White Bread Read Free Page B

present. Although a relatively small piece of world bread history, the story of American industrial loaves and their political lives offers a unique vantage on a question that concerns growing numbers of people in the early twenty-first century: What’s behind our fraught relationship with industrial food and, by extension, how does our relation with industrial food reflect our messy relations with one another?
    By “industrial food,” I’m referring to the products of capital-intensive agriculture, processed into homogeneous, standardized edibles designed to maximize efficiency and profit over other values such as taste or sustainability. And industrial food has, for the better part of two centuries, stood at the center of Americans’ fears and aspirations about eating and its relation to good society. Mass-produced white bread, in turn, has long epitomized our contradictory relationship to industrial food, simultaneously embodying the promise of industrial abundance and the dangerous hubris of science.
    Not surprisingly, then, nearly every diet guru, health expert, food activist, gourmet tastemaker, government official, and social reformer concerned with how the country ate had something—often
a lot
—to say about industrial bread. Scratch the surface of any public figure, government official, or social movement interested in changing how the country ate during the past 150 years, and you will almost certainly find a powerful vision of good bread standing in for a larger vision of good society.
    So what can we learn from this history? Or, more urgently, how can reflecting on what now seem like strange and outdated efforts to change America through its bread inform the way we think about food today? Concern about the country’s food—where it comes from, how it is grown, what it contains, and how it affects our bodies, environment, and society—mounts every day. Stories about obesity, food safety, carbon footprints, and conditions on farms and in food factories appear daily in the media, heightening the growing sense that something is wrong with the U.S. food system. In the face of this, an energetic new social movement—often called the “alternative food movement”—has exploded onto the scene. A diverse assemblage of locavores, farmers’ market lovers, community-supported agriculture subscribers, fair trade coffee sippers, New Agrarian back-to-the-landers, artisanal food enthusiasts, home cheese makers, backyard chicken raisers, community garden organizers, neo-traditionalist advocates for “eating like Great-Grandma,” hardcore and occasional organic food purchasers, co-op shoppers, and Slow Food gourmets, the alternative food movement is hard to pin down. 15 But one thing is clear: millions of Americans are, once again, setting out to change the way the country eats.
    Thanks to an explosion of politically charged food writing and reporting that began in the late 1990s, members of the alternative food movement have access to a great deal of information about
why
and
how
the food system needs to change. Much less is known about the successes and failures of such efforts in the past. Even less is known about the rich world of attachments, desires, aspirations, and anxieties that define American’s relations to the food system as it is.
    This book tackles both of those lacunae, and regardless of what your own vision of good food and good society may be, I hope that the story of industrial bread and its discontents will unsettle it a little. This is a critical book, but my hope is not to naysay social change, or belittle the efforts of food reformers in any era. Indeed, I hope that my affection for people concerned about the politics of food in the past and present shines through, even as I dwell on the limits and dangers of their efforts. That sympathy is the product of my own experiences trying to change the world through food—and a hard-learned