot about who they were. Bread has long been a marker of social status.
AMERICA’S love- hate relationship with this fluffy stuff has been wrapped up in a series of much larger questions about who we are as a nation, how we understand progress, how we envision America’s role in the world, what we believe counts as responsible citizenship, and, ultimately, how we relate to each other across our differences.
When Americans connect the decline of Mom’s home- baked bread with a loss of moral virtue, as they have periodically since the 1840s, they are also making claims about the proper place of women in society. When industrial tycoons of the late 1800s lauded inexpensive white bread churned out by factories as a foundation for social harmony, they were also arguing against labor organizing and government regulation.
When proponents of back- tothe-land movements of the 1850s and 1960s rejected dreams of industrial abundance, praising hearty whole- wheat bread baked on independent family farms as a bedrock of American democracy, they rarely stopped to ask who got left out of this invariably white, propertied vision.
We no longer get 25 percent to 30 percent of our daily calories from bread. No item accounts for anything close to a third of the American diet anymore — not even high-fructose corn syrup. But anyone paying attention to the rising cries for slow, local, organic and healthful food will find America’s battles over bread surprisingly fresh.
AS WITH TODAY’S calls for food justice (focused primarily on consumers’ unequal access to safe, healthy food), bygone battles over what bread Americans should eat as their staple contained uplifting visions of the connection between good food and strong communities, insightful critiques of unsustainable status quos, and earnest desires to make the world a better place. Efforts to reform American bread habits were also replete with smug paternalism, misdirected anxieties, sometimes neurotic obsessions with health, narrow visions of what counts as “good food,” and open discrimination against people who choose “bad food.”
For foodies in America, yesteryear is a land where everyone grew up instinctively knowing
Continued From Page 1D the difference between “real” and “fake” food — wisdom we seem to have lost. This attitude has crystallized in a popular axiom: If your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, don’t eat it. It’s a simple, homey rule with immediate nostalgic appeal. But what if great-grandmother was just as conflicted about food as we are?
As a young mother in the 1910s and ’ 20s, my greatgrandmother Farrell baked 12 to 16 loaves of bread a week for seven children. She enjoyed the sense of community when neighbors crowded into her kitchen on baking day. Her husband insisted on homemade bread. Store-bought loaves were just “sacks of hot air,” he proclaimed — and expensive, too. Yet, by the early 1930s, the family bought its bread.
NO ONE remembers exactly why the Farrells switched, but they were not alone. In 1890, 90 percent of the country’s bread was baked in homes. The rest was purchased from tiny neighborhood bakeries. By 1930, this trend had reversed completely: 90 percent of bread was purchased, and purchased from increasingly large, increasingly distant factories. Despite their success, industrial bakers lived in constant fear that bread would lose its place on the nation’s tables. Compared with newfangled fruit arriving by refrigerated train, or the novelty of modern wonders like Jell–O, bread was just basic. But something remarkable happened during the first three decades of the 20th century. Not only did Americans switch to store- bought bread, but per-capita bread consumption increased.
Food politics in the ’20s and ’30s in America were distinguished by heated debates over what bread the country should eat. Legions of food reformers, social workers, public-health officials, advertising executives, and an astonishing number of diet gurus worked frantically to convince Americans that choosing the wrong bread would lead to serious problems. Some pinpointed newfangled loaves as the source of cancer, diabetes, criminal delinquency, tuberculosis, kidney failure, overstimulated nervous systems, and even “white race suicide.” Others heralded modern bread as a savior, delivering the nation from drudgery, hunger, and dangerous contagions carried by unscientific bread.
But they could all agree on one thing: Incorrect food choices were the root cause of nearly all of the nation’s moral, physical, and social problems. So, in a fashion reminiscent of many community- garden and anti- obesity campaigns today, well- meaning reformers poured into the country’s urban tenements to spread “the gospel of good eating.”
WHAT HAPPENED next entangled choice of bread with high-stakes questions of race, responsibility, and citizenship. Small immigrant- run bakeries came under intense scrutiny, with sanitary inspectors and women’s groups painting pictures of dank, vermininfested cellar workrooms where sewage dripped into dough-mixing troughs.
Even that sentimental icon of all that is good — “Mother’s bread” — was denounced under the banner of a safe and efficient diet. Scientific American, women’s magazines, and homeeconomics textbooks portrayed careless home baking as a threat to family health, while other observers wondered whether even the most careful housewife should bake at all.
Whether or not bread from small bakeries and home ovens was actually unsanitary — it probably wasn’t — anxiety over unclean bread was a gift for industrial bakers. “I want to know where my bread comes from!” an affluent woman demanded in a national advertising campaign. Strange as it might seem, especially to contemporary foodies, the language of “knowing where your food comes from” was a publicity coup for industrial food.
Industrial bread offered reassurance in a sinister world of looming threats. Other factors included women’s increasing role in the labor force, the monopoly power of giant baking companies, and the beguiling promise of industrial abundance conveyed by futuristic loaves designed to look like miniature works of modern art.
The question of what to eat can’t be contained in easy rules or glossed through the assumption that “if you only knew how evil your processed foods were, you would change.” When we define “good bread,” we are talking about a lot more than food. Dreams of good bread are statements about the nature of good society. WHAT REMAINS to be seen is whether foodies can effectively counter these affective attachments to industrial eating — create new dreams of good food — without reinforcing the stark social inequalities of elite consumerism. When making the food system better is understood largely in terms of an enlightened “us” helping an uneducated “them” access “good food” ( i. e., not white bread), we miss the real root causes of our dietary crises — not consumer ignorance, but soaring inequality, declining prospects for large segments of the population, and concentration of power in the food industry.
Aaron Bobrow-Strain is an associate professor of politics at Whitman College. This essay is adapted from his book, “White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf.” Readers may contact him at straina@ whitman. edu. He wrote this for The Free LanceStar in Fredericksburg, Va.