THE STAFF OF DEATH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 42

politics smuggled in with calls for “simple repast.” The disparity between suffragist ideals and a diet
dependent on unremitting female labor was just the tip of the iceberg.
Under the guise of good bread, Graham peddled a sentimental utopia of rural simplicity that con-
veniently ignored the many forms of exploitation, debt bondage, and global connections that had always
plagued supposedly “independent” frontier households—not to mention the human and environmental
costs of the conquest of Indian Territory. Calls for local wheat sound pleasant today, but, in the 1840s,
Graham's exaltation of “virgin soils” and “comfortable log houses” would have clearly read as a warrant
for westward expansion. For Graham and his followers, building the Kingdom of God on Earth from the
stomach out was inseparable from the emerging imperial ambitions of their young Republic. As Kyla
Tompkins, a scholar of nineteenth-century food movements, has explained, whole wheat bread, locally
grown and produced by whites, “signified domestic order, civic health, and moral well-being; ingesting
more [good] bread, [Graham] promised would … ensure America's place in the pantheon of civilized
nations.” 32 Strange as it may seem, for Graham, the destruction of Native American peoples and their
indigenous food-ways represented a necessary step in the country's quest for harmony with nature.
This raises awkward questions about the power to declare things “natural” or “unnatural.” If we hon-
estly and passionately love the taste of store-bought white bread, why isn't that a natural craving? More
disturbingly, Graham's assumption that property-owning, small-scale farmers living in white, male-
headed, heterosexual households and grinding their own “local” wheat were the most “natural” Amer-
icans—the ultimate expression of moral virtue, democratic spirit, and natural harmony—still resonates
strongly today. But what—and who —gets left out of this picture?
We might, like some contemporary vegetarian activists, forgive these elements of Grahamism as un-
fortunate but understandable products of their time. But we would do better to appreciate the tensions
inherent in the movement. Grahamism demanded justice for animals and slaves, while longing for land
cleared of Native Americans. It challenged the abuses of an industrializing food system in ways that re-
inforced women's subordination. And it questioned the entrenched authority of medical experts, while
reinforcing divides between “virtuous” elite eaters and the “intemperate” poor.
By the end of the nineteenth century, however, America's utopian impulse to perfect society from
the intestines out would lose some of the radical social critique that makes Grahamism attractive. Early
twentieth-century bread critics drew heavily on Graham's coupling of bodily health and civic virtue, but
theirs was a more worldly approach. As debates about the effect of modern bread came once again to
prominence between 1910 and 1930, all sides would rely on the unsavory premises of social Darwinism
and racial eugenics. Concerns about white bread's effects on bodies would increasingly channel earthly
anxieties about the survival of the fittest. Christian physiologists' spiritual dreams of social and inner
harmony, for all their flaws, would give way to obsessions with external appearance and material suc-
cess. Two early twentieth-century food gurus, Alfred W. McCann and Bernarr MacFadden, epitomized
the evolution from Christian physiology to more ruthless dreams of social fitness demonstrated through
bodily discipline.
MCCANN'S PARABLES OF WHITE BREAD POISONING
In the late 1920s, just two miles away from the Ward Baking Company's Brooklyn factory, another fam-
ily was making its fortune selling a very different kind of loaf. The Dugan brothers began baking bread
in 1875, as a complement to their pushcart grocery business. By the 1920s, their business had outgrown
a series of ever-larger bakeries, and was likely the country's largest producer of 100 percent whole wheat
bread. 33