Milling & Baking News - September 4, 2012 - 36

Book Review 

Outsider brings valuable, if inconsistent, insights to baking
WHITE BREAD: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE STORE-BOUGHT LOAF By Aaron Bobrow-Strain 272 Pages Beacon Press, $27.95 are “just within the realm of the plausible, and they always gain traction by playing on already existing anxieties,” he adds. While bread is the subject of this book, what draws his attention is neither the product nor the industry that bakes it so much as it is the manner in which those outside baking have reacted to and used bread to pursue various agendas. “This is a book about one commodity — industrial white bread — that has played an incredibly important and largely unnoticed

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rom the opening pages of “White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf,” it is clear to anyone in grain-based foods that the author comes to this subject from the perspective of outsider. Aaron Bobrow-Strain is associate professor in the politics department at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., and his professional career includes no formal association with baking. Still in recounting the history of what he portrays as America’s bipolar relationship with white bread, Mr. Bobrow-Strain offers valuable insights for bakers and nutritionists as they deal with challenges facing the industry and controversies over what people eat. At the book’s outset, Mr. BobrowStrain offers a key message about the futility and even harm that comes from vilifying white bread and other processed foods as a means of changing how people eat. The warning applies whether changes are sought to address health issues such as obesity or even to enhance the nation’s moral fiber. “The history of battles over bread suggest real change will happen only when well-meaning folks learn to think beyond ‘good food’ and ‘bad food,’” he says. The book demonstrates that scientifically shaky attacks to justify a particular view of white bread have played out over and over again, and in making these historical linkages Mr. Bobrow-Strain’s writing resonates most powerfully. “The specifics change over time: Atkins turns into gluten free, gluten free turns into…?,” he says. “But much remains the same, and this is where history can offer some perspective.” Whether it is the gluten argument or many others, diet gurus follow essentially the same template, he says, beginning by “introducing small grains of doubt into the comfortable confidence of mainstream science.” These kernels invariably

role in American politics, diet, culture and food reform movements, but is not another story of how one food ‘saved the world.’ Rather, it’s a history of the countless social reformers, food experts, industry executives, government officials, diet gurus and ordinary eaters who have thought that getting Americans to eat the right bread (or avoid the wrong bread) could save the world — or at least restore the country’s moral, physical and social fabric. Sadly, this turns out to be the difficult story of how, time and again, well meaning efforts to change the country through its bread end up reinforcing forms of race, class and gender exclusion — even when they also achieve much-needed improvements in America’s food system.” In Mr. Bobrow-Strain’s telling, the history of white bread in the

United States is best understood by examining broader societal aspirations at six inflection points in the past century plus of history. The first three chapters trace the rise and fall of white bread as the symbol of our nation’s desire for purity, food safety and health. The fourth chapter focuses on enrichment as a vehicle for physical strength and the fifth on bread as a symbol of global leadership and the American way. The final chapter deals with the present, offering the view that white bread in the past 20 years has been transformed from a symbol of affluent suburban life to an emblem of “white trash.” He traces the early history of “industrial bread,” his name for white pan bread baked by commercial wholesale bakers, to the 1840s. He says the industry seriously emerged 50 years later amid widespread anxiety about hygiene, gender roles and “dirty immigrants.” Despite scant evidence that bread caused illness, writers of the time warned that even bread baked under favorable conditions “may be swarming with the germs of filth.” The warnings took hold among the public. Mr. Bobrow-Strain says readers of Good Housekeeping voted unprotected bread one of their top five food safety concerns. In reaction, wholesale bakers largely supplanted corner bakeries and home baked bread over the course of the next generation by producing a “perfectly clean, perfectly white spectacle of modern progress.” “Accurately or not, a simple loaf of bread from a small urban bakery seemed to many consumers a harbinger of death and disease,” he continues. “These fears ultimately changed the country’s bread. An urgent need to know that one’s bread was pure proved instrumental in convincing Americans to embrace industrially produced loaves.” The author contends that the “germaphobes” of the time never expected their concerns to lead to the creation of what has become the wholesale baking industry. While the “fear of bread” descriptions are convincing, the book understates the importance of industrialization generally emerging in the U.S. economy and the importance of enhanced efficiency in changing lifestyles as contributors to the new industry. Presumably, fewer and fewer housewives were making
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36 / September 4, 2012 Milling & Baking News
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Milling & Baking News - September 4, 2012

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