White Bread (9 page)

 

Red's milk never made my wife and me sick. We were young and not at any special risk, and everything seemed to work out, despite my apprehension. Soon we were driving glass jars of milk to friends in Tucson every week. A few people we knew balked outright at the idea of unpasteurized milk. Some signed on, enthusiastic about local milk in theory, but never mustered up the guts to drink their weekly jar in practice. Most people thought it was the best milk they'd ever had, and asked for more. They trusted our milk, and I've never fully understood why. In part, our friends trusted Kate and me, and that sufficed. More importantly, they trusted the experienced older couple teaching us. But, in a lot of ways, our friends were also placing their faith in a dream of good food. It's an old dream, and one that has left a deep imprint on America. It's the idea that food from small, local producers is pure and virtuous, that the best way to ensure food safety is to know exactly where it comes from.

Proponents of industrial food like to mock this dream, reveling in every instance of sickness traced to a small producer. Hard-to-pin-down relations of trust enmeshed in face-to-face connections, they argue, are no match for industrial-scale Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. During the early twenty-first century, however, a growing and diverse segment of the U.S. population, from liberal to libertarian, suburban soccer moms to rural survivalists, aging hippies to young urban elites, didn't share the food industry's confidence.

Prompted by the very real failings of a scientific regulatory system effectively controlled by powerful corporations, they sought alternative ways of knowing that their food was safe. Rather than rely on formal procedures and government audits, they wanted to know more intimately where their food came from. “People around here like farmers' markets,” the past director of my local farmers' market told a public gathering, “because you never know what those Third World people are putting in imported food.” Less xenophobically, my food politics students trust the meat from Walla Walla's organic grass-fed beef producer, not because they've checked the ranch's paperwork, but because they've gotten to know the owner and toured the operation.

I find this logic convincing and appealing, but what does it leave out? Among other gaps, reducing food safety to consumer-owner relations ignores a whole world of food chain workers—the people who, in most cases, actually grow, pick, process, and pack our food. This, despite the fact that the intense systematic pressures to cut corners that lead to contaminated food are often inseparable from the forces that make food chain work the most exploited and dangerous sector of the U.S. economy. As Eric Schlosser argues in
Fast Food Nation
, worker safety concerns are food safety concerns and vice versa.
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The alternative food movement has had a hard time grappling with this idea. When we seek out “where our food comes from,” we want to see a smiling farm-owning family, not a poor immigrant labor force. As Slow Food USA president Josh Viertel acknowledged in 2009, “Historically this movement has focused on the environment, health and preserving small farms. But we've completely missed the boat when it comes to work.”
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Some segments of the diverse alternative food movement have, in fact, found ways to incorporate labor into their agrarian vision of good food. Others at least pay lip service to workers, but hope that a new system of local farms would make them redundant. In the worst cases, however, food safety concerns react with racism and xenophobia to enflame hatred. As in the case of my local farmers' market director, it is sometimes hard to separate food safety concerns from fear of strangers. Noted raw milk advocate Dr. William Campbell Douglass, for example, issued a widely cited statement in 2008 arguing that dirty illegal immigrant food chain workers were making Americans sick, infecting the country's sustenance with diseases ranging from tuberculosis to leprosy to STDs. That these diseases are not typically spread through food didn't matter. Douglass had touched a deep chord in American history. As sociologists Lourdes Gouveia and Arunas Juska discovered, well-meaning activism against contaminated meat in the 1990s often had the unintended side effect of fueling fear of “dirty” immigrant meatpackers.
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Food purity discourses may achieve wide-ranging improvements in the health and security of a defined population (typically wealthy white consumers), but they are not innocent. They structure the world of life into comparable ranks and actionable hierarchies, safeguarding privileged spheres while targeting outliers as enemies. There is nothing particularly wrong with this on a certain level—who mourns the elimination of typhus from milk? What becomes clear from the story of bread, however, is that fears of threat to the social body don't remain neatly moored in purely alimentary realms. They overflow, combine with larger social anxieties, and reinforce other kinds of exclusion and distract from root causes.

Perhaps what is needed in the face of this is a new model of food safety—one that doesn't just flip the old model around, privileging the dream of small-scale producers over large-scale, raw over pasteurized, while retaining the same underlying architecture of purity and contagion. We need a vision of food safety aware of its own social collusions and attentive, first and foremost, to the complex power relations flowing through our food system.

Brasserie Four in Walla Walla, Washington, serves up regional cheeses,
pâte de foie de poulet
handmade from local organic chickens, and roasted bone marrow from a nearby ranch. Tourists, drawn to this out-of-the-way town by its hundred-plus wineries, stop in for French country cooking, but the vibe is hipster-hominess. “Townies”—affluent early retirees and young urbanites who fled to the country with kids in tow—fill the place most nights. The art on the wall is by their kids and grandchildren. This is a place for sopping up herbed broth enveloping Northwest mussels and scraping every last bit of seasonal root vegetable puree out of a bowl. It is a place where you need lots of good bread. And for several years, until Walla Walla hatched a good European-style bakery of its own, Brasserie Four—this shrine to the local and artisanal—served baguettes made by Japanese robots twelve hundred miles away.

For such well-traveled bread, it had many of the marks of artisanal quality: a creamy yellow crumb, alveolate with large irregular holes, each bubble's thin, shiny membrane testifying to skillful work with a finicky wet dough and the absence of commercial yeast. The taste was nutty, with tang but no artificially sour sourdough notes. Brasserie Four's baguettes, produced by La Brea Bakeries in Los Angeles and shipped frozen to groceries and restaurants around the world, were clearly the product of care, slow fermentation, and simple ingredients, not a chemically pumped speed dough like most ersatz “French bread” in town.

As someone interested in good bread and food politics, I had long wondered whether it was possible to produce high-quality European-style breads in the United States at affordable prices. The dream of good bread for the masses is the most ancient of bread dreams. And living in Walla Walla, far from the artisan bakeries of Portland, San Francisco, or New York, this relatively inexpensive and widely available bread almost seemed to fit the bill. Not all my foodie friends shared my optimism: when I told one die-hard champion of handmade bread that I planned to visit La Brea's factory, he exploded, “Why would you want to go to La Brea Bakery? It's the evil empire!”

Some of the country's most prominent artisan bakers shared that sentiment. Dan Leader, owner of upstate New York's famed Bread Alone bakery, complained about La Brea to the
New York Times
, “With all due respect, bread that's mixed, shaped, and baked in a factory, untouched by human hands, is not artisan bread.”
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I was inclined to trust Leader because it was his cookbook that first introduced me to the art of baking European loaves. But I was still resolved to head to L.A. with my question: Could bread that's mixed in a sixty-thousand-square-foot factory owned by a Swiss multinational, shaped by high-tech machinery mimicking the sensitive fingers of a village baker, partially baked in a seventy-foot-long tunnel oven, and then flash frozen for shipment to stores and restaurants from Singapore to Walla Walla be “good”?

Jon Davis, La Brea Bakeries' vice president for concept development—the company's idea man, I was told—agreed to help answer that question by showing me around La Brea's operations. We made two preliminary stops before heading out to the Van Nuys industrial park where Brasserie Four's baguettes were born. First, we paused for coffee at the tiny La Brea Avenue storefront Nancy Silverton opened in 1989. That space still has a neighborhood bakery feel, with a steady stream of regulars ducking in for bread, coffee, and pastries, but no actual bread is baked there now. When it first opened in 1989, Angelinos, accustomed to sterile supermarket bread, called Silverton's European hearth loaves “dirty,” “too holey,” and “burnt,” but something clicked quickly. In less than two years La Brea had outgrown its original space, and Silverton decided to open a larger bakery to fill skyrocketing orders from L.A. grocery stores and restaurants.
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That second bakery—the Direct Store Delivery plant producing fresh bread for the Greater Los Angeles market—was the next stop on our tour. “The DSD” is the heart of La Brea Bakeries, and Jon Davis's affection for this place was palpable. It is here where he “plays,” getting out of the office and putting his hands in the dough to develop and refine new product lines. Although some of the work here is automated, this is not an industrial bakery by any stretch; it's a small artisanal bakery that has been “scaled up,” the way a cook might double or triple a recipe. Instead of the original bakery's one worker scurrying around with one bucket of sourdough starter, the DSD has more workers and buckets than I can count. Instead of a couple of plastic tubs of fermenting dough, the DSD has scores of plastic tubs stacked in precarious towers. The overall effect is organized chaos, a precisely orchestrated ballet of weaving carts, moving loaves, and flying hands. The place still looks and smells like a craft bakery—even though it produces thousands of loaves a day.

Finally, after battling northbound traffic on the 405 expressway, we reached our third stop—the part of the tour I had traveled twelve hundred miles to see: quite possibly the world's most innovative industrial bakery. On the outside, La Brea's global production facility was a beige shell in a bland industrial park. Nothing immediately screamed “bakery.” Inside, with its massive stainless steel tanks, circulatory system of tubes and pipes, cool, clean air, and humming conveyor belts, the place might as well have been a large milk bottler or apple-processing plant. But then I saw the baguettes.

La Brea's Van Nuys, plant is an M. C. Escher optical illusion come to life: impossibly long lines of dough trailing into the visual vanishing point, becoming impossibly perfect squares, rolling themselves into perfectly uniform baguettes, marching off in impossibly long lines again, rotating into towering Ferris wheel contraptions, filing around corners, parading through tunnels, and spiraling up almost forty feet in the air. When the 80 percent-baked baguettes finally descend to earth, it is through the machine that makes La Brea's far-flung distribution possible: a massive blast freezer that inserts fresh, preservative-free bread into the global food system. Human hands touch the loaves at exactly two points: each loaf is hand straightened and hand slashed before baking. Is this an artisan bakery? “Yes,” Davis replied without hesitation.

“Artisanal,” Davis argued, is a commitment to integrity, not the use of any particular technique. He pointed to La Brea's insistence on slow, cool fermentation to build rich flavor and texture out of just flour, water, starter, and salt. La Brea could easily speed up the line by turning up the temperature to accelerate fermentation, eliminating the loaves' long sojourn in a cool retarding room, or adding chemicals that condition dough to higher speed mixing and rougher handling. It won't. And, Davis admitted with a note of pride, the company has lost several major contracts because of this commitment. Unlike most large bakeries, he explained, La Brea has changed its machinery to conform to and nurture the delicate, living nature of bread, rather than adjusting its bread to suit the requirements of efficient automation. Moving steadily along its assembly line, the dough looked, felt, and smelled just like what I make at home.

Awed, I asked Davis how La Brea's industrial-artisanal power might affect small bakeries. Would it, Goliath-like, annihilate the country's fragile new culture of local baking? What were the environmental costs of transporting frozen bread thousands of miles? Davis had answers to those questions, but by then I was lost in my own reverie. The idea that a company like La Brea could make high-quality bread accessible to a much broader group of people intrigued me. “If you have a good small artisan bakery in your neighborhood or town, by all means, buy your bread there,” Davis insisted, “but unless they live in San Francisco or someplace like that, most people just don't have that kind of access.” La Brea loaves still cost more than standard store-bought fare and appeal to a relatively narrow band of consumers, but what could it become? Was this a model for a future of artisanal-industrial abundance, a technological fix for the failings of our food system?