THE STAFF OF DEATH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 36

control those parts of my life. I could control the way I ate, and it felt good. History plus psychology
explained my results.
But, as anyone who has ever typed a health-related search into Google knows, there are always ex-
perts ready to offer some other explanation. In this case, a whole army of alternative health care pro-
viders, physical therapists, diet gurus, and holistic healers, armed with everything from critiques of cap-
italist agribusiness to the latest insights of genomic medicine, rejected my quick self-psychoanalysis.
Gluten didn't just hurt celiacs, they warned. According to these alternative health experts, many if not
most people had their health and stamina sapped by the stuff. Thus, gluten-free diet proponents cau-
tioned their audiences to “think outside the celiac box”—to imagine a whole spectrum of gluten sensit-
ivities and systemic effects that can't be objectively identified by science yet, but can be perceived (and
remedied) by individuals carefully attuned to their bodies. 6 We have slowly discovered genetic markers
and mechanisms for other low-grade autoimmune disorders, the argument went; what's to say that low-
grade gluten intolerance wouldn't eventually be made verifiably “real” in the same way someday? 7
That kind of talk could easily be dismissed as pseudo-science, relegating the gluten-free craze to
a long line of fashionable pseudo-ailments sported briefly by “the worried well.” 8 Without tests ac-
cepted by mainstream science and relying only on a patient's bodily intuition, self-diagnosis of non-
celiac gluten intolerance was easy to gloss as psychosomatic. On the other side of the gluten divide,
however, a collection of ever-more-mainstream voices had begun to pose gluten avoiders as canaries
in the coal mine—people who were, for some reason, more attuned to something fundamentally askew
with our health care and food systems. Gluten problems, from this perspective, spoke to a larger prob-
lem of health hazards lurking in modern food, concealed from us by Big Agribusiness and the failings
of mainstream medicine. The staff of life may have sustained Western diets for thousands of years, but
no longer. Modernity corrupted the staff of life. 9
Exactly what had changed varied in different accounts, but all argued that, in some important way,
our wheat, or the way we eat it, had become “unnatural.” Some writers blamed modern plant breeding.
Others pointed to pesticides, endocrine disrupters, high-speed dough handling, industrial fermentation,
genetic modification, or the unbridled use of wheat-based additives in foods that never before contained
gluten. Some of the claims were clearly specious, but others contained a tantalizing basis in truth: driven
by food processors' need for grains adapted to the rigors of industrial processing, modern plant breeding
has dramatically increased gluten levels in wheat. Powered by the relentless acceleration of corporate
baking, high-speed dough handling and rapid-fire fermentation have changed the molecular makeup of
bread. 10 What wasn't clear was whether those changes actually impacted eaters. 11
As a student of food history, I knew that diet gurus often operate like this: introducing small grains
of doubt into the comfortable confidence of mainstream science. These small grains of doubt are al-
ways just within the realm of the plausible, and they always gain traction by playing on already existing
anxieties. They thrive by taking big, looming, seemingly impossible to control social forces and giv-
ing them a quick and easy individual dietary fix. Gluten-free proponents might be right about structural
problems in the U.S. food system, I concluded, but their individualistic “Not in my body” solution was
all wrong. 12 And yet, as someone upset about the U.S. industrial food system, arguments regarding ag-
ribusiness and the harmful effects of gluten resonated with me. Was gluten free a fad or a warning bell?
Or both?
In the end, I gave up on that question, just as I gave up on gluten-free eating. I realized that, as a con-
sumer, I could weigh evidence on either side of the scientific debate all day without getting anywhere,
but as a student of history, I could offer another way of looking at the problem: regardless of wheth-
er I believed that widespread gluten intolerance was “real” or not, I knew that we could learn a lot by