White Bread (24 page)

In 1950, J. L. Locke, a U.S. milling industry representative, summed up these cultural assumptions in an appeal to “improv[e] the health and attitude of the Japanese people by supplementing their diet with enriched white bread”: “There is some reason to believe that a change in diet might so change the health and attitude of that warlike people that we could live with them in improved peace and harmony.” Locke's self-interested motives were transparent, and occupation officials, hoping to develop a domestic milling industry in Japan, roundly rejected the U.S. milling industry's appeals.
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But in many ways they accepted the basic premise of Locke's argument. The occupation offered a historic opportunity to transition Japan toward wheat, and this, in turn, had important political ramifications. As SCAP commander general Douglas MacArthur wrote in 1950, finding a reliable substitute (that is, wheat) for rice was a key to “block[ing] the rapacious encroachment of Communism” in the region.
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In 1958 Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson visited Japanese schools, where he reported seeing “kiddies at their desks—each kiddie … with a big wheat roll made of American-grown wheat.” In Benson's account of the trip, Japanese schoolchildren eating wheat wasn't merely a gift for U.S. farmers. It was a good sign for world peace.
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An age-old belief in the moral and physiological superiority of wheat bread had found a new home in Cold War rhetoric: the conservative columnist George Sokolsky, for example, worried that rice would not fortify Asia against Communist incursions, and urged the government to deploy America's genius for advertising in the service of shifting Japan toward more vital foods. To support this idea, Sokolsky pointed to the popular radio adventure character Jack Armstrong, “the All American Boy,” who so effectively cemented connections between fortitude and Wheaties in the 1930s.
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This, in turn, might have reminded readers of the central plotline of many Jack Armstrong shows: the handsome, wheat-fueled All-American Boy travels to an exotic, non-Western land where he accomplishes heroic feats unimaginable to the natives.

Reporting on an eleven-fold increase in Japanese wheat consumption during the occupation, a widely reprinted 1957 news story gave this plot a new twist: thanks to the presence of bread in Japanese school lunches, “Japan's youth is literally outgrowing and outweighing its parents.” This effect could also be observed in Japanese beauty pageants, where bread was producing “long-limbed beauties.”
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Although white bread remained popular, most Japanese were not so convinced that they owed their improved lives to it. U.S.-sponsored bread subsidies, school lunch programs, bread festivals, baking classes, advertising campaigns, and sandwich recipe contests had only marginal impact. Bread production increased dramatically during the 1950s, but the association of bread with vigor and civilization did not stick. Even the founder of one of the country's largest postwar bakeries—a pioneering force behind the Americanization of Japanese baking—complained in 1967, “I find myself the only one in my family who stubbornly sticks to eating bread. … My children, who went off to study overseas, have come home and now won't touch anything but rice. What's a father to do?”
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Officials connected with the USDA and farm lobby continued to present wheat exports and bread habits as central to peace, but others wavered. By the 1960s, talk of transitioning Japan to a wheat diet had faded, and rice supplies topped the list of food security concerns. Wheat exports and American bakery technology transfer continued, but with fewer of the trappings of a civilizing mission. The association between American bread habits and military strength was durable, but not unshakable.
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In corn tortilla-eating Mexico, however, a new paradigm for food power was taking shape. It would replace the focus on acute famine relief with a longer-term emphasis on tackling problems of poverty and agricultural productivity. Born out of a specific combination of U.S. and Mexican government interests, the new paradigm would eventually spread throughout the world, helping to cement associations between industrial eating, economic development, and social stability.

One of the most memorable photographic images of the Mexican Revolution depicts Emiliano Zapata and Francisco Villa, surrounded by rough peasant soldiers, eating breakfast at Mexico City's elegant Sanborn's Café. The two leaders have just hammered out a truce and triumphantly occupied the capital. They appear dazzled by camera flashes, and their barefoot troops, accepting service from tuxedoed waiters, evince a mixture of pride and discomfort. Although Zapata and Villa's sojourn at the center of Mexican government lasted less than a year, the image of them sprawled in the capital's most refined palace of aristocratic dining has endured in national memory for almost one hundred years. More than any other single image, it seemed to crystallize the revolution's challenge to class and racial hierarchies. What usually gets forgotten about that famous breakfast, though, is the menu. The generals and their troops didn't eat corn tortillas and beans that December morning in 1914; they ate sweet white rolls.
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Although corn tortillas never risked displacement from the center of Mexico's diet, white bread has been a fixture in the country since the earliest days of Spanish conquest. And for just as long, eating it has been an act of social positioning. As historian Jeffrey Pilcher explained, in colonial Mexico “Creole gentlemen … paraded their status within New Spain's racial hierarchy by wearing ruffled collars and eating wheat bread. One 18th-century English visitor to the remote southern state of Chiapas even noted that aspiring gentlemen would stand conspicuously in their doorways, ‘to see and be seen … shaking the crumbs of bread from their clothes.' ”
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If anything, the status of white wheat bread increased after independence, particularly during the late nineteenth-century dictatorship of Porfirio DÍaz. With the regime's governing ideology of white supremacy and avid emulation of European fashions, bread baking boomed under DÍaz. The “French-style”
bolillo
roll emerged as an edible incarnation of Mexico's progress. Reflecting on “the Future of the Hispanic American Nations,” prominent Porfirian senator Francisco Bulnes gave the old preference for bread a modern spin grounded in the emerging “science” of racial improvement. “The race of wheat is the only truly progressive one … maize has been the eternal pacifier of America's indigenous races and the foundation of their refusal to become civilized.” While U.S. food reformers inspired by Grahamism tried to suppress enflamed passion with whole wheat diets, Pilcher notes, late nineteenth-century Mexican elites “sought the opposite effect, to ignite vigor in the Indian masses through the consumption of [white] wheat.”
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The Mexican Revolution of 1910 toppled Porfirio DÍaz and challenged the privileges of the country's light-skinned aristocracy, but the social dualism of modern wheat bread and backwards corn tortillas proved more immutable. Intellectuals and artists of the post-revolutionary period like Octavio Paz and Diego Rivera waxed eloquent about corn, casting it as the embodiment of Mexico's authentic, pre-Hispanic cultural essence. But for post-revolutionary rulers and their working-class cadres, wheat still symbolized the country's urban, industrial future.

Robert Weis, a historian of Mexican baking, argues that by 1929, white bread—particularly
bolillos
—had become a key symbol of the revolution's promise to ordinary consumers.
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Heavily subsidized by the government, white bread baking boomed. Even President Lázaro Cárdenas—who revived the revolutionary spirit of Zapata and Villa between 1934 and 1940 with sweeping land reforms, anti-imperialist rhetoric, and the expropriation of foreign oil companies—preached the superiority of wheat bread.
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There was only one problem. Even as World War II ended, Mexico was still very much a peasant country without the capacity to supply a large urban industrial workforce with cheap bread. In the country's traditional wheat-growing regions, overtaxed soils produced meager crops and declining yields. New farmland in the north, opened up for wheat cultivation by ambitious government irrigation projects, offered better prospects, but endemic plant disease—a plague of black stem rust—continued to cripple production.
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Meanwhile, in the cities, technology for turning wheat into bread had not advanced much since the eighteenth century. Even the capital city supported only one large industrial bakery—la PanaderÍa Ideal—well into the 1930s, and the Ideal Bakery certainly didn't live up to its name: thanks to antiquated wrapping equipment, Ideal loaves tended to reach customers' hands covered in mold. As a 1939 survey revealed, despite the promises of revolutionary governments, “wheat bread is almost a luxury good in Mexico, destined almost exclusively for the middle and upper classes.”
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Bad weather and poor corn and wheat harvests between 1943 and 1945 turned everyday grain scarcity into acute crisis. Even with government bread subsidies, prices soared beyond the reach of urban consumers. Roving gangs of frustrated consumers attacked bakeries in Mexico City, and bread riots spread throughout the country. In May 1945, protests against a 100 percent increase in the price of bread shut down the capital city of Veracruz state. That same spring, U.S. ambassador George Messersmith warned Washington that without emergency shipments of corn and wheat, Mexico would “fly a [Communist] red flag in three months time.”
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U.S. officials responded with a mixture of anxiety and opportunism. A food crisis in Mexico threatened to destabilize a southern neighbor already perceived as unpredictable and prone to anti-imperialist outbursts. At the same time, hunger could also create opportunities for the furthering of U.S interests. The election of right-leaning Manuel Ávila Camacho as president in 1940 had signaled a turn away from Lázaro Cárdenas's radical social reforms and anti-U.S. rhetoric, creating an opening for closer ties with the United States. A friendly display of U.S. food power could help seal that rapprochement.

With war-ravaged Europe absorbing all the grain America could spare, however, the United States could not fight on another food front with exports alone. Rhetoric aside, U.S. farmers could not save the
whole
world. Industrial food power would have to expand to include other weapons beside direct exports of surplus grain. Henry Wallace, FDR's secretary of agriculture and then vice president, understood this challenge as early as 1940. While representing the Roosevelt administration at President Ávila Camacho's inauguration, Wallace observed the country's need for agricultural improvement firsthand and listened to the new leader's plan. Ávila Camacho pledged to steer Mexico away from radical land redistribution and support for peasant farmers. Instead, he would fight hunger and spur urban development through investments in capital-intensive agriculture. On his return to Washington, Wallace set out to convince policy makers that the United States must join in efforts to modernize Mexican agriculture, for the sake of hemispheric security—even if it threatened grain exporters at home.

The Rockefeller Foundation, which had already begun to formulate similar ideas on its own, agreed to the vice president's plea. As the foundation's influential report “The World Food Situation” declared later, “The time is now ripe, in most places possibly over-ripe for sharing some of our technical knowledge with these people.” “Agitators from Communist countries,” the Rockefeller Foundation warned, were taking advantage of America's failure to share its alimentary abundance. “Appropriate action now,” the foundation argued, “may help [Third World countries] to attain by evolution the improvements … which otherwise may have to come by revolution.”
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What the Rockefeller Foundation proposed had never been tried before: a private U.S. foundation, in collaboration with Washington and a foreign government, would set out to transform the entire agricultural system of another country, from the ground up, in the image of the United States. Maybe U.S. farmers couldn't save the whole world from Communist takeover all on their own, but U.S.-style farming practices might.

In 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation established the Office of Special Studies (later called the Mexican Agricultural Program, or MAP) in collaboration with the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. Over the next eighteen years, the MAP's twenty U.S. agricultural scientists and one hundred Mexican counterparts would tackle two fundamental priorities: creating high-yield, disease-resistant wheat seeds and raising the productivity of the country's corn farmers. Work on improving vegetables, beans, barley, and sorghum would come later, but the Mexican government and Rockefeller Foundation agreed that wheat and corn were top priorities. Corn covered 65 percent of the country's agricultural land, supplying the cornerstone of the Mexican diet. It was an obvious place to start. Wheat was less prevalent, taking up only 7 percent of the country's farmland, but it was grown primarily by large commercial farmers and consumed by affluent urbanites. It suited the country's modern image of itself—wheat and white bread were aspirational commodities. As a result, wheat received disproportionate attention. The payoff from this work was stunning and quick.

By 1948, the American plant pathologist Norman Borlaug and his team had already developed and begun to distribute wheat strains resistant to Mexican stem rust. Their ultimate success came a few years later. In a series of genetic crosses conducted during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Borlaug successfully brought together the three Holy Grails of Mexican wheat improvement: rust resistance, of course, but also dwarf stature and heightened responsiveness to petroleum-based synthetic fertilizer. While Mexican wheat production couldn't have grown without rust resistance, it was the latter two traits—dwarf stature and input responsiveness—that would truly change the world. On their own, the MAP seeds were only marginally more productive than traditional Mexican varieties. But, unlike traditional varieties, they were specially designed to thrive as part of a larger package of modern inputs—pesticides, intensive irrigation, mechanized harvesting, and, most importantly, large quantities of synthetic fertilizer. Given sufficient water and chemical pest control, the MAP seeds could efficiently convert massive quantities of fertilizer into ever-larger grain heads. This is what made them revolutionary. In fact, the new seeds were so good at converting synthetic nutrients into large grain heads that their stalks tended to collapse under their own weight, making mechanized harvesting impossible. Dwarfism solved that problem. The creation of wheat varieties with thick stalks and squat stature prevented collapse (called “lodging”) and ushered in the era of ultra-mechanized, high-yield grain farming.