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ers to understand baking as a deeply sensual spiritual practice, independent of attachment to perfect final
products.
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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.
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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 overcon-
trolled, rationalized, and deadening imposition. Thus, treating cooking as a “creative, expressive art”
undermined larger systems of gendered oppression.
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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” animat-
ing 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 busi-
ness, 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.
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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 capit-
alist 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 state-
ment 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 Dragon-
wagon 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 re-
make 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.”
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