White Bread (28 page)

 

In 1970 Richard Pryor stormed off stage in the middle of his popular nightclub act at Las Vegas's Aladdin Theater, refusing to do another minute of “white bread humor.” This was a pivotal moment in the comedian's career. He fled to Berkeley, California, where he immersed himself in drugs and the teachings of Malcolm X, only to emerge a few years later as a bigger, much edgier star.
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It was also the first widely cited use of “white bread” as an adjective. The phrase spoke to soaring racial tensions and a mounting sense of despair over white Americans' unwillingness to compromise even a little on their investment in the political, cultural, and economic institutions of white privilege. Strangely though, “white bread” America seemed quite ready to adopt brown bread as a symbol of its values.

Brown breads of various sorts—mostly highly sweetened whole wheat loaves—were rare in the postwar United States, but they were not unknown. Rather, they were fixtures of particular times and places: church bake sales, family gatherings, and quaint country inns. Although many still doubted whole wheat breads' digestibility and questioned whether they were appropriate for daily consumption, in limited venues they were treasured delicacies. Father and the kids might have grumbled about brown bread's “sawdust” texture, but the loaves were also esteemed as symbols of old-fashioned feminine care and rural fortitude. So, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when barefoot girls in peasant skirts made home baking cool, hippie brown bread would have seemed less of a threat to “American” tastes and values than other counterculture staples.

The decidedly uncountercultural global milling and food-processing conglomerate International Multifoods captured this affinity perfectly in a 1970 pamphlet,
Naturally Good Baking
. The recipe book could be read simultaneously as an attempt to appropriate counterculture chic and as a rebuke of youth rebellion. Illustrated with drawings of pioneer life, the booklet addressed itself to modern homemakers who had recently come to appreciate the value of whole wheat breads and desserts, but who long ago lost “Grandma's cookbook.” According to International Multifoods, recapturing the aroma of fresh-baked bread could return families to the days when Grandma “cared about what her family ate and spent hours in the kitchen” to provide it.
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With a few deft words and drawings, the recipe book repositioned the origins of 1970s interest in whole grain goodness—away from unwashed, rebellious youth and into the sanitized territory of “how things used to be.”

Counterculture food gurus and activists had different takes on this kind of nostalgia. Some groups actively resisted it. Worker-owned cooperatives like Seattle's Little Bread Company and Chicago's Bread Shop, for example, dwelled less on the past and more on community organizing, job creation, and providing good low-cost bread. Even the moral superiority of whole wheat bread was not always a given. Particularly in more socialist-leaning bakeries, for example, members argued over whether to value white bread, with its low-cost, working-class appeal, alongside brown.
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Other counterculture figures approached sentimentality in a more conflicted manner. For Crescent Dragonwagon, homemade food cemented the foundations of an alternative social structure. And yet, at times, Dragonwagon seemed aware that her alternative might not be so alternative:
The Commune Cookbook
expressed an extraordinary faith in the ability of its idea of “good food” to appeal to people across differences of class and race, but it also acknowledged the way visions of good food could divide groups. On paper, Dragonwagon's dream of a new way of relating to food resonates with her desire for women's rights. In practice, though, she realized that renewed emphasis on women's place in the kitchen smacked of old-fashioned patriarchy and ran the risk of creating yet another burden women must bear.

Carol Flinders, coauthor of the popular
Laurel's Kitchen
, for her part, understood this tension but didn't appear worried. For Flinders, kitchens were women's “most effective front for social change.” “I'm not saying that women shouldn't take jobs,” she claimed in the introduction to
Laurel's Kitchen
, just that the place “where [women's] efforts will count the most is not in business or professions … but in the home and community.”
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These were “the most effective front[s] for social change.” But the fact that Flinders didn't apply the same logic to men was telling: for Flinders, women, not men, made social change from the kitchen outward because women were naturally and innately positioned to make the world whole through caring labor.
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In
Laurel's Kitchen
bread making exemplified a feminine ethic of care, and learning to make bread served as a, if not
the
, crucial rite of passage into that ideal. Reconnecting with women's innate goodness and transformative potential required reconnecting with the innate goodness of whole grain, something that had been lost when machines began making bread.

At the same time, Flinders clearly saw how closely her feminine ideal allied her with generations of constrictive patriarchic tradition. Her solution to this conundrum was to imagine a bygone era of empowered domesticity that could be revived in the modern world.
Laurel's Kitchen
unfolds around the character of Flinders's coauthor Laurel Robertson, a friend with “natural wisdom” who dedicated herself single-mindedly to caring for her hearth and family. Robertson epitomized Flinders's feminine ideal. She was a woman who didn't betray her innate value as a mother or true place in the political life of her community by seeking a place in men's unnatural, externally focused world.

It would have been hard to read
Laurel's Kitchen
as anything but conservative, written as it was in the era of Gloria Steinem, Equal Rights Amendment battles, expanding definitions of family, and the first sparks of the gay rights movement. And yet Flinders's picture of the content, hearth-centered life available to women was so beautifully drawn, so sensual and full of love, that it couldn't help but appeal, even to many feminists.

Thirty years later, the same tension still haunts the alternative food movement. In 2010,
New York Times
columnist Peggy Orenstein identified the newest incarnation of this recurring conundrum as “the femivore's dilemma.” Femivores, she observed, were “highly educated women who left the workforce to care for kith and kin,” and then carved out a space of meaning and agency in the home by devoting themselves to politically conscious food provision. In this way, femivores redefined “traditional” domestic labor—cooking from scratch, canning, gardening, raising chickens, and even shopping—as an arena of “self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment”—the very principles that, according to Orenstein, had led women to the workforce in the first place.
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Orenstein's article sparked a predictable debate. Many critics focused on a contradiction that even Orenstein acknowledged: the “tomato-canning feminists' ” realm of self-sufficiency and autonomy assumed an income-earning spouse somewhere just outside the picture frame. How could “autonomy” be premised on financial dependence? As Orenstein wrote, “If a woman is not careful, it seems, chicken wire can coop her up as surely as any gilded cage.”
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Other critics dug into the more hidden assumptions of Orenstein's piece: while feminists might disagree on whether femivore life was a cage or not, it was most definitely gilded. To suffer the femivore's dilemma one must be relatively affluent. Like “the omnivore's dilemma,” the femivore's dilemma emerges out of the highly privileged position of having almost limitless life options, something that most women—and men—in contemporary America don't experience.

This brings us back to
Laurel's Kitchen
. For, while critics in the 1970s and today have noted the gendered contradictions of nostalgia for the lost days of Grandma's cooking, less has been said about the vision of America smuggled in with the aroma of fresh bread. When counterculture food gurus like Flinders imagined the American past, they saw a halcyon world of independent cabins filled with nuclear families. Grandma didn't slave in cotton fields or garment factories, nor did she struggle to save the farm from creditors. She didn't campaign for suffrage or march for workers' rights on May Day. Home was not a migrant farmhand's wagon. Great Depressions only increased the “realness” of American food. And when immigrants or people of color appeared in this America, they were scrubbed of actual history, eagerly waiting to share exotic new ingredients or a bit of ancient wisdom with their white audience. This was a romanticized past.

In the enchanted broccoli forest of best-selling counterculture cookbooks, however, at least one author offered a glimmer of perspective. Mollie Katzen, perhaps the most influential cookbook author of the era, honestly admitted, “It is difficult to talk about bread-baking without lapsing into sentimentality.” “One is tempted to go on and on about how exhilarated and connected to the universe one feels, about how the kitchen atmosphere acquires sublime soulfulness, about how born-again breadmakers are magical, charismatic individuals,” she confessed. “[But] it is not my place to promise you a transformed existence. What I offer is one with more bread recipes. The rest is what you make of it.”
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By the late 1970s, however, it was clear that Americans were hooked on self-transformation. Even more than through their appeal to conservative nostalgia, counterculture bread tastes spread to mainstream America via the quest for perfect health.
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Healthy eating had, of course, been one important component of the counterculture since the mid-1960s, but by the mid-1970s it had been elevated to a supreme position in American life. Stripped of its political and social critiques, the counterculture's fixation on wellness easily morphed into an individual-centered, consumer-driven bodily project. Health food stores, yoga studios, and exercise fads flourished across the country, permanently changing the way Americans thought about wellness. Bernarr MacFadden would have been proud: the counterculture's search for bodily harmony had found its love match in 1970s self-actualization.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, counterculture food rebels believed that if Americans only knew about the dangers of industrial food and the goodness of healthy eating, they would change their diet. Changing the country's relation to food would, in turn, bring about swift changes in economic and political relations. By the late 1970s, counterculture food gurus saw part of their dream fulfilled: more Americans knew about the dangers of industrial eating and aspired to counterculture visions of healthy eating than at any other point in the past century. By the early 1980s, a study revealed that six out of ten young singles thought that white bread was unhealthy and to be avoided.
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But it was also becoming clear that this consciousness wouldn't necessarily set in motion the larger structural changes counterculture food activists had hoped for. In fact, the industrial food system could almost effortlessly assimilate health consciousness. The fixation on wellness emerging across large swathes of the U.S. population in the late 1970s could serve as a much-needed new engine for profit in the industrial food system.

This was clearly the case in the baking industry. The perceived moral and bodily goodness of whole wheat bread had helped lead the country toward health food, and the baking industry was ready to share in the bounty. In fact, the 1970s health craze couldn't have come at a better time for the industry. Through the late 1960s and early 1970s, industrial bakers labored under low profits and a tattered image. After the great chemistry- and engineering-driven advances of the 1950s and early 1960s, even industry insiders conceded that their business had fallen into a state of torpor. Market studies revealed that bread itself had become so homogeneous that consumers had trouble distinguishing one brand from another. What little profits could be squeezed out of cheap white bread came mostly from mergers and oligopoly power, rather than innovation. A handful of companies—many the descendants of William Ward's Bread Trust—jockeyed for market position using brute force instead of quality product. Constant investigations into price fixing by dominant firms marked the period, as market concentration increased.
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When wheat prices, and by extension bread prices, soared in the mid-1970s as a result of high oil prices and large sales of surplus grain to the USSR, it only heightened consumers' sense that bakers were taking advantage of them.

Meanwhile, the public embrace of health foods and environmentalism exposed industrial baking practices to more condemnation. And the locus of this opprobrium had shifted from counterculture to mainstream, from Haight-Ashbury to Capitol Hill. In 1971, Ralph Nader launched a new round of Senate hearings on the baking industry and spurred the Federal Trade Commission to take action against misleading health claims in Wonder bread advertising.
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Accounts of early twentieth-century experiments feeding rats a white bread-only diet resurfaced, migrating from their traditional place on the mimeographed pages of alternative weeklies to the science sections of major newspapers.
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Even mainstream nutrition scientists, long reluctant to question the place of white bread in a balanced diet, joined in. As Hilda Swenerton, California state nutrition expert for the university extension service, admitted in the
Los Angeles Times
, “We've been so busy pointing out how the faddists are all wrong that we've failed to recognize some of the good faddists have done.”
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In 1977 the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, backed by a stable of mainstream scientists, issued its landmark
Dietary Goals for the United States
. The report put a government seal on a set of recommendations not all that different from those found in Frances Moore Lappé's radical 1971
Diet for a Small Planet:
Americans should dramatically increase consumption of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, while cutting back on meat, dairy, and refined sugars.
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Even more importantly, mainstream nutrition science had discovered the paramount importance of fiber. Starting in 1975, scores of books, magazine articles, and news items touted the lifesaving benefits of roughage, ushering in “the fiber era” in American nutrition.
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