HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 98

millennium, it had reached consumers in every corner of “the United States of Arugula.” With this deli-
cious bread, of course, came new dreams about society.
OH, YOU POOR THING
A mile from the heart of Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto, Steve Sullivan's Acme bakery is a good place to
observe the artisan bread revolution in its highest form. This is the real deal: a small, unfranchised neigh-
borhood bakery producing slow-fermented, handcrafted bread. It doesn't sell sandwiches. It doesn't sell
coffee or cookies. It sells bread.
On a spring morning two years ago, I queued in a convivial crush outside Acme's clacking screen
door. When my turn came to squeeze into the hot, floury shop, I paid $8 for an Italian bâtard and the
best walnut levain in the Western Hemisphere. The levain wouldn't make it home uneaten—that much I
knew—so I thought I might as well sit down with a cup of coffee from Alice Waters's Café Fanny next
door while I tore through its malty mix of chewy crumb and toasted nuts.
Acme's walnut levain—organic flour, natural starter, malted barley, water, walnuts, and salt—has
only a quarter of the ingredients found in Wonder bread. Its crumb's intense, almost beery flavor comes
from the unrushed work of microbes—the slow artistry of Saccharomyces and Lactobacilli . Its dark,
almost scorched crust gives a smoky, nutty counterpoint to the crumb's tang. Considering that, when
stripped of fats, sweeteners, and added flavorings, most of bread's taste comes from browning reactions
in the crust, we Americans eat our bread far too pale. Steve Sullivan knew better.
In 1983, fresh from a stint at Chez Panisse—what was then, and still is, the epicenter of California
cuisine—Steve Sullivan opened Acme with a loan from Doobie Brothers guitarist Patrick Simmons.
Acme now has a wholesale bakery making loaves for local restaurants and three retail outlets, including
one in San Francisco's ultrahigh-end Embarcadero Market. But Sullivan has resisted expansion beyond
that, focusing instead on community, quality, and craft. The payoff has been a fierce continued attention
to flavor and the jovial community feeling surrounding the bakery.
These are big ideas in small loaves: dreams of pleasure, community, and authenticity, a glimpse into
the possibility of a different kind of food system. But, after shelling out $8 for a couple of pounds of
bread, I was painfully aware that these are also exclusive dreams.
In The Commune Cookbook , Crescent Dragonwagon railed against the “elitist thinking” behind
America's taste for industrial white bread. The introduction of inexpensive refined flours in the nine-
teenth century had allowed the country to share in aspirational dreams of high-class living embodied in
light, white loaves. Dark breads, she observed perceptively, had become more and more associated with
social inferiority. 57 Today, however, thanks to the convergence of counterculture and industry, we live
in a world that presents a mirror image of Dragonwagon's.
A Washington Post article commemorating the moment in 2009 when whole wheat bread sales sur-
passed white for the first time in U.S. history explained this reversal. Growing awareness of the import-
ance of the fiber and nutrients found in whole grains played a role, but so did status aspirations. Today,
the article observed, whole wheat bread “signifies the sophistication of your palate, your appreciation
for texture and variety. … The grainier you like it, the more refined your sensibilities. The darker it is,
the greater your chance for enlightenment.” 58 Industrial white bread has completed its two-hundred-
year trajectory from modern marvel to low-class item. As the spokeswoman for a food industry-affili-
ated nonprofit nutrition policy organization concluded, “It used to be, 'Oh, you poor thing, you have that
nasty brown bread.' … Now it's, 'Oh, you poor thing. You have that nasty white bread.' ” 59