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were often juxtaposed with the Communist world's scarce “dark bread.” A 1946 Woman's Home Com-
panion feature on “life behind the iron curtain,” for example, held white bread up as a key example
of the pruducti Russian people craved, but only America could provide. While some critics of fluffy
American bread praised hearty Soviet loaves, they generally conceded that the U.S. baking system was
still better at providing affordable abundance. Even as the United States fretted about its own soaring
bread prices, the Los Angeles Times could proudly declare that “a Soviet worker must work half a day
or longer to earn enough money to buy a kilogram of rye bread, while an American needs to work only
12 minutes.” 19
From Gaston, North Carolina (“Reds Stand in Breadlines”), to Lima, Ohio (“Bread Scarce in Soviet
Cupboards”), the U.S. press triumphed in stories of Soviet bread shortages. 20 Accounts of daring es-
capes from the Soviet bloc run frequently by popular magazines during the early 1950s invariably men-
tioned bread prices and bread lines as a motivating factor in the flight from Communism. And even
when American reporters in Russia observed abundant high-quality and nutritious dark bread, industri-
al white bread was still a symbol of U.S. superiority: the Russian food system was so inefficient, they
argued, consumers had few other options and could afford little else beyond dark bread. Finally, with
Soviet military technology advancing at frightening speeds, newspapers could still reassure readers that
bread shortages periodically brought the Red Army to a screeching halt. 21
In this way, abundant modern food, including industrial white bread, constituted one of the Cold
War's most reassuring dreams: the idea of alimentary affluence in the West and dark Soviet bread lines
in the East. In industrial bread, U.S. policy makers, manufacturers, and consumers had definitively fused
the assumed universality of their foodways with the imperatives of national security.
This wasn't just an East-West comparison. By the mid-1950s, Americans could increasingly compare
their supermarket bread to the golden products of Western European bakeries. Subsidized by Marshall
Plan money, U.S. tourists had begun traveling to France in record numbers. And they returned from
those tours with stories of astonishingly good bread, sparking a fad for French bread in the United
States. 22
Not everyone in the United States had access to French bread, which began appearing in big-city
stores, or would want to pay the hefty premium price, but anyone who read could form an opinion about
the difference between American white bread and its European counterparts. Nearly every newspaper
and lifestyle magazine ran stories about the French bread craze during the mid-1950s, and a complicated
message emerged from those articles. All agreed that French bread tasted divine. Its arrival in America
was something to celebrate. At the same time, there was something off about French bread: the very
hedonistic qualities that made it popular also made it suspect. American industrial bread might taste like
doughy hot air compared to a good baguette, but American bread embodied strength and fortitude in a
way that the French stuff didn't. And for better or worse, in a dangerous world, system and fortitude had
to trump taste.
The once-pressing question of whether France's bread had, as one woman remarked in a letter to the
Los Angeles Times , caused the country to “lose vim and vigor” in the face of Nazi invasion didn't con-
cern U.S. observers so much anymore. 23 Rather, it was the whole French food system that seemed off.
As articles in Time and other national publications concluded, the French baking industry had too many
inefficient subsidies, lax sanitation regulations, archaic distribution networks, and monopolistic guilds.
France needed industrial baking and American-style competition.
When ergotism, a rare form of hallucination-inducing poisoning caused by fungus-infected rye,
sickened two hundred residents of the small village of Pont-Saint-Esprit during the summer of 1951,
U.S. media reveled disproportionately in the sensational story. Tellingly, almost every story on the out-
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