WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 68

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WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM
Dreams of Peace and Security
Bread comes from America and it does not come from Russia .
—Hamilton Fish, 1947
MUNDO BIMBO
Even as anti-immigrant fervor gripped large parts of the United States during the 2000s, one unexpected
border crosser was doing quite well in the land of white bread. Since 1996, Mexico's industrial baking
giant Grupo Bimbo had been quietly acquiring some of its northern neighbor's most iconic bakery
brands. After its takeover of Weston Foods in 2010 and of Sara Lee in 2011, Bimbo poised itself to be-
come the United States' largest industrial bread baker. With almost $10 billion in global sales in 2009,
one hundred thousand employees, and operations in eighteen countries from Chile to China, it was
already one of the world's biggest. How did a Mexican company get so far baking such a supposedly
“American” food? And how did pan gringo take hold in the land of corn tortillas anyway?
When I first visited Mexico as a student in 1991, my lower-middle-class host family served pan
Bimbo for breakfast—every morning for a hundred days: three hundred slices of the softest, whitest
bread I had ever eaten. No matter how I begged to eat a more “Mexican” breakfast, no matter how much
my host mother smiled and nodded at my pitiful pleading, Bimbo bread always awaited me on the kit-
chen patio. Perhaps my host mother believed that sliced white bread suited a gringo like me. Maybe it
was just cheap and convenient. Twenty years later, sitting in a taxi on my way to Bimbo's headquar-
ters, still trying to unscramble the mystery of those breakfasts, I asked the driver about the appeal of
supermarket bread. Mexicans will never give up corn tortillas, he assured me. But there was something
“attractive” about Bimbo bread. His family ate it at most breakfasts and some lunches. It wasn't the fla-
vor that drew him to white bread: Bimbo bread tastes like cotton, he confessed with a self-deprecating
laugh. “I don't know why we like it so much, but we do.”
Understanding the ascendance of sliced white bread in Mexico requires a foray into the politics of
what has come to be called “the Mexican Miracle,” a thirty-year period from the 1940s to 1970s marked
by high levels of economic growth, explosive industrialization, and rapid urbanization. For better and
for worse, that miracle rested on a foundation of cheap, “modern” foods like Bimbo—made possible by
government subsidies and incredible advances in agricultural productivity. Just as Mexico's industries
and cities grew during this period, its farms came to look ever more like factories. Mexico produced
unprecedented quantities of food, easily outpacing the country's rapid population growth. And yet, in
this new world of industrial food production, more Mexicans went hungry. Modern agriculture facilit-
ated explosive industrial growth and social peace in the cities, but took a toll on rural workers and peas-