HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 93

This brings us back to Laurel's Kitchen . For, while critics in the 1970s and today have noted the
gendered contradictions of nostalgia for the lost days of Grandma's cooking, less has been said about
the vision of America smuggled in with the aroma of fresh bread. When counterculture food gurus like
Flinders imagined the American past, they saw a halcyon world of independent cabins filled with nuc-
lear families. Grandma didn't slave in cotton fields or garment factories, nor did she struggle to save
the farm from creditors. She didn't campaign for suffrage or march for workers' rights on May Day.
Home was not a migrant farmhand's wagon. Great Depressions only increased the “realness” of Amer-
ican food. And when immigrants or people of color appeared in this America, they were scrubbed of ac-
tual history, eagerly waiting to share exotic new ingredients or a bit of ancient wisdom with their white
audience. This was a romanticized past.
In the enchanted broccoli forest of best-selling counterculture cookbooks, however, at least one au-
thor offered a glimmer of perspective. Mollie Katzen, perhaps the most influential cookbook author of
the era, honestly admitted, “It is difficult to talk about bread-baking without lapsing into sentimental-
ity.” “One is tempted to go on and on about how exhilarated and connected to the universe one feels,
about how the kitchen atmosphere acquires sublime soulfulness, about how born-again breadmakers are
magical, charismatic individuals,” she confessed. “[But] it is not my place to promise you a transformed
existence. What I offer is one with more bread recipes. The rest is what you make of it.” 33
By the late 1970s, however, it was clear that Americans were hooked on self-transformation. Even
more than through their appeal to conservative nostalgia, counterculture bread tastes spread to main-
stream America via the quest for perfect health. 34 Healthy eating had, of course, been one important
component of the counterculture since the mid-1960s, but by the mid-1970s it had been elevated to a
supreme position in American life. Stripped of its political and social critiques, the counterculture's fix-
ation on wellness easily morphed into an individual-centered, consumer-driven bodily project. Health
food stores, yoga studios, and exercise fads flourished across the country, permanently changing the way
Americans thought about wellness. Bernarr MacFadden would have been proud: the counterculture's
search for bodily harmony had found its love match in 1970s self-actualization.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, counterculture food rebels believed that if Americans only knew
about the dangers of industrial food and the goodness of healthy eating, they would change their diet.
Changing the country's relation to food would, in turn, bring about swift changes in economic and polit-
ical relations. By the late 1970s, counterculture food gurus saw part of their dream fulfilled: more Amer-
icans knew about the dangers of industrial eating and aspired to counterculture visions of healthy eating
than at any other point in the past century. By the early 1980s, a study revealed that six out of ten young
singles thought that white bread was unhealthy and to be avoided. 35 But it was also becoming clear that
this consciousness wouldn't necessarily set in motion the larger structural changes counterculture food
activists had hoped for. In fact, the industrial food system could almost effortlessly assimilate health
consciousness. The fixation on wellness emerging across large swathes of the U.S. population in the late
1970s could serve as a much-needed new engine for profit in the industrial food system.
This was clearly the case in the baking industry. The perceived moral and bodily goodness of whole
wheat bread had helped lead the country toward health food, and the baking industry was ready to
share in the bounty. In fact, the 1970s health craze couldn't have come at a better time for the industry.
Through the late 1960s and early 1970s, industrial bakers labored under low profits and a tattered image.
After the great chemistry- and engineering-driven advances of the 1950s and early 1960s, even industry
insiders conceded that their business had fallen into a state of torpor. Market studies revealed that bread
itself had become so homogeneous that consumers had trouble distinguishing one brand from another.
What little profits could be squeezed out of cheap white bread came mostly from mergers and oligo-