White Bread (23 page)

To make matters worse, by the end of the 1950s, the United States appeared to be losing ground to the Soviets in almost every arena that mattered—education, science, technology, weapons. Every arena except consumer goods and food production, that is. In this context, visions of domestic consumer affluence displaced Freedom and Equality as the most important weapon in U.S. propaganda efforts.
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U.S. efforts to combat the appeal of Communist “workers' paradise” with glamorous images of life in a “consumers' paradise” filled with sleek Chevrolets, color TVs, automatic dishwashers, and Populuxe living room sets have been well documented.
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The important role that industrial food played in creating the image of America as the land of plenty is less well known, and it is unclear how much U.S. food-related propaganda affected target audiences in the USSR, Western Europe, Asia, and Latin America. It did seem to work on
Americans:
even as confidence in the superiority of U.S. military readiness, technology, and education wavered at home and abroad, Americans picked up on the idea that their ability to produce and consume abundant food set them apart. Industrially produced food was “something better” the United States could offer a hungry world.

During the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, where Vice President Richard Nixon famously accused Nikita Khrushchev of making lousy dishwashers, U.S. newspaper headlines across the country positively crowed over the way American food “dazzle[d] Ivan.” Modern food processing was “our secret weapon”—“the newest weapon in America's fight against communism.”
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“Johnny” might not be able to read as well as “Ivan,” as Rudolf Flesch warned in his best-selling attack on the U.S. educational system, but few Americans doubted that Johnny could eat better than his Soviet counterpart. Speaking at a U.S. Information Agency symposium on food and the Cold War, Campbell's Soup Company president William B. Murphy captured this spirit: “The best example of the American dream of plenty is in food. … Communism is utterly incompatible with the production of food.”
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To be sure, U.S. food propaganda typically focused on more glamorous modern food concoctions—TV dinners and ready-mix cakes—but industrial bread was basic and U.S. industrial foodways were often juxtaposed with the Communist world's scarce “dark bread.” A 1946
Woman's Home Companion
feature on “life behind the iron curtain,” for example, held white bread up as a key example of the
pruducti
Russian people craved, but only America could provide. While some critics of fluffy American bread praised hearty Soviet loaves, they generally conceded that the U.S. baking system was still better at providing affordable abundance. Even as the United States fretted about its own soaring bread prices, the
Los Angeles Times
could proudly declare that “a Soviet worker must work half a day or longer to earn enough money to buy a kilogram of rye bread, while an American needs to work only 12 minutes.”
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From Gaston, North Carolina (“Reds Stand in Breadlines”), to Lima, Ohio (“Bread Scarce in Soviet Cupboards”), the U.S. press triumphed in stories of Soviet bread shortages.
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Accounts of daring escapes from the Soviet bloc run frequently by popular magazines during the early 1950s invariably mentioned bread prices and bread lines as a motivating factor in the flight from Communism. And even when American reporters in Russia observed abundant high-quality and nutritious dark bread, industrial white bread was still a symbol of U.S. superiority: the Russian food system was so inefficient, they argued, consumers had few other options and could afford little else beyond dark bread. Finally, with Soviet military technology advancing at frightening speeds, newspapers could still reassure readers that bread shortages periodically brought the Red Army to a screeching halt.
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In this way, abundant modern food, including industrial white bread, constituted one of the Cold War's most reassuring dreams: the idea of alimentary affluence in the West and dark Soviet bread lines in the East. In industrial bread, U.S. policy makers, manufacturers, and consumers had definitively fused the assumed universality of their foodways with the imperatives of national security.

This wasn't just an East-West comparison. By the mid-1950s, Americans could increasingly compare their supermarket bread to the golden products of Western European bakeries. Subsidized by Marshall Plan money, U.S. tourists had begun traveling to France in record numbers. And they returned from those tours with stories of astonishingly good bread, sparking a fad for French bread in the United States.
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Not everyone in the United States had access to French bread, which began appearing in big-city stores, or would want to pay the hefty premium price, but anyone who read could form an opinion about the difference between American white bread and its European counterparts. Nearly every newspaper and lifestyle magazine ran stories about the French bread craze during the mid-1950s, and a complicated message emerged from those articles. All agreed that French bread tasted divine. Its arrival in America was something to celebrate. At the same time, there was something off about French bread: the very hedonistic qualities that made it popular also made it suspect. American industrial bread might taste like doughy hot air compared to a good baguette, but American bread embodied strength and fortitude in a way that the French stuff didn't. And for better or worse, in a dangerous world, system and fortitude had to trump taste.

The once-pressing question of whether France's bread had, as one woman remarked in a letter to the
Los Angeles Times
, caused the country to “lose vim and vigor” in the face of Nazi invasion didn't concern U.S. observers so much anymore.
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Rather, it was the whole French food
system
that seemed off. As articles in
Time
and other national publications concluded, the French baking industry had too many inefficient subsidies, lax sanitation regulations, archaic distribution networks, and monopolistic guilds. France needed industrial baking and American-style competition.

When ergotism, a rare form of hallucination-inducing poisoning caused by fungus-infected rye, sickened two hundred residents of the small village of Pont-Saint-Esprit during the summer of 1951, U.S. media reveled disproportionately in the sensational story. Tellingly, almost every story on the outbreak instructed U.S. readers that ergotism was a medieval disease, a remnant of a scarier age before industrial baking, and all congratulated American industrial bakers for single-handedly eradicating ergotism through vitamin enrichment. These claims were not exactly true on several levels—but that didn't matter: Tales of bread-poisoned peasants, convinced they were jet planes, leaping from windows and rumors that “the village idiot had hexed the baker” seemed to confirm the larger sense of French baking: it was irrational and archaic. French foodways were “charming” and something to “keep … happily in mind while we survey most of the other half of mankind,” one observer noted, but certainly no model for global security.
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This attitude didn't just emanate from Francophobes. Francophiles also replicated the divide between taste and security, pleasure and fortitude. An article by
New York Times
food editor Janet Nickerson exemplified this trend. Pitting American white bread against its European counterparts, Nickerson argued that opposition to American white bread divided into two camps, one based on health and the other on flavor. The epicurean critics held a special place in her heart; indeed, they were incontrovertibly correct. Fluffy, limp-crusted, and bland industrial white bread couldn't hold a candle to crisp, nutty-flavored French and Italian breads. Alas—and one can almost hear her sigh echoing across the decades—“health values deal with
fact
while flavor considerations deal with
opinion.”
Thus, in the end, readers were better off buying industrial white bread, for their family's health.
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Armed with this confident and urgent vision of good food, America set out to transform the world's bread, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. U.S. corporations, with government support, built American-style industrial bakeries in Iran and struggled (without much success) for similar footholds in Western Europe. But what happened when the iron triangle of wheat, industrial baking, and global security set down in countries where bread was not the staple food? The results were far more complicated than both proponents and critics of American industrial foodways acknowledge, as the case of Japan reveals.

In the early 1950s, U.S.-trained public health officials and agribusiness representatives combined forces to spread the gospel of white bread to the conquered rice eaters of Japan. Their efforts—particularly the targeting of Japanese schoolchildren's palates through school lunch programs—are frequently held up as the ultimate example of U.S-backed agribusiness forcing its industrial foods on defenseless populations, of the premeditated destruction of healthy, “holistic” eating.
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But the story is quite a bit more complicated than that, not least because the Japanese taste for white bread long predates the end of WWII. Indeed, occupation officials under the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) faced an imperial conundrum: Japan welcomed white bread and industrial baking technology with open arms, but fiercely resisted cultural assumptions about the nutritional and political superiority of a white bread diet.
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This two-sided response divided occupation officials, creating room for debate about white bread's role in securing the Asian front against Communism. While some officials argued for rebuilding Japan on a foundation of rice and fish protein, others insisted on bread and milk.

Japan had been home to a small but flourishing baking industry since the late nineteenth century, with white bread serving as a popular novelty food and sometimes status symbol.
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Indeed, occupation officials quickly discovered that the most forceful complaint levied by the Japanese against U.S.-supplied bread was that it was
not white enough
. As one fifty-year-old housewife polled by SCAP sociologists in 1950 recalled, “We have always liked bread before the war, and always ate it on Sundays. So we can get used to it [as a new staple], but if it is not white bread we will be very unhappy about it.”
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After the devastation of war, however, bread of any color was nothing to scoff at. The final years of the war had been a nutritional disaster for the islands' population, as Japan lost control over food-producing territories abroad. The average weight of Japanese children plummeted and even affluent children suffered marked deficiencies of vitamins B, C, and D. After the war, the United States had far greater sympathy for starving white Europeans than it did for the Japanese, and the great food aid machinery doled out stingy rations to the East until the crisis in Europe was resolved. Thus, early school lunch programs consisted of less than an ounce of dry milk per child, thin miso broth, scavenged military surplus rations, and whatever vegetables parents could provide. Schools struggled to meet their goal of five hundred calories per child.
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When, in 1949, officials could finally announce, “Owing to the goodwill of SCAP, the complete lunch program will be carried out by providing each child with pure white bread and butter,” one hundred grams of bread per child twenty days a month at a heavily subsidized price looked extremely good. Children protested at the “odious flavor” of many SCAP-imported foods—especially dry milk, which students flat out refused to drink—but white bread was popular. Students and parents overwhelmingly praised the school lunch program and lobbied for its continuation.
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At the same time, Japanese consumers balked at the idea that bread could sustain a nation, despite the fact that, even before the war, Japanese leaders had tried to connect wheat diets with modernization and military might.
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Sounding not unlike a European American complaining about sushi, one housewife spelled out the problem: “With a bread diet, one becomes hungry immediately; with a rice diet it lasts longer.” “With bread alone,” another housewife bemoaned, “people like my husband, who does carpentry work, get tired.” Although, thanks to subsidized ration coupons, 93 percent of the islands' population ate bread once a day and the majority told pollsters that they enjoyed it, few would choose bread over rice if given a choice.
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This attitude generated debate among occupation officials, public health officers, and agribusiness representatives. From early on in the occupation, public health officials—whose cultural understandings of what constituted a “real meal” had a tendency to mix freely with their understanding of scientific nutrition—saw the occupation as a watershed chance to “rationalize” and “improve” the Japanese by liberating them from their polished rice staple. Officials' frustration and disappointment are palpable in documents complaining of the inability to provide a “complete” or “real” lunch for Japanese school-children—by which they meant that they could not provide bread and butter along with what they recognized as a more culturally appropriate table of miso stew, fish protein, and vegetables.
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Only when school districts finally had the flour, baking facilities, and cooking fuel to produce bread would they deem their program a true success—the school lunch program had much loftier goals than mere calorie distribution. Its larger mission was to “correct” the Japanese diet while fostering “the scientification of the Japanese kitchen; [and the] permeating of democratic thought.” “Democratic spirit,” SCAP headquarters insisted, could be nurtured in school cafeterias through the “substitution of reason and scientific practices in place of local customs and superstitions regarding cooking practices.”
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Propagating American meals was part of a strategy of forging civilized citizens, and without bread—the perceived core of a civilized diet—a local school official complained, how can we teach these lessons to our children?
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