White Bread (30 page)

A mile from the heart of Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto, Steve Sullivan's Acme bakery is a good place to observe the artisan bread revolution in its highest form. This is the real deal: a small, unfranchised neighborhood bakery producing slow-fermented, handcrafted bread. It doesn't sell sandwiches. It doesn't sell coffee or cookies. It sells bread.

On a spring morning two years ago, I queued in a convivial crush outside Acme's clacking screen door. When my turn came to squeeze into the hot, floury shop, I paid $8 for an Italian bâtard and the best walnut levain in the Western Hemisphere. The levain wouldn't make it home uneaten—that much I knew—so I thought I might as well sit down with a cup of coffee from Alice Waters's Café Fanny next door while I tore through its malty mix of chewy crumb and toasted nuts.

Acme's walnut levain—organic flour, natural starter, malted barley, water, walnuts, and salt—has only a quarter of the ingredients found in Wonder bread. Its crumb's intense, almost beery flavor comes from the unrushed work of microbes—the slow artistry of
Saccharomyces
and
Lactobacilli
. Its dark, almost scorched crust gives a smoky, nutty counterpoint to the crumb's tang. Considering that, when stripped of fats, sweeteners, and added flavorings, most of bread's taste comes from browning reactions in the crust, we Americans eat our bread far too pale. Steve Sullivan knew better.

In 1983, fresh from a stint at Chez Panisse—what was then, and still is, the epicenter of California cuisine—Steve Sullivan opened Acme with a loan from Doobie Brothers guitarist Patrick Simmons. Acme now has a wholesale bakery making loaves for local restaurants and three retail outlets, including one in San Francisco's ultrahigh-end Embarcadero Market. But Sullivan has resisted expansion beyond that, focusing instead on community, quality, and craft. The payoff has been a fierce continued attention to flavor and the jovial community feeling surrounding the bakery.

These are big ideas in small loaves: dreams of pleasure, community, and authenticity, a glimpse into the possibility of a different kind of food system. But, after shelling out $8 for a couple of pounds of bread, I was painfully aware that these are also exclusive dreams.

In
The Commune Cookbook
, Crescent Dragonwagon railed against the “elitist thinking” behind America's taste for industrial white bread. The introduction of inexpensive refined flours in the nineteenth century had allowed the country to share in aspirational dreams of high-class living embodied in light, white loaves. Dark breads, she observed perceptively, had become more and more associated with social inferiority.
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Today, however, thanks to the convergence of counterculture and industry, we live in a world that presents a mirror image of Dragonwagon's.

A
Washington Post
article commemorating the moment in 2009 when whole wheat bread sales surpassed white for the first time in U.S. history explained this reversal. Growing awareness of the importance of the fiber and nutrients found in whole grains played a role, but so did status aspirations. Today, the article observed, whole wheat bread “signifies the sophistication of your palate, your appreciation for texture and variety. … The grainier you like it, the more refined your sensibilities. The darker it is, the greater your chance for enlightenment.”
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Industrial white bread has completed its two-hundred-year trajectory from modern marvel to low-class item. As the spokeswoman for a food industry-affiliated nonprofit nutrition policy organization concluded, “It used to be, ‘Oh, you poor thing, you have that nasty brown bread.' … Now it's, ‘Oh, you poor thing. You have that nasty white bread.' ”
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White bread still sells—Americans bought 1.5 billion loaves of it in 2009—but its consumer profile has changed, settling into the lower classes. And while references to nutrition facts give distaste for white bread a patina of scientific truth, elites' feelings toward people who choose to eat “unhealthy” bread are anything but objective. Just as in the 1920s, disdain for difference can come cloaked in seemingly neutral discussions of healthy eating and responsible choices.

Given the country's post-1970s preoccupation with fitness and body image, we could take the
Post
's analysis a step further. Caring about health and social status are not separate matters. Today, showing interest in healthy eating is an essential piece of the performance of eliteness. Maintaining a fit-looking body, keeping abreast of new health food trends, and at least paying lip service to scientific nutrition advice proclaim one's superior virtue and self-control to the world. In this way, concern with health and fitness helps tacitly justify social inequality: a person's elite status and fit body may, in fact, have arisen from destructive behavior—like insider trading and bulimia—or just some lucky inheritance, but the visual spectacle of an affluent healthism declares, “I earned my wealth through discipline, self-sacrifice, and hard work, just like I earned this body.”

Thus, something as simple as bread choice is an act of social positioning. Bread choice stakes a claim to a particular identity, but also opens one up to others' ideas about what that selection means. Some manifestations of the white trash revival try to reclaim white bread eating as a virtuous cultural celebration, an authentic piece of southern regional foodways, as Ernst Matthew Mickler's
White Trash Cookbook
contends. African Americans join in this, as well, touting Wonder bread's place in traditional soul food. Even an article in the haute cuisine magazine
Saveur
admitted, “Sopping up [Kansas City barbeque] may well be the only legitimate use for spongy, store-bought white bread.”
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Industrial white bread may also serve as an edible emblem of class solidarity. “I've wanted to scream this for so long / There is no shame in the trailer park / or white bread, or government cheese / There is no shame on the victims of poverty,” the hard-core band Crimson Spectre thrashed out in its “White Trash Manifesto.”
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But all those acts of positive self-positioning face a grim association between white bread, failure, and irresponsibility. “White Trash Momma,” a song by another heavy metal band, expressed this connection even more brutally. In it, a woman “raised on white bread” slides into crack use and prostitution, sealing her “white trash fate.”
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In the end, there's something sad about the way counterculture dreams of building good society through good bread morphed into reinforced social distinctions. Nevertheless, this wasn't an intended or inevitable outcome of counterculture food activism: large-scale and unexpected shifts in both how Americans thought about health and the very nature of the U.S. economy sealed hippie brown bread's fate (in a fancy wrapper with a high price tag). Certainly the world is better because of counterculture efforts to raise awareness about the politics of eating. And we gained an artisanal bread revolution along the way.

The social dreams embodied in that artisanal revolution may sometimes seem precious and far removed from the daily grind of poverty evoked in white trash rhetoric. But this doesn't mean that they should be abandoned. I, for one, crave the world of community, cultural vibrancy, environmental responsibility, and alimentary diversity embodied in a fresh-baked loaf of local artisanal bread. But if the story of white bread's journey from modern marvel to low-class symbol teaches anything, it is that food dreamers must be ready to modify their vision if it does more to reinforce social stratification than to build a better world.

There is a seven-inch crack in the ceramic bowl I use to make bread most weeks. I never wash the bowl, just give it a quick rinse and a wipe. It's not hygienic. Millions of leftover microbes colonize the cruddy fissure. A slurry of flour and water begins to bubble with life when sealed in the bowl overnight, and after two days, it stinks of overripe fruit. What had been a clean white paste now looks like the surface of an uninhabitable swamp planet. It's easy to imagine why, before microscopes, people turned to theories of spontaneous generation to explain yeasty effervescence. Today, plagued and blessed by our acute awareness of invisible life, we associate the change in my bowl with rogue microbial colonies and it makes us squirm. “Shouldn't you use some bleach on that bowl?” a friend asks.

These days, playing with microbes at home is generally considered improper behavior. My fermentation experiments are pretty tame; my wife's raw milk cheeses are a littler edgier. Then there's this from the “wild fermentation” activist Sandor Katz: “After a goat slaughter, I fermented some of the meat for a couple weeks. I placed the meat in a gallon jar, then filled it with a mixture of all the other live ferments I had around: wine, vinegar, miso, yogurt, and sauerkraut juice. I covered the jar and left in an unobtrusive corner of our basement [for two weeks]. It bubbled and smelled good. … [Later], as it cooked, an overwhelming odor enveloped the kitchen … there was some swooning and near fainting.”
1

It's not hygienic, but I can't help but wonder whether this kind of “improper handling”—the creative contagion of yeasty fermentation—might offer a model for challenging the chauvinisms and exclusions wrapped up in quests for “good bread.” Fermentation is my own food dream, and I know that's problematic. But one thing should be clear by now: food is so central to how we think about social life that we'll probably never be able to completely avoid dreams of good food and their attendant risks. Nor should we. Utopian dreams of good food inspire people to make the world better. I wouldn't want to lose that passion. We can, however, be a lot more reflective about the politics, assumptions, and absences contained in our visions of changing the world through food. Ultimately, it is possible, and eminently practical, to strive for
both
eager optimism about social change
and
self-critical pessimism about the costs of our actions. One without the other is dangerous, either overly naïve or debilitatingly negative. In this book, I've offered a lot of the latter—critique abounds in the preceding chapters. So, by way of conclusion, here is my self-consciously optimistic dream of political fermentation.
2

First, what fermentation is not. Throughout this book, five seductive dreams come up over and over again. They touch a deep chord in consumers' relation to food, and yet have underpinned many of the most ambiguous outcomes of well-meaning efforts to change the way the country eats. They are the dreams of purity, naturalness, scientific control, perfect health, and national security and vitality. Each of these dreams rose to prominence because it crystallized deep currents of longing and anxiety—and thus galvanized action. All five dreams endowed eating with seductive moral clarity: some foods were obviously good and some were clearly evil. On the surface, at least, who could possibly disagree with wanting purer food, more natural food, more abundant food made possible by science, healthier food that fought disease and weakness, or food that made the world a little safer and less hungry? And yet, we've seen that each of these rousing visions of improvement framed the problems of society and the food system in dubious ways.

The dream of
purity
animated important food safety activism, but also drove industrial and anti-industrial food reformers alike to exclude and divide groups of people in the name of sanitation. Quests for purity created an enduring bridge between concerns about healthy diet and attempts to police against social “contagions” (like unwanted immigrants or alien ideas about health and nutrition).

Visions of
naturalness
, for their part, facilitated important critiques of industrial hubris and giant oligopoly food producers, as seen in the 1960s counterculture. But fears that the country had grown estranged from nature also enveloped food reform movements in nostalgia for an American Eden of independent, white, property-owning farmers. That nostalgia idealized female domesticity and local communities, glossing over the power disparities that always marked those realms. In the process, sentimental dreams of naturalness made it harder for well-meaning people to address inequalities in the fields, factories, and kitchens of industrial food production.

Narratives of
scientific control
typically stood opposed to the quest for natural harmony, but they were no less utopian in appeal. Large-scale food producers and ordinary consumers leaned breathlessly toward a future of abundance, leisure, and harmony made possible by speed, efficiency, and the conquest of nature. In the 1920s and 1950s, this dream blinded many Americans to the hubris and shortsightedness of scientific control. In exchange for spectacles of efficiency, abundance, and control, people harnessed their sustenance to greedy corporations, embraced bread infused with chemicals additives, lost sight of heterogeneous pleasure, cheered the remaking of world wheat farming into a petroleum-fueled factory system, and ignored the destruction of small-scale bakers.

The dream of
perfect health
seeks something that is hard to dislike: life extension and bodily improvement. Nevertheless, even those achievements come at a cost. As seen in food movements from Grahamism to gluten free, the quest for perfectly tuned bodies individualized and medicalized problems that might have been better addressed through social and political means. The quest for perfect health has also come with psychological costs for those who participate in it. With its fantasies of bodily control comes a relentless fear of deterioration and a sense that imperfect health reflects character weakness or moral failing.

Finally, dreams of food and
national security and vitality
help produce an anxious, Manichean geography. At times the perceived need to fortify “us” against “them” has legitimated attention to marginalized people's demands for better bread, whether through wartime enrichment campaigns or postwar Food for Peace. But it has also nurtured an emergency mentality that propelled ill-conceived changes in the American diet and made alternative ways of organizing the food system appear dangerous and unpatriotic.