White Bread Read Free

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. 9
    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. 10
    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.
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    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. 11
    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. 12 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