CONCLUSION: BEYOND GOOD BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 101

obviously good and some were clearly evil. On the surface, at least, who could possibly disagree with
wanting purer food, more natural food, more abundant food made possible by science, healthier food
that fought disease and weakness, or food that made the world a little safer and less hungry? And yet,
we've seen that each of these rousing visions of improvement framed the problems of society and the
food system in dubious ways.
The dream of purity animated important food safety activism, but also drove industrial and anti-in-
dustrial food reformers alike to exclude and divide groups of people in the name of sanitation. Quests
for purity created an enduring bridge between concerns about healthy diet and attempts to police against
social “contagions” (like unwanted immigrants or alien ideas about health and nutrition).
Visions of naturalness , for their part, facilitated important critiques of industrial hubris and giant oli-
gopoly food producers, as seen in the 1960s counterculture. But fears that the country had grown es-
tranged from nature also enveloped food reform movements in nostalgia for an American Eden of in-
dependent, white, property-owning farmers. That nostalgia idealized female domesticity and local com-
munities, glossing over the power disparities that always marked those realms. In the process, sentiment-
al dreams of naturalness made it harder for well-meaning people to address inequalities in the fields,
factories, and kitchens of industrial food production.
Narratives of scientific control typically stood opposed to the quest for natural harmony, but they
were no less utopian in appeal. Large-scale food producers and ordinary consumers leaned breathlessly
toward a future of abundance, leisure, and harmony made possible by speed, efficiency, and the conquest
of nature. In the 1920s and 1950s, this dream blinded many Americans to the hubris and shortsighted-
ness of scientific control. In exchange for spectacles of efficiency, abundance, and control, people har-
nessed their sustenance to greedy corporations, embraced bread infused with chemicals additives, lost
sight of heterogeneous pleasure, cheered the remaking of world wheat farming into a petroleum-fueled
factory system, and ignored the destruction of small-scale bakers.
The dream of perfect health seeks something that is hard to dislike: life extension and bodily im-
provement. Nevertheless, even those achievements come at a cost. As seen in food movements from
Grahamism to gluten free, the quest for perfectly tuned bodies individualized and medicalized problems
that might have been better addressed through social and political means. The quest for perfect health
has also come with psychological costs for those who participate in it. With its fantasies of bodily con-
trol comes a relentless fear of deterioration and a sense that imperfect health reflects character weakness
or moral failing.
Finally, dreams of food and national security and vitality help produce an anxious, Manichean geo-
graphy. At times the perceived need to fortify “us” against “them” has legitimated attention to margin-
alized people's demands for better bread, whether through wartime enrichment campaigns or postwar
Food for Peace. But it has also nurtured an emergency mentality that propelled ill-conceived changes
in the American diet and made alternative ways of organizing the food system appear dangerous and
unpatriotic.
In sum, these five big dreams of food and society roused Americans to change their diets and food
system, but often at great cost. At root, each one of the five gave us the idea that good eating was a form
of combat. We manned the barricades against impurity and contagion and fought to defend the borders
of an imagined state of natural harmony. We mobilized science to conquer and tame that same nature,
used food to arm ourselves against bodily decay, and rallied to defend the nation by eating right. We
fought this combat in the name of protecting our health and the health of society—good things. But our
alimentary trench war often had grave consequences for people on the margins or excluded from soci-