White Bread (2 page)

Not surprisingly, the bread supply has long been a crucial concern of states and rulers. Subjects of the Assyrian Empire ate a mixed diet of legumes, onions, greens, and meat from sheep and goats, but social order revolved around a centrally controlled bread ration. In Pharaonic Egypt, state workers received wages in bread and bread grains, and soldiers were known for eating so much bread—a ration of four pounds per day—that Greeks called Egyptians
artophagoi
, “the bread eaters.” Rome was no different, building its vast imperial reach on a foundation of sophisticated bakeries and highly developed bread distribution systems.
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During the European Middle Ages, bread remained central to culture, religion, and survival. In thirteenth-century Britain, for example, workers on feudal manors ate 70–80 percent of their daily calories in the form of bread and cheese. Beer, essentially liquid bread, made up much of the remaining 20–30 percent, with meat, fruit, and vegetables appearing as rare seasonal treats. During periods when labor was scarce and wages higher, such as after the great population decline caused by the Black Death, Europeans ate significantly more meat, but bread still anchored the diet in most places and vegetables were sparse.
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The advent of modernity didn't do much to change Europeans' reliance on bread. Residents of seventeenth-century Sienna consumed between two and three pounds of bread per person every day. Under Louis XIV, Parisian workers subsisted on three and a half pounds of bread a day, and not much else. Speaking very broadly, we can say that from the 1600s to as late as the 1950s, Europeans received between 40 to 60 percent of their daily calories in the form of bread.
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Even in the United States, a country big enough to grow almost anything, bread remained central. As one observer of the early Republic wrote, American “wage-earners … were probably better fed than laborers in Europe.” Still, “they rarely tasted fresh meat more than once a week. … They ate bread, one of the cheapest sources of energy.”
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From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Americans got, on average, 25–30 percent of their daily calories from bread, a figure that began to dip significantly only in the late 1960s. During times of war or recession (or in the ranks of the poor), the percentage rose even higher.
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Under conditions like these, governments perceived as neglecting the bread supply faced mob violence, bread riots, and worse. Marie Antoinette may never have actually said, “Let them eat cake” in response to her subjects' demand for bread, but the French monarchy's neglect of the bread supply did pave the path to Madame Guillotine.

In October 1789, it was French women's outrage over, among other things, the monarchy's lavish dining during a time of high bread prices that tipped the balance in favor of the masses. The Revolution had begun several months earlier with the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but the king and queen, lying low in Versailles, had remained largely insulated from the upheavals. Then, on October 5, six thousand women, marching on the monarchs' summer residence armed with lances, pitchforks, and muskets, changed that. A number of different offenses triggered the march, but when the women reached Versailles, their anger shifted to bread. Chanting, “Bread! Bread! Bread!” and facing little resistance from sympathetic National Guardsmen, the women ransacked the palace. They seized and distributed the royal bread stores and forced the king and queen to return to Paris, where they lived under virtual house arrest until their executions three years later. As the royal carriage left Versailles for the last time, thousands of women surrounded it, triumphantly brandishing loaves of bread speared on the tips of bayonets.
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Across the channel, English peasants and workers also demanded bread, but where French officials' efforts to maintain a moral economy of bread had collapsed, with disastrous results, British rulers maintained firmer control. From 1266 to 1863, the English Assize of Bread strictly regulated bread sales and bakery profits. But even that system wasn't perfect, and bread riots regularly erupted during moments of waning faith in the benevolence of government.
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The modern English word “lord” still carries this political history in its bones. Lord derives from the Old English title “hláford”— “keeper of the bread”—a privileged status, but also a perpetually anxious one. Ruling has always meant a tense dance between the power of bread keepers and the demands of bread eaters.

The dance was even harder for bakers. Throughout history, the village baker was not the jolly, romantic figure we picture today. Not only was the baker the target of intense government regulation, but his almost absolute control over people's sustenance made him socially suspect. Accused—often with good reason—of false weights, grain hoarding, hunger profiteering, and cutting flour with cheap whiteners like chalk, alum, or borax, bakers earned dubious reputations over the centuries. When things went wrong in town—even things unrelated to bread—the baker often got the blame.

 

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 needs 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.