White Bread

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

  Nevertheless, 1950s-era concerns about bread were different from those that would emerge later. In the 1950s, consumers and officials expressed their dismay at the state of bread in a language of public health, corrupt baking trusts, and adulteration that would have been immediately familiar to any food reformer of the Progressive Era. “Change the national food habits and we can still [have] a virile nation,” read one typical letter to the FDA about bread. It could have come straight out of the century’s first decades.13 In the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, food reformers clearly drew on these Progressive Era roots, but they also created a new language for talking about the problems of diet. Rejecting the dream of public health expertise and government regulation in the service of national virility, the counterculture imagined individual eating itself as a form of activism.

  Food choices had already begun to factor into civil rights and early antiwar activism. Lunch counter sit-ins, political fasts, and the UFW grape boycott all linked sustenance and social change. The act of eating (or not eating) could draw attention to demands for rights and recognition. But none of those late-1950s and early-1960s movements believed that social change could be achieved solely by eating the right food. Bread’s role in these movements was indicative: to the extent that it factored into their struggles, bread served generically as a symbol of Christian commensality posed against worldly injustice, as in the Wonder Bread seriographs of Sister Corita, Daniel Berrigan’s antiwar poetry (And the Risen Bread), or Thomas Merton’s socially engaged spiritual teachings (Bread in the Wilderness and The Living Bread). For these purposes, any bread would do, and social movements saw little reason to focus their attentions specifically on the evils of processed food. When Martin Luther King Jr. called for a boycott of Wonder bread in Memphis, for example, it was unfair hiring practices, not chemical additives, that concerned him.14

  With the emergence of the “hippie” counterculture, however, food wasn’t just a tactic in the theater of social change. Changing diets had become an arena of politics in its own right—perhaps the arena. As Crescent Dragonwagon, author of the popular Commune Cookbook, declared, the ecology of human diet united all struggles against oppression, from black and women’s liberation to antiwar movements. Again, bread was indicative. As influential whole foods guru Beatrice Trum Hunter proclaimed, bread baking constituted “a revolt against plastic food in a plastic culture. The free-form loaf is but another aspect of the revolt against the mechanization of life.”15

  Mostly middle-class, white, and buoyed by an upbeat economy, flower children and whole foods advocates exuded an optimistic sense that changing one’s lifestyle could change the world. Utopian dreams of leisure, freedom from oppressive experts, the pursuit of pleasure, and self-actualization flourished. Although segments of the counterculture would harden considerably after the upheavals of 1968 and into the grim recessions of the 1970s, much of it was as joyous and raucous as earlier generations of civil rights activists had been earnest and disciplined.16

  Counterculture cooks threw off the heavy hand of home economics, dispensing with recipes and reveling in chance, experimentation, and imperfection. Counterculture cookbooks—often self-published—mocked their own authority, encouraging readers to distrust instructions found in cookbooks. Precise directions and exact measurements were oppressive vestiges of an inhuman system. Readers should “learn to feel for themselves through experience and experimentation,” as Tassajara Bread Book author Edward Espe Brown urged. Instructions in Mother Earth News for baking bread captured this new outlook perfectly, directing would-be bakers to knead until the dough “springs like a plump baby’s bottom,” and then enjoining them to “take this opportunity to grease the cans and light a joint.”17

  During the first half of the twentieth century, experts from home economics and the baking industry had so thoroughly convinced Americans that only lab-coated professionals could succeed at the cryptic science of bread baking that counterculture food gurus took distinct pride in liberating it for the untrained masses. “Anyone can do this” and “Baking is easy” were constant refrains in counterculture cookbooks. Buddhist monk Edward Espe Brown, whose Tassajara Bread Book taught a generation to bake, went even further: the precise outcome of bread making didn’t matter. Instead, he counseled readers to understand baking as a deeply sensual spiritual practice, independent of attachment to perfect final products.18

  The freeform revolt against culinary expertise could seem frivolous and self-involved at times. Mo Willet’s Vegetarian Gothic, for example, offered this dietary advice: “You should eat when you’re hungry, feast when you’re joyful, fast to get high, and sing of love all the time.” “Fill your bread with wholesome foods and lots of love and you’ll find yourself feeling good all over,” Willet glowed.19 But there was method in the revelry. Just as industrial white bread stood for larger systems of oppression, upending decades of dietary expertise challenged all forms of authoritarian control. For Crescent Dragonwagon, encouraging imperfect cooking undermined “antinatural” uniformity in other realms, from the beauty myths of femininity to the lockstep war machine. Women, she argued, experienced cooking as an oppressive burden because generations of food experts had turned it into an overcontrolled, rationalized, and deadening imposition. Thus, treating cooking as a “creative, expressive art” undermined larger systems of gendered oppression.20

  Similarly, her short stint as professional baker taught her the larger lesson that “capitalism can’t work.” After struggling to produce affordable bread without sacrificing ingredient quality or wholesome process, she concluded, “It’s impossible to make good, healthy bread at any kind of profit. Her reasoning was insightful, quite possibly true, and certainly revealing of the larger dream of “good bread” animating the counterculture. It’s worth quoting at length.

  If you got [your ingredients] in bulk enough to make it sizably cheaper, you’d be doing so much business, probably, that you would be shipping the breads all over the place—and then you’d have to add preservatives or have stale bread! I really believe the answer lies in small communities. But—and this is what brought all this to mind—it’s interesting that good bread, the symbol of the American dream (or rather, one of many symbols) cannot be produced within it now. I don’t consider myself, really, in it. I don’t mean that as arrogantly as it sounds—I just mean that I and the people I live with are surely not typical of Americans, and the bread we bake we don’t “produce.” Some people and their narrow definition of politics! Baking a loaf of brown bread in this society is revolutionary, if you know why you’re doing it. It is for us.21

  Invocations of bread politics like this were standard fare in the counterculture, but Dragonwagon’s take was both intelligent and influential. The statement begins with a concise gloss on the pressures of capitalist baking—the constraints of efficiency and scale in a competitive, profit-driven context. Then, like so many critics in the American agrarian tradition, she offers small communities as an antidote. The statement never clarifies exactly how small communities baking their own bread might sidestep the capitalist system—historically they rarely have, even on the remote frontier—but it was a powerful vision. And it attached a feeling of profound agency to the simple act of baking one’s own bread. To bake was to stand apart from the system. With this elegant argument, Crescent Dragonwagon repositioned cooking as an act of resistance, turning domestic binds into the stuff of liberation.

  And yet, for all its radical anti-capitalist trappings, this dream of good bread also aligned Dragonwagon and the counterculture in general with a deeply conservative lineage. The countercultural dream of good bread challenged authority and expertise, stood against capitalist agribusiness, and sought to remake relations among people and between nature and society. Yet it also rested on rather orthodox myths of American individualism and independence. “Homemade bread,” Dragonwagon observed wryly, “is a symbolic thing. It’s American—it goes with pioneers and beginnings and family.”22

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p; In this evocation of frontier independence and its foodways as the bedrock of good society, the counterculture drew heavily on Grahamism. Perhaps more surprisingly, given the counterculture’s disdain for regimen, the dream of good bread also gave new life to the ideologies of Physical Culture: sickness, both individual and social, was, in large part, traced back to weak, duped individuals’ descent into an unnatural diet. Sickness might not have been a sin, but it did arise from individual irresponsibility. To be sure, this was a more politically conscious vision than MacFadden’s. Dragonwagon and her comrades believed that individual irresponsibility could only be understood in the context of a poisonous, corrupt System in need of radical change. But, like MacFadden, they didn’t reflect much on what values and assumptions got smuggled in with their utopia of self-defense through good food. At the very least, they failed to recognize how easily their vision of good bread and good society could be recast in accordance with entirely capitalist and individualistic values.

  DOMESTICATING THE COUNTERCULTURE

  On October 23, 1969, the United States celebrated its first National Day of Bread, sponsored by the country’s millers, bakers, and grocers and enshrined by congressional resolution.23 Most Americans missed it, though. There were a few other things going on in the country. The National Day of Bread fell in the midst of Chicago’s Days of Rage and only a week after hundreds of thousands of Americans mobilized across the country in the first National Moratorium Day of antiwar protests. It came after a long summer that saw the Stonewall uprising, Manson murders, Woodstock, stepped-up nuclear testing by the Soviet Union, and the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals from Vietnam. Two extraordinary events—the moon landing and the ‘69 Mets’ underdog World Series victory—brought the country together a bit that summer. But mostly it felt like things were coming apart at the seams. In other words, for anyone threatened by social turmoil and political upheaval, it was a good time for a National Day of Bread. Celebrating bread allowed besieged conservatives to talk about family, Christianity, and old-fashioned values. What little press coverage the National Day of Bread received unanimously featured churches and happy families—quite different from the images of upheaval and bloodshed shown on nightly TV.

  During the summer and fall of 1969, arguments about Vietnam, long hair, and tofu might have turned many kitchen tables into war zones. But not bread. At a time when Abby Hoffman purportedly urged kids to kill their parents, homemade, whole wheat, and multi-grain breads were an easy piece of the counterculture for outsiders to swallow. A few social conservatives and hardliners within the baking industry rallied against dark loaves peddled by “food faddists,” “scaremongers,” and “anti-Americans,” but mostly people embraced countercultural bread. In a stirring 1968 editorial, even E. J. Pyler, the elder statesman of baking science and publisher of the industry’s leading trade magazine, urged his fellow bakers to “fight conformity.”24

  By the late 1970s, whole wheat bread consumption had soared, industrial white bread sales had plummeted, and the country was experiencing an unprecedented revival of home baking. For the first time in decades, overall bread consumption inched upwards, and “health breads” with roots in the counterculture led the way.25 Three factors accounted for this epochal shift. First, as already suggested, counter-cultural critiques of industrial baking drew on a social dreamworld of conservative nostalgia that was easy to appreciate on Main Street and in suburbia. Second, stripped of its emphasis on community and social transformation, the counterculture’s love of natural whole grains translated fluidly into the consumer-driven health food and self-actualization trends of the 1970s. Finally, high-value whole grain health breads offered a desperately needed source of profit and enhanced public image for industrial bakers crippled by declining sales and food safety scandals. Let’s look at each of these factors more closely.

  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.26 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.27 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.28

  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.”29 These were “the most effective front[s] for social cha
nge.” 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.30 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.31