HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 90

In this evocation of frontier independence and its foodways as the bedrock of good society, the coun-
terculture 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 to-
gether 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 in-
dustry 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 eld-
er 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 coun-
terculture 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 commu-
nity 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 indus-