UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 18

still be the stuff of poverty. Food reformers' confidence in the gospel of hygienic eating fueled great
victories, but also helped buttress social discrimination.
Thanks to widely circulating discourses of scientific expertise and efficiency, bread consumption
choices became a way in which people positioned themselves and were positioned within social hier-
archies. Of course, bread choices have always been about positioning oneself and being positioned with-
in social hierarchies. Combined with the language of purity and contagion, however, it acquired power-
ful new stakes: early twentieth-century bread choices were not just about class and distinction in general,
but rather about a specific form of social difference constructed around the very lines of life and death,
health and disease. 58
In the 2000s, as in the 1900s, Americans had many opportunities to contemplate food safety. And yet,
compared to the 1900s, Americans had very little to fear. Thanks to modern medicines and, yes, govern-
ment regulation, food-borne illness was no longer one of the nation's top killers. Even some food safety
advocates conceded that widely cited estimates of the prevalence of food-borne illness might be exag-
gerated. Still, fears continued, sometimes escalating into panic. 59 These fears were not without basis.
In a world of cutthroat competition and broken oversight, food processors take short cuts. They accel-
erate production lines to breakneck speeds, and accidents happen. They cut costs by recycling unsafe
waste products as animal feed, sourcing fresh produce from distant corners of the planet, and cram-
ming livestock into unsanitary feedlots. Avoidable illnesses sicken and kill real people. But resurgent
anxiety about food safety also reflects other, more social dynamics. History suggests that anxiety about
food contamination generally intensifies during periods of perceived upheaval: in moments of expand-
ing globalization, rapid demographic changes, immigrant influxes, and swiftly evolving technology. The
early twentieth century was one of those moments of upheaval, as was the early twenty-first.
That levels of anxiety about food can be correlated with concerns about immigration or urbanization
does not make them less real. It does, however, challenge us to think about the social life of food fears in
more nuanced ways. What unintended legacies will early twenty-first-century food safety anxiety pro-
duce? Will it yield consumer action and government legislation that address root causes of food-borne
illness? Will it give rise to new, alternative networks of trust and accountability? What social disparities
will it alleviate or amplify?
Red's milk never made my wife and me sick. We were young and not at any special risk, and everything
seemed to work out, despite my apprehension. Soon we were driving glass jars of milk to friends in Tuc-
son every week. A few people we knew balked outright at the idea of unpasteurized milk. Some signed
on, enthusiastic about local milk in theory, but never mustered up the guts to drink their weekly jar in
practice. Most people thought it was the best milk they'd ever had, and asked for more. They trusted
our milk, and I've never fully understood why. In part, our friends trusted Kate and me, and that suf-
ficed. More importantly, they trusted the experienced older couple teaching us. But, in a lot of ways, our
friends were also placing their faith in a dream of good food. It's an old dream, and one that has left a
deep imprint on America. It's the idea that food from small, local producers is pure and virtuous, that
the best way to ensure food safety is to know exactly where it comes from.
Proponents of industrial food like to mock this dream, reveling in every instance of sickness traced to
a small producer. Hard-to-pin-down relations of trust enmeshed in face-to-face connections, they argue,
are no match for industrial-scale Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. During the early twenty-