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break instructed U.S. readers that ergotism was a medieval disease, a remnant of a scarier age before in-
dustrial baking, and all congratulated American industrial bakers for single-handedly eradicating ergot-
ism through vitamin enrichment. These claims were not exactly true on several levels—but that didn't
matter: Tales of bread-poisoned peasants, convinced they were jet planes, leaping from windows and
rumors that “the village idiot had hexed the baker” seemed to confirm the larger sense of French baking:
it was irrational and archaic. French foodways were “charming” and something to “keep … happily in
mind while we survey most of the other half of mankind,” one observer noted, but certainly no model
for global security. 24
This attitude didn't just emanate from Francophobes. Francophiles also replicated the divide between
taste and security, pleasure and fortitude. An article by New York Times food editor Janet Nickerson ex-
emplified this trend. Pitting American white bread against its European counterparts, Nickerson argued
that opposition to American white bread divided into two camps, one based on health and the other on
flavor. The epicurean critics held a special place in her heart; indeed, they were incontrovertibly correct.
Fluffy, limp-crusted, and bland industrial white bread couldn't hold a candle to crisp, nutty-flavored
French and Italian breads. Alas—and one can almost hear her sigh echoing across the decades—“health
values deal with fact while flavor considerations deal with opinion.” Thus, in the end, readers were bet-
ter off buying industrial white bread, for their family's health. 25
Armed with this confident and urgent vision of good food, America set out to transform the world's
bread, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. U.S. corporations, with government support, built
American-style industrial bakeries in Iran and struggled (without much success) for similar footholds in
Western Europe. But what happened when the iron triangle of wheat, industrial baking, and global se-
curity set down in countries where bread was not the staple food? The results were far more complicated
than both proponents and critics of American industrial foodways acknowledge, as the case of Japan
reveals.
RATIONALIZING RICE EATERS
In the early 1950s, U.S.-trained public health officials and agribusiness representatives combined forces
to spread the gospel of white bread to the conquered rice eaters of Japan. Their efforts—particularly
the targeting of Japanese schoolchildren's palates through school lunch programs—are frequently held
up as the ultimate example of U.S-backed agribusiness forcing its industrial foods on defenseless pop-
ulations, of the premeditated destruction of healthy, “holistic” eating. 26 But the story is quite a bit
more complicated than that, not least because the Japanese taste for white bread long predates the end
of WWII. Indeed, occupation officials under the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP)
faced an imperial conundrum: Japan welcomed white bread and industrial baking technology with open
arms, but fiercely resisted cultural assumptions about the nutritional and political superiority of a white
bread diet. 27 This two-sided response divided occupation officials, creating room for debate about white
bread's role in securing the Asian front against Communism. While some officials argued for rebuilding
Japan on a foundation of rice and fish protein, others insisted on bread and milk.
Japan had been home to a small but flourishing baking industry since the late nineteenth century, with
white bread serving as a popular novelty food and sometimes status symbol. 28 Indeed, occupation of-
ficials quickly discovered that the most forceful complaint levied by the Japanese against U.S.-supplied
bread was that it was not white enough . As one fifty-year-old housewife polled by SCAP sociologists in
1950 recalled, “We have always liked bread before the war, and always ate it on Sundays. So we can get
used to it [as a new staple], but if it is not white bread we will be very unhappy about it.” 29
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