White Bread (29 page)

While some in the baking industry fought back against this dietary heresy, most treated it as an opportunity. Two companies had already shown that health bread could be mass-produced with industrial methods at a high profit. Both begun out of Connecticut homes decades earlier, Pepperidge Farms and Arnold Bakers exemplified the way industrial producers could appeal to a health-obsessed nation without sacrificing scale and efficiency. By the late 1960s, Margaret Rudkin, founder of Pepperidge Farms, had built the company into a multimillion-dollar industry leader, but its origin was classic American health foodism.
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In the 1930s, asthma crippled Rudkin's youngest son and doctors could offer little assistance. Convinced that diet played a role in the boy's affliction, Rudkin set out to cure him with a diet of whole wheat bread, baked from her Irish grandmother's recipe. It worked well enough to attract interest in the community. The boy's doctor requested loaves for his other patients and demand grew from there. Soon Rudkin had, with the help of two servants, started a small bakery in the family's home kitchen.

The wife of a wealthy financier, Rudkin raised money to open one real bread factory, and then others. By the late 1950s, Pepperidge Farms baked more than a million loaves a week in its cutting-edge bakeries. Despite its dependence on high-tech production, however, the company's advertising was self-consciously old-fashioned—even by baking industry standards. The combination was unbeatable. With its cutting-edge technology and homey image, the company soon dominated national markets for health bread, even though its loaves sold for more than double the price of regular bread. In 1961 the Campbell's Soup Company bought Pepperidge Farms, and Rudkin died in 1967, but the company kept pace with the country's emerging interest in counterculture food.

So did Arnold Bakers, a second multimillion-dollar company built on dark, dense loaves.
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Paul Dean Arnold had founded that company in 1940 out of his garage after quitting work at a Nabisco plant. Touting products like “Bran-Nola Bread,” the company had grown to more than $200 million in annual sales by the time of Arnold's death in 1985. The Arnold “Health Loaf Natural,” a highly sweetened light brown mixture of stone ground whole wheat and unbleached white flour, was, in many ways, the iconic health bread of its time.

Through the 1970s, ingredients that seemed drawn straight from a commune kitchen—sprouted wheat, unsulfured molasses, raisin juice, and wheat germ—gave Pepperidge Farms and Arnold loaves exotic appeal. They were Woodstock in cellophane. Other companies quickly followed suit, and soon health breads were the fastest-growing segment of the entire baking industry. Between 1967 and 1982, white bread consumption plummeted 30 percent—but overall bread consumption, led by high-fiber brown loaves, actually increased.
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The advent of industrial health bread was not without hiccups. Few of the country's major bread conglomerates shared Rudkin's and Arnold's attachment to the spirit of health food doctrines. Theirs was a purely instrumental embrace. If loaves could be made to
look
like brown health loaves by adding caramel color, it was fine. And why not rack up impressive amounts of fiber at a low cost by adding cheap wood pulp to industrial loaves? Wonder bread's parent company, ITT Continental, advertised that its Fresh Horizons loaf, filled with “powdered cellulous” (aka wood pulp), had 400 percent more fiber than white bread, but “the same great taste.” Consumers didn't buy it. Fresh Horizons and other wood pulp fiber breads earned a spot on the
New York Times's
list of the worst foods of 1976—just under Tube-A-Goo, syringes filled with brightly colored syrup that looked and smelled “exactly like hair waving lotion.”
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In the end, consumer outrage and concerted action by government regulators reined in the early excesses of industrial health bread. Unfortunately, that didn't stop many of the new mass-market health breads from tasting a bit like Tube-A-Goo. In order to achieve extended shelf life without the use of chemical preservatives, bakers jammed health loaves full of moisture-retaining natural sweeteners. The result, as
New York Times
food writer Mimi Sheraton noted, was sometimes less than pleasant: “cloying sweetness” and “a limp, wet texture.”
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Still, the baking industry pressed on. By the late 1970s, health breads weren't just a lucrative niche market—they were the essential element of the industry's battle against resurgent home baking.

Thanks to the counterculture, conservative nostalgia, and spreading concern about wellness, home baking was more popular than at any time in the previous century. Guided by
Laurel's Kitchen, The Tassajara Bread Book
, and James Beard's
Beard on Bread
, millions of Americans were experimenting with their own doughs for the first time. And these were definitely experiments. Uncertain how to parse competing ideas about which new grain was the purest and most salubrious, 1970s home bakers crammed every grain they could get into their bread. The age of the whole-wheat-spelt-oat-amaranth-brown rice-millet-buckwheat-barley loaf was born. For good measure, 1970s bakers also threw in zucchini, olives, carrots, bananas, sunflower seeds, soya, whey, carob, and dates. Meanwhile, large doses of honey and molasses eased the unfamiliar taste and texture of whole grains onto the American palate.

Between 1973 and 1979, nearly every major newspaper, home magazine, and cooking monthly ran stories noting the boom in home baking and offering tips to first timers. John Hess, writing in the
New York Times
, called it a “kitchen revolt.”
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Bread making was in vogue. In fact, it was in
Vogue:
the style magazine's April 1979 issue touted homemade bread as an easy way its readers could ensure less sugar and more fulfillment in their lives.
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That home bread making had made it from the food section to the fashion pages said something to the baking industry. It seemed as if the country's bakers had to fight a small version of the early twentieth-century battle against home baking all over again.

In the 1900s bakers undercut home baking with fears of impurity and contagion, buttressed by a charismatic sheen of scientific authority. By the 1970s, however, counterculture gurus had effectively associated charismatic food science with hubris and destruction. A new strategy was needed. So, in the 1980s, the baking industry took back terrain from home baking with niche marketing and appeals to upscale chic.

This approach reflected larger shifts in the U.S. economy. Rocked by recessions, oil crises, and de-industrialization, the U.S. economy began to take on a new form in the 1970s. Manufacturing no longer served as the country's driving engine. Financial services—making money from money—had begun to take their place at the center of the economy.

After steadily rising through the postwar period, real wages for most Americans began to decline. Even forty years later, average wages adjusted for cost of living still wouldn't have returned to their pre-1970s level, but the financialization of the U.S. economy did produce enormous wealth for urban professionals. Wealth distribution in the country became, and remained, more polarized than at any other period since the Roaring Twenties. Affluent singles and childless couples reveled in unprecedented disposable incomes, giving rise to a world of “yuppie” consumption. And yet, across the country, households that could afford to maintain Carol Flinders's dream of a dedicated homemaker were growing increasingly rare.
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These trends would have a marked effect on the very nature of consumption. During the postwar era of rising wages and decreasing inequality, consumption largely took the form of standardized, one-size-fits-all, mass-market commodities. As with enriched white breads on supermarket shelves, differences among competing commodities were relatively small. During the 1980s, however, fueled by the rapid segmentation of American society, consumer life diversified into ever-more precise niche markets. Massive department stores lost ground to boutique chains catering to narrow bands of consumers, who increasingly began to tie their identities to specific niche markets.
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Along with advances in transportation and packaging, this had a profound effect on the American diet. No longer would everyone eat the same iceberg lettuce. Increasingly, shoppers could choose the style of lettuce—shipped in from Mexico, if needed—that fit their status aspirations exactly. To survive, bakers would have to embrace real product diversification. And in this area, upstarts outpaced industry leaders. Small bakeries sprouted up across the country in record numbers during the 1980s. By the 1990s, some of them had grown into chains, “vying to become the ‘Starbucks' of bread.”
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Au Bon Pain, La Vie de France, Great Harvest, the St. Louis Bread Company, and Breadsmith clones spread through suburban malls and city streets.

Many of the resurgent small bakeries paid the rent with sweets and sandwiches, not bread. Nevertheless, by the early 1990s, observers could point to a “new bread mystique” seducing the country. Like the new consumer economy in general, the small-bakery revival of the 1980s and 1990s targeted specific class and status groups. Supermarkets still sold industrial white bread, of course, but demand for fluffy loaves increasingly concentrated in lower-income brackets. By the end of the 1970s, people buying supermarket white bread almost universally ranked low price as their top consideration in food purchasing. Middle- and upper-class consumers were increasingly willing to pay more for distinctive bread. Now “we can sell Cadillacs along with the Fords,” a
Bakery Magazine
writer beamed.
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Catering to middle- and upper-class consumers interested in health and charmed by novelty, supermarket chains opened in-store bakeries that made high-value specialty breads from scratch or “baked off” partially cooked loaves from central distribution centers. Comfortable suburbanites switched to health breads like Arnold and Orowheat and flocked to strip-mall chain bakeries.

Meanwhile, urban elites could select from a growing array of high-end bread bakeries—often with roots in the counterculture. In 1977, Mimi Sheraton had eulogized urban ethnic bakeries, lost to gentrification and suburbanization. According to Sheraton, San Francisco sourdough had become “practically extinct.”
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Within a decade, however, the situation had changed dramatically. On the West Coast, young urban professionals—yuppies—discovered the pleasures of European-style artisan loaves at Nancy Silverton's La Brea Bakery or Steve Sullivan's Acme Bread. In New York, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw the opening of soon-to-be-institutions like Amy's Bakery, Tom Cat Bakery, and the Sullivan Street Bakery.

Multiple forces drove this explosion of high-end bread bakeries: choosing healthy grain foods had become closely associated with ideas of personal responsibility and successful self-image; yuppie consumers craved distinctive gourmet foods, especially ones with ties to Europe or California; and, perhaps most importantly, high-quality bread appealed to a new consumer dream. Market researchers called it “neo-traditionalism,” and it combined nostalgia for 1950s-vintage family values with a cash-charged belief in the possibility of achieving self-actualization through consumer choice. Artisanal bread offered a perfect neo-traditionalist symbol, self-consciously old-fashioned and yet decidedly upscale.
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European-style breads as gourmet status symbols were not new, at least in New York. As early as 1962, the year Eero Saarinen's birdlike TWA terminal swooped down at what was still called Idlewild International Airport, a subsidiary of Pepperidge Farms was airlifting Parisian baguettes into Manhattan. By 1963, affluent New Yorkers could buy the “astronomically priced” 85-cent bread at 250 outlets, including Bloomingdales. Baked overnight in a prestigious Paris
boulangerie
and on New York shelves by noon, the loaves' thirty-six hundred “food miles” were something to brag about.
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By the 1980s European bread was spreading west into the country's heartland. Meanwhile, the isolation of
Lactobacillus sanfrancisco—
the bacteria responsible for San Francisco sourdough's tang—set off a craze for sourdough that marched east across the country.

High-status bread inspired legions of imitators, some crude and some creative. On the crude side, bakeries interested in scale and efficiency could substitute “natural sourdough flavor” for costly slow, cool fermentation. Often, as one bakery scientist acknowledged, the all-important
look
of artisan authenticity could be achieved without sacrificing industrial efficiency. “We developed our technology to produce perfectly regular looking loaves. It's not that hard to program them to make perfectly irregular ones,” he confessed.
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Like rustic faux-Italian tiles and factory-scratched “vintage” furniture, which give a patina of history and character to fifteen-minute-old McMansions, artfully mutilated bread promised a mini respite from the soulless world of modern commodity production—even though it was still fast food.

On the more creative side, La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles went from one-room bakeshop to multibillion-dollar global conglomerate by pioneering artisan-industrial technology: loaves shaped by gentle robots and factory assembly lines adapted to the same kind of slow, careful procedures used by small bakeries. The result was a true hybrid, combining a bit of the artisan spirit with a bit of the industrial method.

Whether through small, unfranchised bakeries, strip-mall chains, or industrial artisans like La Brea, the dream of good bread, European-style, was no longer confined to coastal cities. By the turn of the millennium, it had reached consumers in every corner of “the United States of Arugula.” With this delicious bread, of course, came new dreams about society.