WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 69

ant farmers, forcing millions from the countryside into urban slums. Through all that tumultuous social
change, Bimbo bread stood as a kind of promissory note, a graspable piece of a future yet to come.
At the same time, this uniquely Mexican story can be understood only in a much larger context of
cheap food, wheat bread, and Cold War geopolitics. Whether they knew it or not, when Lorenzo Servitje
and his three Catalonian immigrant collaborators opened the first Bimbo factory in 1945, they formed
part of a bigger web of global food politics and superpower struggle that would define the postwar peri-
od. As much as the story of Bimbo bread reveals about Mexico, it is also a story about how the Un-
ited States understood its place—and the place of its industrial food production system—in a dangerous
world. It is a story about how a particular approach to growing, processing, and eating industrial food
got fused with hopes for world peace and security—and what that has meant for the United States and
the world.
This chapter's globe-trotting exploration of Grupo Bimbo's origins provides a glimpse into the mak-
ing of a particular form of postwar “American alimentary exceptionalism” premised on the universal de-
sirability of industrially grown and processed food. This alimentary exceptionalism did not assume the
U.S. industrial food system was gastronomically superior to the rest of the world's foodways, but rather
that it offered a unique foundation on which world peace could rest in the uncertain postwar world. Al-
though this vision had deep roots in the United States, we can trace its postwar origins to successful
famine relief—mostly in the form of massive shipments of wheat and flour to Europe and Asia—during
the first years of the Cold War.
During the early Cold War, shipments of U.S. bread grains to famine-torn Europe and Asia served
two purposes: at home, they prevented rural recession by absorbing farm surpluses. Abroad, U.S. grain
shipments saved millions from starvation, buttressed friendly governments, and generally served as one
of the United States' most effective weapons against the spread of Communism. As the Cold War wore
on, U.S. reliance on “food power”—the strategy of using the United States' undisputed dominance in
the arenas of industrial agriculture and industrial food processing as a carrot and a stick on the global
stage—deepened. Shipments of U.S. grain as food aid continued, becoming a permanent cornerstone of
both domestic farm support and foreign policy. At the same time, direct grain shipments were supple-
mented and eventually superseded by efforts to remake world agriculture in the American image.
This Cold War history has enduring legacies—not just in the form of globally competitive Mexican
bakers. As scholars of U.S. “dietary imperialism” have noted, the export of industrial food and industrial
agriculture during this period radically changed the way the world ate. Less noticed is that the exercise
of food power also left a deep impression on the way Americans themselves emotionally connect with
industrial food: every time a chemical manufacturer tells PBS viewers that its newest high-yield seeds
are needed to fight poverty in some conflict-ridden country, every time a grain industry spokesperson
warns that only industrial agriculture can keep famine and food riots at bay, every time some environ-
mentalist excuses the social and ecological consequences of new biotechnologies out of fear that popu-
lation growth will outstrip food supplies, they are deploying a dream forged in the crucible of Cold War
anxiety. 1 Understanding that historical context—tracing it through its origins in the European famine of
1946-48 to key laboratories like occupied Japan, Main Street 1950s America and, of course, postwar
Mexico—won't resolve decades-old debates about poverty and food, but it will highlight hidden cultur-
al assumptions and unacknowledged shortcomings in the dream of peace and security achieved through
industrial eating. The story of bread and the Cold War reminds us that, even when couched in a language
of humanitarianism and world peace, the present-day eliding of industrial food production and global
security establishes a state of emergency in which the enormous social, economic, environmental, and
health costs of industrial food production must be accepted without question or critique.