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York Times , called it a “kitchen revolt.” 47 Bread making was in vogue. In fact, it was in Vogue: the style
magazine's April 1979 issue touted homemade bread as an easy way its readers could ensure less sugar
and more fulfillment in their lives. 48 That home bread making had made it from the food section to the
fashion pages said something to the baking industry. It seemed as if the country's bakers had to fight a
small version of the early twentieth-century battle against home baking all over again.
In the 1900s bakers undercut home baking with fears of impurity and contagion, buttressed by a cha-
rismatic sheen of scientific authority. By the 1970s, however, counterculture gurus had effectively as-
sociated charismatic food science with hubris and destruction. A new strategy was needed. So, in the
1980s, the baking industry took back terrain from home baking with niche marketing and appeals to up-
scale chic.
This approach reflected larger shifts in the U.S. economy. Rocked by recessions, oil crises, and de-
industrialization, the U.S. economy began to take on a new form in the 1970s. Manufacturing no longer
served as the country's driving engine. Financial services—making money from money—had begun to
take their place at the center of the economy.
After steadily rising through the postwar period, real wages for most Americans began to decline.
Even forty years later, average wages adjusted for cost of living still wouldn't have returned to their
pre-1970s level, but the financialization of the U.S. economy did produce enormous wealth for urban
professionals. Wealth distribution in the country became, and remained, more polarized than at any oth-
er period since the Roaring Twenties. Affluent singles and childless couples reveled in unprecedented
disposable incomes, giving rise to a world of “yuppie” consumption. And yet, across the country, house-
holds that could afford to maintain Carol Flinders's dream of a dedicated homemaker were growing in-
creasingly rare. 49
These trends would have a marked effect on the very nature of consumption. During the postwar era
of rising wages and decreasing inequality, consumption largely took the form of standardized, one-size-
fits-all, mass-market commodities. As with enriched white breads on supermarket shelves, differences
among competing commodities were relatively small. During the 1980s, however, fueled by the rap-
id segmentation of American society, consumer life diversified into ever-more precise niche markets.
Massive department stores lost ground to boutique chains catering to narrow bands of consumers, who
increasingly began to tie their identities to specific niche markets. 50
Along with advances in transportation and packaging, this had a profound effect on the American
diet. No longer would everyone eat the same iceberg lettuce. Increasingly, shoppers could choose the
style of lettuce—shipped in from Mexico, if needed—that fit their status aspirations exactly. To sur-
vive, bakers would have to embrace real product diversification. And in this area, upstarts outpaced in-
dustry leaders. Small bakeries sprouted up across the country in record numbers during the 1980s. By
the 1990s, some of them had grown into chains, “vying to become the 'Starbucks' of bread.” 51 Au Bon
Pain, La Vie de France, Great Harvest, the St. Louis Bread Company, and Breadsmith clones spread
through suburban malls and city streets.
Many of the resurgent small bakeries paid the rent with sweets and sandwiches, not bread. Neverthe-
less, by the early 1990s, observers could point to a “new bread mystique” seducing the country. Like the
new consumer economy in general, the small-bakery revival of the 1980s and 1990s targeted specific
class and status groups. Supermarkets still sold industrial white bread, of course, but demand for fluffy
loaves increasingly concentrated in lower-income brackets. By the end of the 1970s, people buying su-
permarket white bread almost universally ranked low price as their top consideration in food purchasing.
Middle- and upper-class consumers were increasingly willing to pay more for distinctive bread. Now
“we can sell Cadillacs along with the Fords,” a Bakery Magazine writer beamed. 52
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