White Bread Read Free Page A

with; it is someone you are willing and permitted to share bread with.
    Bread consumption has long marked hierarchies of social status. From the very first city-states, bread sustained serfs, merchants, slaves, kings, and gods alike—but they did not all eat the same bread. They ate loaves assigned to their specific segment of society, either by formal decree, as in imperial Rome and Assyria, or by implicit custom, as in late twentieth-century America. For bread-eating peoples, the very act of eating bread defined boundaries between “civilized” and “savage.”
    In most times and places throughout history, the social order of bread arrayed itself in a spectrum from the lightest, whitest, and most wheaten for elites to darker, chewier, and more admixed loaves for the rest. In early twentieth-century America, for example, it would have been almost impossible to escape the message, conveyed by food advertising, scientific studies, political cartoons, foreign correspondents, and even church sermons, that only savage peoples and unwashed immigrants ate dense, dark bread. Eating white bread was said to “Americanize” undesirable immigrants, and a few social commentators even claimed that eating white bread literally changed newcomers’ complexions. 13
    And yet, in many places and times, food experts, philosophers, and ordinary eaters contested that ancient order. Whether white or dark bread constituted the best foundation for a vigorous, moral society was quite possibly the first great food fight. Plato debates this question in
The Republic
, concluding that the ideal
polis
must be built on dark, hearty rural loaves, not soft, citified white ones. 14 So too some ancient food writer probably waxed lyrical about Gilgamesh’s decision to eat “authentic” peasant barley cakes instead of overcivilized einkorn wheat.
    This points to something else important about status and the staff of life. While the type of bread one eats has long marked one’s social position, more abstract ideas about what counts as “good bread” shape the very ground on which social groups interact. When we define what counts as “good bread,” we are talking about a lot more than food. Dreams of “good bread” are statements about the nature of “good society.” Such dreams come with unspoken elaborations of who counts as a responsible citizen and how society should be organized.
    When, for example, Americans debate, as they have periodically since the 1800s, whether “Mother’s bread” or store-bought loaves are more virtuous and authentically “American,” they are also making claims about the proper place of women in society. When robber barons of the late 1800s Gilded Age lauded abundant and inexpensive white bread churned out by factories as the foundation for social harmony, they were also arguing against a society of labor organizing and government regulation. And when back-to-the-land movements of the 1840s and 1960s contended that hearty whole wheat bread baked on independent family farms was a bedrock of democratic society, they rarely stopped to ask themselves who got left out of this invariably white and propertied vision. Yet these abstract dreams of good bread and good society had real consequences for real people.
    For these reasons and more, this isn’t really a book about the history of bread. It’s a book about what happens when dreams of good society and fears of social decay get tangled up in campaigns for “good food.”
    More specifically, it traces six different deeply felt notions that have defined America’s relationship to bread at different moments: dreams of purity and contagion; control and abundance; health and discipline; strength and defense; peace and security; resistance and status. In doing this, the book’s scope is limited to the era of standardized, mass-produced industrial bread, from about 1840 to the