WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 75

After the devastation of war, however, bread of any color was nothing to scoff at. The final years of
the war had been a nutritional disaster for the islands' population, as Japan lost control over food-produ-
cing territories abroad. The average weight of Japanese children plummeted and even affluent children
suffered marked deficiencies of vitamins B, C, and D. After the war, the United States had far greater
sympathy for starving white Europeans than it did for the Japanese, and the great food aid machinery
doled out stingy rations to the East until the crisis in Europe was resolved. Thus, early school lunch
programs consisted of less than an ounce of dry milk per child, thin miso broth, scavenged military sur-
plus rations, and whatever vegetables parents could provide. Schools struggled to meet their goal of five
hundred calories per child. 30
When, in 1949, officials could finally announce, “Owing to the goodwill of SCAP, the complete
lunch program will be carried out by providing each child with pure white bread and butter,” one hun-
dred grams of bread per child twenty days a month at a heavily subsidized price looked extremely good.
Children protested at the “odious flavor” of many SCAP-imported foods—especially dry milk, which
students flat out refused to drink—but white bread was popular. Students and parents overwhelmingly
praised the school lunch program and lobbied for its continuation. 31
At the same time, Japanese consumers balked at the idea that bread could sustain a nation, despite
the fact that, even before the war, Japanese leaders had tried to connect wheat diets with modernization
and military might. 32 Sounding not unlike a European American complaining about sushi, one house-
wife spelled out the problem: “With a bread diet, one becomes hungry immediately; with a rice diet it
lasts longer.” “With bread alone,” another housewife bemoaned, “people like my husband, who does
carpentry work, get tired.” Although, thanks to subsidized ration coupons, 93 percent of the islands'
population ate bread once a day and the majority told pollsters that they enjoyed it, few would choose
bread over rice if given a choice. 33
This attitude generated debate among occupation officials, public health officers, and agribusiness
representatives. From early on in the occupation, public health officials—whose cultural understandings
of what constituted a “real meal” had a tendency to mix freely with their understanding of scientific
nutrition—saw the occupation as a watershed chance to “rationalize” and “improve” the Japanese by
liberating them from their polished rice staple. Officials' frustration and disappointment are palpable in
documents complaining of the inability to provide a “complete” or “real” lunch for Japanese school-
children—by which they meant that they could not provide bread and butter along with what they re-
cognized as a more culturally appropriate table of miso stew, fish protein, and vegetables. 34
Only when school districts finally had the flour, baking facilities, and cooking fuel to produce bread
would they deem their program a true success—the school lunch program had much loftier goals than
mere calorie distribution. Its larger mission was to “correct” the Japanese diet while fostering “the sci-
entification of the Japanese kitchen; [and the] permeating of democratic thought.” “Democratic spirit,”
SCAP headquarters insisted, could be nurtured in school cafeterias through the “substitution of reas-
on and scientific practices in place of local customs and superstitions regarding cooking practices.” 35
Propagating American meals was part of a strategy of forging civilized citizens, and without bread—the
perceived core of a civilized diet—a local school official complained, how can we teach these lessons
to our children? 36
In 1950, J. L. Locke, a U.S. milling industry representative, summed up these cultural assumptions
in an appeal to “improv[e] the health and attitude of the Japanese people by supplementing their diet
with enriched white bread”: “There is some reason to believe that a change in diet might so change the
health and attitude of that warlike people that we could live with them in improved peace and harmony.”
Locke's self-interested motives were transparent, and occupation officials, hoping to develop a domest-