HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 88

read one typical letter to the FDA about bread. It could have come straight out of the century's first dec-
ades. 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 countercul-
ture 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 in-
justice, 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 addit-
ives, 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 ad-
vocates 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 in-
to 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-pub-
lished—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 un-
trained 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 read-