White Bread (3 page)

The idea for this book took form in three very different places that I've called home over the past few decades—a cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona, the “Gourmet Ghetto” of Berkeley, California, and the upstart wine tourism town of Walla Walla, Washington. In each of these three places I encountered people working to change the American food system in different ways. I participated in many different manifestations of the alternative food movement and I absorbed elements of remarkably different visions of the relationship between good food and good society. As much as I've grown critical of all those dreams, each one deeply shaped the way I think about the history of industrial bread and what that history can teach present-day foodies.

A few months after my stint as village baker, my wife and I left Tucson to apprentice on a humane-sustainable cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. There, we lived in a trailer with rattlesnakes under the front steps. Under the tutelage of Jim Corbett—a Quaker rancher from Wyoming with a Harvard philosophy degree, a history of political activism, and a deeper appreciation of the spiritual connections between human community and the natural world than anyone I've ever met—we learned to gently move cattle through the range on foot. We practiced an ethic of compassion for animals and the land, protected riparian areas, cared for pasture, and sold what may have been the first meat advertised as “local grass-fed beef” in Tucson. My wife started an informal raw milk collective and I baked a lot of bread. It was the one thing on this list of jobs that I was actually qualified to do. It also gave me a way to connect with folks on the ranch, and over many fresh, crusty loaves of
pain au levain
, we talked endlessly about the politics of food.

During that time, I set myself to understand global food politics and history. Books like
Fast Food Nation
and its heirs were still years away, so I read what I could find: dry agricultural economics textbooks, even drier treatises on trade policy, and their colorful antithesis, counterculture food manifestos of the 1960s and 1970s. For fun, I soaked up food histories—accounts of grain traders, sugar merchants, and, yes, old English bakers. Books by feminist food historians, like Laura Shapiro's
Perfection Salad
, taught me that food politics wasn't just about big business and government policy. It included more intimate struggles over gender, race, and class.

Even then it was clear that labels like “organic” and “sustainable” could easily be co-opted by big companies with almost oligopolistic control over markets. What really mattered was not
what
we ate as much as the distribution of power that brought us that food. Seen from that light, raising humane-sustainable cattle on the Saguaro-Juniper Ranch seemed like a small way of redistributing power and resetting the terms of the food system. By avoiding the oligopolistic middle, we were forging a true alternative based on direct connections between land, animals, and people. What happened in a small community of ranchers, livestock, and grasses in southeast Arizona could have global ramifications.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had just passed and a specter loomed just south of the ranch. Cheap U.S. corn, exported by multinational grain traders subsidized by the U.S. government, threatened to displace a million or more small farmers in Mexico. This would leave them few options other than picking crops and working construction in
el Norte
. Breaking the cycle of corn and beef oligopoly in Arizona seemed part of a larger struggle to give the world's food producers, farm workers, and consumers more options—not just the illusion of choice offered by big agribusiness.
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Eventually, my wife and I left the ranch and Arizona altogether so I could go back to graduate school in the Bay Area. In that milieu, I encountered a kind and intensity of desire to change the way the world eats that I couldn't have imagined in Arizona. We lived in a Berkeley grad student ghetto of WWII-era barracks and decommissioned public housing blocks that made our ranch trailer seem luxurious. Luckily, we were too busy eating to notice. We couldn't afford to eat at Chez Panisse, the culinary epicenter of California's alternative food movement, but we could revel in local organic produce from the Berkeley farmers' market and subscribe to a weekly box of food from a farm in Yolo County. When we had a daughter a few years later, we could take her to milk her first goat at the open house of one of America's best artisanal cheese makers. Like other folks then forging what David Kamp called “the United States of Arugula,” we discovered artisanal olives and practically took out student loans to buy artisan cheese.
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With Acme Bakery, one of the world's best bread makers, only a few blocks from our apartment, I stopped baking. And I began to notice what an affluent white project alternative food was.

It wasn't just the high price tags, pale skin tones, or collective sensibility of the comfortably liberal, comfortably professional populace. In many ways, the thing that made me realize how affluent and how white the alternative food movement could be was the strenuous, back-bending-Berkeley-yoga-studio effort it made to insist that it wasn't (or didn't have to be). For, if there was one thing besides sheer hedonistic pleasure that marked Berkeley food politics, it was the mantra “We need to make this more inclusive.” If only “we” could bring the virtuous spirit of good food to “them,” everything would be okay.

It's a seductive attitude, buttressed by the language of nutrition science and America's intuitive belief in the moral virtue of small farms, but I slowly came to realize that it often reinforced injustices as much as it challenged them. While increasing dietary options for less fortunate others isn't bad per se, it can bolster social hierarchies and strengthen inequality—particularly when expressed as an enlightened “Us” helping “Them” to sit at our preset table. As Julie Guthman, a keen observer of the Berkeley food scene, has noted, there is a difference between inviting others to sit at the table you've laid and engaging with people about how the table got made in the first place. The latter requires tackling tough questions about how power is distributed in society, often obscured even in the most well-meaning efforts to make “good food” accessible.
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In Berkeley I learned that my own dreams of changing the world through good food were complicit in an elitism that I didn't support. This has been a difficult realization, and it's tempting to hide from its implications. The mantra “It might not be perfect, but at least I'm doing
something”
provides a partial rejoinder—but glosses over the real consequences of acting without critical self-reflection. Critique is important. At the same time, I wouldn't want my critiques of the alternative food movement to align me with conservative voices ranging from right-wing cable TV pundits like Glenn Beck to chemical company lobbyists lining up to defend America's industrial food against the threat of “liberal elites.” How can I critique a movement that I care about deeply without undermining its efforts?

History—a good tool to think with—offers a way out of this dilemma. Reflecting on the sometimes laughable, sometimes infuriating dreams of changing America's bread in the past can help us grasp the possibilities and limits of efforts to change the way America eats in the present a little more clearly. In tracing the combinations of anxiety, longing, desire, habit, fear, benevolence, and greed that have propelled the history of industrial bread, I hope to show that dreams of good food are powerful social forces. They animate the actions of consumers, industry executives, advertisers, government officials, and food reformers. They have real material consequences. At the same time, they do not appear out of nowhere. Dreams of good food arise out of particular constellations of power and interests that can be analyzed and understood. To this end, the book is not arranged chronologically. Instead, it follows specific dreams of good bread through time. Each of the book's chapters centers on one particular dream of good bread and the arrangements of power that underpinned it. Each chapter then reflects on the consequences—intended and unintended, serendipitous and unfortunate, immediate and slow burning—brought on by that particular dream of good bread.

The past is not passed in this history. Even seemingly archaic ideas about saving the world through food have afterlives. They linger in the preoccupations of the present. To capture that play of the past in the present, each chapter of the book begins and ends with a contemporary story, a bridge of sorts between the concerns of the present and the ideas of the past.

Industrial bread, as defined in this book, began in embryonic form during the 1840s and exploded in the 1890s and 1900s amidst widespread anxiety about germs, gender roles, and “dirty” immigrants (chapter 1: dreams of purity and contagion). In this moment of upheaval, industrial bread was a perfectly shaped, perfectly clean, perfectly white spectacle of modern progress (chapter 2: dreams of control and abundance). During the Roaring Twenties it became the target of considerable anger and anxiety: modern bread appeared to be
too
pure,
too
perfect—and critics said that it was making the country fat, dumb, and lazy. “Responsible” citizens would have to demonstrate their social fitness through strict dietary discipline and white bread avoidance (chapter 3: dreams of health and discipline).

During World War II, however, synthetic enrichment campaigns, championed for reasons of national security, gave industrial bread armor plating and renewed appeal. Bread enrichment campaigns also trained Americans to crave added vitamin power in their food (chapter 4: dreams of strength and defense). After the war, industrial bread helped fuel the Manichean culture of the Red Scare and Cold War. Propelled by confident belief in the moral and physical superiority of industrial food, American bread went global in the early 1960s, a key ingredient in America's postwar dominance of the world food system (chapter 5: dreams of peace and security).

On the opposite end of the political spectrum, industrial bread emerged as a focal point for counterculture ire in the late 1960s. Antiwar activists, ecologists, and back-to-the-landers held up “plastic” white bread as a lethal symbol of militaristic hubris and cultural conformity. In the 1970s, industrial “health bread” went from counterculture to mainstream on a wave of consumer-oriented body consciousness. The 1980s and 1990s saw an explosion of elite niche market breads—“yuppie chow”—juxtaposed against industrial white, which had completed its trajectory from modern marvel to white trash icon. And, as I write these words in the spring of 2011, industrially produced whole wheat bread has, for the first time in U.S. history, outsold its refined white counterpart. Organic, artisanal-style, multigrain, and even gluten-free breads lead the industry today (chapter 6: dreams of resistance and status).

Exploring these stories, we'll see that dreams of good food play a unique role in the creation of social distinctions: they link individual consumption decisions to the health of the whole society in a way that seems natural and physiological, not socially produced. When someone else embraces our vision of good food, it isn't viewed as a culturally specific affinity; it is seen as acceptance of a universal natural truth—who wouldn't want to eat good food? On the other hand, when someone questions the universal goodness of our good food, it marks them as unfathomably different—what kind of person doesn't want good food?!
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Seen in this light, the history of bread dreams is frequently a history of ambiguous achievements and evils committed for the most benevolent of reasons. Often the problem was not the food dream itself, but what the dream made invisible. In the 1830s, food guru Sylvester Graham—the man whose followers would give America both the humble graham cracker and the lofty belief that there is something morally virtuous about whole wheat—achieved celebrity status by blaming Irish and black New Yorkers for a cholera epidemic. The poor, he argued, brought disease upon themselves because they lacked the intelligence and self-discipline to embrace a “natural” diet. National health—both physical and moral—could be achieved only through a strict regime of healthy eating.

In retrospect, there was nothing wrong with Graham's prescription for healthy eating. It was a bit ascetic for my taste—whole wheat bread, fruit, nuts, fresh water, and no spices, meat, sugar, caffeine, or alcohol—but it was probably a reasonable reaction against the country's relentless diet of meat, boiled vegetables, white bread, and booze. The problem was that his vision of better society through better eating made such a neat panacea that he missed the real reason poor New Yorkers died from cholera: grueling labor conditions, low wages, corrupt government, and profiteering by vendors of clean water.
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Substitute “obesity” for “cholera,” and I'm left wondering: Have we come that far since Sylvester Graham? This, in turn, raises the practical question at the heart of this book: Should we really try to change the world by changing what and how people eat?

My Tucson self says yes. My Berkeley self is more skeptical. And yet, I wrote this book in a third place: Walla Walla, Washington, where I now teach food politics to smart, eager students at Whitman College. The contemporary alternative food movement has been a force during most of my students' lives, so many of them arrive at college already deeply committed to changing the food system. And Walla Walla itself embodies all the contradictions they will have to grapple with if they are to succeed at that.

Tucked into the dry southeastern corner of Washington State, the town is surrounded by miles of wheat. Grown by heavily indebted family farmers in vast, capital-intensive farms and then exported to Asia by large multinational grain traders at low prices subsidized by the U.S. government, Walla Walla wheat is a river of gold in the global, geostrategic food system.