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White bread still sells—Americans bought 1.5 billion loaves of it in 2009—but its consumer profile
has changed, settling into the lower classes. And while references to nutrition facts give distaste for
white bread a patina of scientific truth, elites' feelings toward people who choose to eat “unhealthy”
bread are anything but objective. Just as in the 1920s, disdain for difference can come cloaked in seem-
ingly neutral discussions of healthy eating and responsible choices.
Given the country's post-1970s preoccupation with fitness and body image, we could take the Post 's
analysis a step further. Caring about health and social status are not separate matters. Today, showing
interest in healthy eating is an essential piece of the performance of eliteness. Maintaining a fit-looking
body, keeping abreast of new health food trends, and at least paying lip service to scientific nutrition
advice proclaim one's superior virtue and self-control to the world. In this way, concern with health and
fitness helps tacitly justify social inequality: a person's elite status and fit body may, in fact, have aris-
en from destructive behavior—like insider trading and bulimia—or just some lucky inheritance, but the
visual spectacle of an affluent healthism declares, “I earned my wealth through discipline, self-sacrifice,
and hard work, just like I earned this body.”
Thus, something as simple as bread choice is an act of social positioning. Bread choice stakes a claim
to a particular identity, but also opens one up to others' ideas about what that selection means. Some
manifestations of the white trash revival try to reclaim white bread eating as a virtuous cultural celebra-
tion, an authentic piece of southern regional foodways, as Ernst Matthew Mickler's White Trash Cook-
book contends. African Americans join in this, as well, touting Wonder bread's place in traditional soul
food. Even an article in the haute cuisine magazine Saveur admitted, “Sopping up [Kansas City barbe-
que] may well be the only legitimate use for spongy, store-bought white bread.” 60
Industrial white bread may also serve as an edible emblem of class solidarity. “I've wanted to scream
this for so long / There is no shame in the trailer park / or white bread, or government cheese / There
is no shame on the victims of poverty,” the hard-core band Crimson Spectre thrashed out in its “White
Trash Manifesto.” 61 But all those acts of positive self-positioning face a grim association between white
bread, failure, and irresponsibility. “White Trash Momma,” a song by another heavy metal band, ex-
pressed this connection even more brutally. In it, a woman “raised on white bread” slides into crack use
and prostitution, sealing her “white trash fate.” 62
In the end, there's something sad about the way counterculture dreams of building good society
through good bread morphed into reinforced social distinctions. Nevertheless, this wasn't an intended
or inevitable outcome of counterculture food activism: large-scale and unexpected shifts in both how
Americans thought about health and the very nature of the U.S. economy sealed hippie brown bread's
fate (in a fancy wrapper with a high price tag). Certainly the world is better because of counterculture
efforts to raise awareness about the politics of eating. And we gained an artisanal bread revolution along
the way.
The social dreams embodied in that artisanal revolution may sometimes seem precious and far re-
moved from the daily grind of poverty evoked in white trash rhetoric. But this doesn't mean that they
should be abandoned. I, for one, crave the world of community, cultural vibrancy, environmental re-
sponsibility, and alimentary diversity embodied in a fresh-baked loaf of local artisanal bread. But if the
story of white bread's journey from modern marvel to low-class symbol teaches anything, it is that food
dreamers must be ready to modify their vision if it does more to reinforce social stratification than to
build a better world.
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