HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 91

trial bakers crippled by declining sales and food safety scandals. Let's look at each of these factors more
closely.
In 1970 Richard Pryor stormed off stage in the middle of his popular nightclub act at Las Vegas's Alad-
din Theater, refusing to do another minute of “white bread humor.” This was a pivotal moment in the
comedian's career. He fled to Berkeley, California, where he immersed himself in drugs and the teach-
ings of Malcolm X, only to emerge a few years later as a bigger, much edgier star. 26 It was also the
first widely cited use of “white bread” as an adjective. The phrase spoke to soaring racial tensions and a
mounting sense of despair over white Americans' unwillingness to compromise even a little on their in-
vestment in the political, cultural, and economic institutions of white privilege. Strangely though, “white
bread” America seemed quite ready to adopt brown bread as a symbol of its values.
Brown breads of various sorts—mostly highly sweetened whole wheat loaves—were rare in the post-
war United States, but they were not unknown. Rather, they were fixtures of particular times and places:
church bake sales, family gatherings, and quaint country inns. Although many still doubted whole wheat
breads' digestibility and questioned whether they were appropriate for daily consumption, in limited
venues they were treasured delicacies. Father and the kids might have grumbled about brown bread's
“sawdust” texture, but the loaves were also esteemed as symbols of old-fashioned feminine care and
rural fortitude. So, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when barefoot girls in peasant skirts made home
baking cool, hippie brown bread would have seemed less of a threat to “American” tastes and values
than other counterculture staples.
The decidedly uncountercultural global milling and food-processing conglomerate International Mul-
tifoods captured this affinity perfectly in a 1970 pamphlet, Naturally Good Baking . The recipe topic
could be read simultaneously as an attempt to appropriate counterculture chic and as a rebuke of youth
rebellion. Illustrated with drawings of pioneer life, the booklet addressed itself to modern homemakers
who had recently come to appreciate the value of whole wheat breads and desserts, but who long ago lost
“Grandma's cookbook.” According to International Multifoods, recapturing the aroma of fresh-baked
bread could return families to the days when Grandma “cared about what her family ate and spent hours
in the kitchen” to provide it. 27 With a few deft words and drawings, the recipe topic repositioned the
origins of 1970s interest in whole grain goodness—away from unwashed, rebellious youth and into the
sanitized territory of “how things used to be.”
Counterculture food gurus and activists had different takes on this kind of nostalgia. Some groups act-
ively resisted it. Worker-owned cooperatives like Seattle's Little Bread Company and Chicago's Bread
Shop, for example, dwelled less on the past and more on community organizing, job creation, and
providing good low-cost bread. Even the moral superiority of whole wheat bread was not always a giv-
en. Particularly in more socialist-leaning bakeries, for example, members argued over whether to value
white bread, with its low-cost, working-class appeal, alongside brown. 28
Other counterculture figures approached sentimentality in a more conflicted manner. For Crescent
Dragonwagon, homemade food cemented the foundations of an alternative social structure. And yet,
at times, Dragonwagon seemed aware that her alternative might not be so alternative: The Commune
Cookbook expressed an extraordinary faith in the ability of its idea of “good food” to appeal to people
across differences of class and race, but it also acknowledged the way visions of good food could divide
groups. On paper, Dragonwagon's dream of a new way of relating to food resonates with her desire for