HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 97

Catering to middle- and upper-class consumers interested in health and charmed by novelty, super-
market chains opened in-store bakeries that made high-value specialty breads from scratch or “baked
off” partially cooked loaves from central distribution centers. Comfortable suburbanites switched to
health breads like Arnold and Orowheat and flocked to strip-mall chain bakeries.
Meanwhile, urban elites could select from a growing array of high-end bread bakeries—often with
roots in the counterculture. In 1977, Mimi Sheraton had eulogized urban ethnic bakeries, lost to gentri-
fication and suburbanization. According to Sheraton, San Francisco sourdough had become “practically
extinct.” 53 Within a decade, however, the situation had changed dramatically. On the West Coast, young
urban professionals—yuppies—discovered the pleasures of European-style artisan loaves at Nancy Sil-
verton's La Brea Bakery or Steve Sullivan's Acme Bread. In New York, the late 1980s and early 1990s
saw the opening of soon-to-be-institutions like Amy's Bakery, Tom Cat Bakery, and the Sullivan Street
Bakery.
Multiple forces drove this explosion of high-end bread bakeries: choosing healthy grain foods had
become closely associated with ideas of personal responsibility and successful self-image; yuppie con-
sumers craved distinctive gourmet foods, especially ones with ties to Europe or California; and, perhaps
most importantly, high-quality bread appealed to a new consumer dream. Market researchers called it
“neo-traditionalism,” and it combined nostalgia for 1950s-vintage family values with a cash-charged be-
lief in the possibility of achieving self-actualization through consumer choice. Artisanal bread offered a
perfect neo-traditionalist symbol, self-consciously old-fashioned and yet decidedly upscale. 54
European-style breads as gourmet status symbols were not new, at least in New York. As early as
1962, the year Eero Saarinen's birdlike TWA terminal swooped down at what was still called Idlewild
International Airport, a subsidiary of Pepperidge Farms was airlifting Parisian baguettes into Manhat-
tan. By 1963, affluent New Yorkers could buy the “astronomically priced” 85-cent bread at 250 outlets,
including Bloomingdales. Baked overnight in a prestigious Paris boulangerie and on New York shelves
by noon, the loaves' thirty-six hundred “food miles” were something to brag about. 55
By the 1980s European bread was spreading west into the country's heartland. Meanwhile, the isol-
ation of Lactobacillus sanfrancisco— the bacteria responsible for San Francisco sourdough's tang—set
off a craze for sourdough that marched east across the country.
High-status bread inspired legions of imitators, some crude and some creative. On the crude side,
bakeries interested in scale and efficiency could substitute “natural sourdough flavor” for costly slow,
cool fermentation. Often, as one bakery scientist acknowledged, the all-important look of artisan au-
thenticity could be achieved without sacrificing industrial efficiency. “We developed our technology to
produce perfectly regular looking loaves. It's not that hard to program them to make perfectly irregu-
lar ones,” he confessed. 56 Like rustic faux-Italian tiles and factory-scratched “vintage” furniture, which
give a patina of history and character to fifteen-minute-old McMansions, artfully mutilated bread prom-
ised a mini respite from the soulless world of modern commodity production—even though it was still
fast food.
On the more creative side, La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles went from one-room bakeshop to
multibillion-dollar global conglomerate by pioneering artisan-industrial technology: loaves shaped by
gentle robots and factory assembly lines adapted to the same kind of slow, careful procedures used by
small bakeries. The result was a true hybrid, combining a bit of the artisan spirit with a bit of the indus-
trial method.
Whether through small, unfranchised bakeries, strip-mall chains, or industrial artisans like La Brea,
the dream of good bread, European-style, was no longer confined to coastal cities. By the turn of the