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a celebration of “authentic” white Americans fighting for their rightful place in a culture supposedly
poisoned by liberal multiculturalism.
Industrial bread played a key role in both versions of white trash fun. It was both a ubiquitous menu
item and a visual stand-in for a whole range of assumptions about low-class consumption. Industrial
white bread called up a lack of pretension—unfussy and authentically American—but also irrespons-
ibility and shame. To eat white bread at a white trash party was to proclaim, “I never really eat white
bread.” And of course, as should be clear by now, none of that symbolism would have been possible,
even imaginable, for most of the twentieth century.
To make the Wonder bread-laden gags of white trash chic legible, America's “best invention” had to
become an icon of poor choices and narrow lives. This historic upending was a relatively recent phe-
nomenon. It played out between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, in the cultural trajectory from hippie
to yuppie. During that remarkable twenty-year period, “white bread” became an adjective as well as a
noun—an adjective with two related but different meanings that still compete with each other today. In
the early years of the 1960s counterculture, “white bread” came to signify all that was bland, homogen-
eous, and suburban. White bread was establishment, plastic, and corporate—everything the countercul-
ture in all its manifestations hoped to destroy. This meaning remains: you know that music described as
“white bread” will be funkless pablum. A TV show set “in a white bread cul-de-sac” will deal with life
in cookie-cutter tract mansions.
By the early 1980s, however, another usage had emerged. In this case, “white bread” signified almost
the opposite: not bland, affluent suburbia, but white trash. In movies and fiction white bread, like
broken-down trailers, came to denote poverty of a white and rural kind—the world described by res-
idents of TV's South Park as “a quiet, little, white-bread, podunk, white-trash, redneck corner of the
U.S.A.” The writer James Salter evoked the despair and grim prospects of this kind of white bread life
in his story “Dirt.” The story turns around a waitress who is young and beautiful now, but beginning to
feel the walls of inescapable poverty closing in around her. As Salter sums up her sparse future, “She
would be living in the trailer park. … Her kids would eat white bread in big soft packages.” 5
This association between white bread and white trash endures, even as African Americans and Lati-
nos make up an ever-larger portion of the market for Wonder bread and pan Bimbo. So how did white
bread become white trash? In very much the same way white trash parties work—through a complex
play of cultural subversions, rebellious aesthetics, rituals of social status, and protests against mass con-
sumption. The outcomes of this process have been just as ambiguous as any white trash party: in 2009,
for the first time in U.S. history, whole wheat bread sales topped white—presumably a healthy develop-
ment. And yet the same anti-elitist attacks on industrial eating that set that change into motion during the
late 1960s had by the 1980s generated new alimentary elites, new forms of social distinction. Dreams of
good bread as an antidote to an oppressive and unhealthy social structure became the stuff of ultra-high-
end consumption. 6
FIGHT THE WHITE
In 1954, the legendary industrial designer Raymond Loewy, commissioned to study bread packaging,
observed that there was pretty much only one color combination that moved loaves off shelves—red,
white, and blue, and maybe golden yellow. Ten years later, a young Catholic nun named Sister Corita
with a fast-growing reputation for making edgy pop art, hijacked the classic red, white, blue, and yellow
Wonder bread package design for decidedly different purposes. In a series of prints drawing inspiration
from the Wonder bread label, Sister Corita proclaimed that radical Christian commensality and social
justice could be snatched even from the heart of mass-consumer society. In one of Sister Corita's Won-
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