White Bread (32 page)

2
.  Anna Revedin et al., “Thirty-Thousand-Year-Old Evidence of Plant Food Processing,”
Proceedings of the National Association of Science
44, no. 107 (2010): 18815–19; Biancamaria Aranguren, Roberto Becattini, Marta Mariotti Lippi, and Anna Revedin, “Grinding Flour in Upper Paleolithic Europe (25,000 Years BP),”
Antiquity
81 (2007): 845–55; Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf,
Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Europe, and the Nile Valley
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000).

3
.  David Waines, “Cereals, Bread and Society: An Essay on the Staff of Life in Medieval Iraq,”
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
30, no. 3 (1987): 255–85; Jean Bottéro, André Finet, Bertrand Lafont, Georges Roux, and Antonia Nevill,
Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat,
Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998); Heinrich Eduard Jacob,
Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History
(New York: Skyhorse, 2007); John Merchant and Joan Alcock,
Bread: A Slice of History
(London: History Press, 2008).

4
.  I. J. Gelb, “The Ancient Mesopotamian Ration System,”
Journal of Near Eastern Studies
24, no. 3 (1965): 230–43; Rosemary Ellison, “Some Thoughts on the Diet of Mesopotamia from c. 3,000–600 B.C.,”
Iraq
45, no. 1 (1982): 146–50; Kasia Maria Szpakowska,
Daily Life in Ancient Egypt: Recreating Lahun
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008); Jacob,
Six Thousand Years of Bread;
Merchant and Alcock,
Bread
.

5
.  Christopher Dyer, “Changes in Diet in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Harvest Workers,”
Agricultural History Review
36, no. 1 (1988): 21–37; Kathy L. Pearson, “Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet,”
Speculum
72, no. 1 (1997): 1–32.

6
.  Fernand Braudel,
The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible; Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century
(New York: Harper & Row, 1981); League of Nations, “Rural Dietaries in Europe. Annex: Report on Bread,” August 26, 1939, Foreign Agricultural Service Correspondence, RG 166, “France 1950–1954,” box 152, National Archives II, College Park, MD (hereafter FAS-NA).

7
.  Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans generally preferred the taste of wheat loaves, but corn, rye, oat, and barley breads often predominated thanks to their lower production costs. Waverley Lewis Root and Richard De Rochemont,
Eating in America: A History
(New York: Ecco, 1981).

8
.  U.S. bread consumption statistics from “Boost for Bread,”
Business Week
, February 28, 1948; Marguerite C. Burke, “Pounds and Percentages,” in
Food: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1959
, ed. United States Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959); William G. Panschar,
Baking in America
, vol. 1 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1956); Esther F. Phipard, “Changes in the Bread You Buy,” in
Crops in Peace and War: The Yearbook of Agriculture, 1950–1951
, ed. United States Department of Agriculture (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951); Richard G. Walsh and Bert M. Evans,
Economics of Change in Market Structure, Conduct, and Performance: The Baking Industry, 1947–1958
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Studies, 1963); M. L. Way and H. B. McCoy,
Establishing a Retail Bakery
(Washington, DC: United States Department of Commerce, 1946); Ronald L. Wirtz, “Grain, Baking, and Sourdough Bread: A Brief Historical Panorama,” in
Handbook of Dough Fermentation
, eds. Karel Kulp and Klaus Lorenz (New York: CRC, 2003).

9
.  Christopher Hibbert,
The Days of the French Revolution
(New York: Morrow, 1980); Darlene Gay Levy and Harriet Branson Applewhite, “Women and Political Revolution in Paris,” in
Becoming Visible: Women in European History
, eds. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); Donald Sutherland,
The French Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).

10
.  Merchant and Alcock,
Bread
.

11
.  USDA Economic Research Service, “100 Years of Eating in America,” February 18, 2010,
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Features/Centennial/
.

12
.  Some examples include E. Melanie DuPuis,
Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink
(New York: New York University Press, 2002); Roger Horowitz,
Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Sidney W. Mintz,
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
(New York: Viking, 1985); Jeffrey M. Pilcher,
¡Qué Vivan los Tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

13
.  Chapters 1 and 2 expand on this idea.

14
.  Plato,
The Republic
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), section 372a–d.

15
.  I use the phrase “alternative food movement” with some hesitation. Although it provides a useful shorthand, the label also ascribes a false sense of unity and coherence to what is really a diverse collection of actors and political visions. Writing on the contemporary U.S. alternative food movement has been as diverse as the movement itself. A number of key scholarly analyses shaped my thinking about U.S. food activism: Patricia Allen,
Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Patricia Allen, Margaret FitzSimmons, Michael Goodman, and Keith Warner, “Shifting Plates in the Agrifood Landscape: The Tectonics of Alternative Agrifood Initiatives in California,”
Journal of Rural Studies
19, no. 1 (2003): 61–75; Alison Blay-Palmer,
Food Fears: From Industrial to Sustainable Food Systems
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008); E. Melanie DuPuis and David Goodman, “Should We Go ‘Home' to Eat?: Toward a Reflective Politics of Localism,”
journal of Rural Studies
21, no. 3 (2005): 359–71; Julie Guthman,
Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Julie Guthman, “Bringing Good Food to Others: Investigating the Subjects of Alternative Food Practice,”
Cultural Geographies
15, no. 4 (2008): 431–47; Jonathan Murdoch and Mara Miele, “A New Aesthetic of Food? Relational Reflexivity in the ‘Alternative' Food Movement,” in
Qualities of Food
, eds. Mark Harvey, Andrew McMeekin, and Alan Warde (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004); Hugh Campbell, “Breaking New Ground in Food Regime Theory: Corporate Environmentalism, Ecological Feedbacks and the ‘Food from Somewhere' Regime?”
Agriculture and Human Values
26, no. 4 (2009): 309–19; Christie McCullen, “The White Farm Imaginary: How One Farmers Market Refetishizes the Production of Food and Limits Food Politics,” in
Food as Communication: Communication as Food
, eds. Janet M. Cramer, Carlnita P. Greene, and Lynn Walters (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Carolyn de la Peña,
Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Richard R. Wilk,
Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System
(Lanham, MD: Altamira, 2006). Important popular accounts that give a sense of the variety of approaches to food activism include David Kamp,
The United States of Arugula: The Sun Dried, Cold Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra Virgin Story of the American Food Revolution
(New York: Broadway Books, 2007); Sandor Ellix Katz,
The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements
(White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2006); Michael Pollan,
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
(New York: Penguin, 2006); Mark Winne,
Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture
(Boston: Beacon, 2010).

16
.  Jonathan Fox and Libby Haight, eds.,
Subsidizing Inequality: Mexican Corn Policy since Nafta
(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2010); Gisele Henriques and Raj Patel,
Policy Brief No. 7: Agricultural Trade Liberalization and Mexico
(Oakland, CA: Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy, 2003).

17
.  Kamp,
The United States of Arugula
.

18
.  Julie Guthman, “ ‘If They Only Knew': Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions,”
Professional Geographer
60, no. 3 (2008): 387–97.

19
.  This dynamic can sometimes be flipped: the food of one's own group can be seen as “bad,” while that of other groups is “good” (i.e., “exotic” or “different”). Although this changes the location of approval/disapproval, it maintains the overarching idea of clear-cut divides between “us” and “them,” “good” and “bad.” In more theoretical terms, we can think of diet as an arena of Foucaultian biopolitics. Because visions of good food link individual preferences to the overall health of society, straying from the norm has real consequences. We ascribe social virtue to people who share our vision of good food. And when a person or group fails to embrace our dream of good food, it isn't seen as an innocent difference—it represents a potential threat to the health of society. For a reading of Foucault through the lens of diet, see Aaron Bobrow-Strain, “White Bread Bio-politics: Purity, Health, and the Triumph of Industrial Baking,”
Cultural Geographies
15, no. 1 (2008): 19–40.

20
.  See chapter 3 for an extended discussion of this moment. Also Charles E. Rosenberg,
The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); James C. Whorton,
Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).

1
.  Daniel Block, “Purity, Economy, and Social Welfare in the Progressive Era Pure Milk Movement,”
Journal for the Study of Food and Society
3, no. 1 (1999): 20–27; DuPuis,
Nature's Perfect Food;
Susanne Freidberg,
Fresh: A Perishable History
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

2
.  James Harvey Young,
Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Clayton A. Coppin and Jack C. High,
The Politics of Purity: Harvey Washington Wiley and the Origins of Federal Food Policy
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Lorine Swainston Goodwin,
The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 1879–1914
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999); Eric Schlosser,
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

3
.  Coppin and High,
The Politics of Purity;
Goodwin,
The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders;
Young,
Pure Food
.

4
.  Estimated by comparing Ward Bakery production figures with New York City consumption statistics. New York consumption figures from “Greatest Egg and Bread Eating City,”
Olean
(NY)
Evening Times
, August 5, 1910, 3.

5
.  “Farm Boy's Opportunities,”
Iowa Homestead
, June 9, 1910; “Table and Kitchen,”
Evening News
, September 18, 1900, 8.

6
.  Robert H. Wiebe,
The Search for Order, 1877–1920
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980).

7
.  Ibid.

8
.  Michael McGerr,
A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005); Wiebe,
The Search for Order;
Steven J. Diner,
A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1998); Nell Irvin Painter,
Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era
(New York: Norton, 2008).

9
.  Wiebe,
The Search for Order
.

10
.  National Association of Master Bakers,
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Convention of the National Association of Master Bakers
(Chicago: National Association of Master Bakers, 1915). Data on bread production in the preceding paragraphs calculated from Panschar,
Baking in America;
Donald R. Stabile, “Bakery Products,” in
Manufacturing: A Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide
, eds. David O. Whitten and Bessie Emeric Whitten (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990); “Flavor of Today's Bread Is Much Better Than Many Critics Are Willing to Admit,”
Western Baker
, January 1937, 21–22; “The Story of American Efficiency,”
U.S. News
, October 31, 1938; T. E. King, “Largest and Most Wonderful Bakery in the World,”
Baker's Helper
, September 1, 1925, 497. On Perry County baking history, see Saxon Lutheran Memorial,
Heritage of Cooking: A Collection of Recipes from East Perry County, Missouri
(Frohna, MO: Saxon Lutheran Memorial, 1965).

11
.  On the idea of “fresh” food and its role in the industrialization of eating, see Freidberg,
Fresh
.