WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 84

the company was surprised at first by stiff competition in the United States. Lorenzo's son Roberto Ser-
vitje reflected that in South America, the challenge was convincing people to eat packaged bread. In the
United States, it was “ferocious competition” from “monstrous” companies like Interstate Baking, Sara
Lee, and Weston Foods. But Bimbo took enormous risks in the United States, aggressively buying up its
competition's routes, factories, and brands. 68 Today, if you buy Arnold bread in the East or Orowheat
in the West, Freihofer in Pennsylvania or Mrs. Baird's in Texas, Stroehmann's in the mid-Atlantic or
Old Country in Arizona, not to mention Roman-Meal, Sun-Made, and Francisco sourdough, it's Bimbo.
White bread imperialism has come home to roost.
On the other hand, the dream of building world peace and security through industrial food production
has never left the United States. More than a half century later, even as critiques of industrial food mount
from all directions, Cold War-era beliefs about a hungry planet's need for ever-more-industrial food pro-
duction still seem commonsensical to most Americans. Indeed, this geopolitical urgency often underpins
attempts to defend large-scale industrial food production against proponents of slow, local, and organ-
ic eating. Viewed through the lens of Cold War Malthusianism, supporters of small-scale nonindustrial
food production can be painted as dangerously insular and elitist. Evoking the humanitarian legacies of
U.S. food power, supporters of industrial agriculture can pose themselves as heroes of the poor, calling
for a “Second Green Revolution” to meet the challenges of the future. 69
We would do well to not dismiss a Second Green Revolution out of hand, particularly if it could
realize its advocates' promises of raising productivity with fewer chemical inputs. But we should also
remember the key lesson of the first Green Revolution: a technology is only as good as the power re-
lations in which it is deployed. If the seeds and inputs of a Second Green Revolution are monopolized
by large chemical companies like Monsanto intent on selling expensive inputs (as they are today), we
should brace for many more tragic outcomes.
It's easy to make sport of rich locavores, but we shouldn't forget the myriad ways in which industrial
abundance often makes hunger worse, not better. What remains to be seen is whether and how advoc-
ates of food system change can counter the deep and potent associations between industrial food and the
security-driven urgency of feeding a dangerous, hungry world.