Book Review: White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

Image by Frank Oschatz from Pixabay

This blog will be a little twist on what I usually write about. Don’t worry, we’ll get back to recipes soon, I’m thinking of panzanella, the Italian bread salad. Right now I want to talk about White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain (Beaon Press, 2012). This book presents a positively riveting account of the history of white bread, as in, industrial white bread. He presents what is at times a truly frightening and disturbing history, mostly throughout the 20^th century. It’s not so much because of the bread itself, although that certainly enters into the equation. It’s what was done with the bread, and all the concepts, control, money, ideas, fears, likes, dislikes, politics, and economics of industrial white bread.

He studies the ruthlessness with which the early bread company giants pursued their wealth through bread (think robber baron or big oilman), with consolidation of power and money nationwide. He moves effortlessly, but chillingly, through the decades to today detailing the nefarious paths our governments have taken to control people’s diet, their thoughts, their politics, even how they go to war. Who would have thought that Wonder Bread was a political and economic weapon during the Cold War? They did. Did you know that before it was known as the Green Revolution, wheat was grown under and called, the Mexican Agricultural Program, or MAP, for short? At first it was so hugely successful, they then transplanted it from Mexico to India. This hybrid wheat they were growing was going to save the world from hunger, or so they espoused. Early on, however, it became apparent that there were serious flaws in the Green Revolution, but they stuck to their guns (it was just too profitable, requiring all those inputs of fertilizer and pesticides), forcing it on the world. It aggravated poverty, deepened the have and have-nots abyss, and destroyed the Earth in the bargain.

As this book makes this incredible journey up to today, it is never about taste. Mr. Bobrow-Strain documents the “French food craze” of the ’50s which (let’s be honest, American food needed to break out of its mold) brought the baguette to the U.S. Great consternation over bread that tasted good (it must be unholy or wicked, couldn’t possibly be as nutritious as white industrial). Probably an echo from Puritan times.

In fact, throughout the entire book, one theme keeps coming up: White bread has very little or no taste. It never was about taste. It was a vehicle for enrichment, the first of the enriched foods we eat today. Taste didn’t matter, as long as you made big healthy men to fight wars and farm the fields. Enrichment did help put the vitamins and minerals into bodies depleted by years of the Great Depression, and in this sense, it was a good thing. Enrichment just didn’t end with bread. It was a tool used to “civilize” the Japanese after WWII. It was used to demonstrate the superiority of U.S. industry as contrasted against the poverty (they railed) of Soviet dark breads.