WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 83

ited Nations Research Institute for Social Development. 64 U.S. policy makers, agribusiness, and many
development practitioners, however, had a hard time seeing beyond the mantra of higher yields. They
saw a world where exploding population growth threatened to outrun food supplies and trigger revolu-
tion at every turn. The answer was obvious: the world needed more food to feed more mouths.
What this perspective ignored, however, was the crucial question of food access . As the Nobel Prize-
winning economist Amartya Sen demonstrated powerfully, it wasn't just the amount of food produced
that matters, but whether people could access the bounty. More efficient food production didn't always
result in greater food access—particularly when it increased inequality and undercut small farmers' abil-
ity to earn a living. All too frequently, hunger and plenty went hand in hand. 65
Green Revolution technology was not inherently bad. Indeed, a more grassroots approach to bio-
technology could achieve important changes in the Third World. But Green Revolution technology was
hampered by the social and political context in which it was deployed. This was a classic case of a good
story gone out of control: accepting the intuitive Malthusian narrative of “Too many mouths, not enough
food” proved far more appealing to policy makers than wrestling with the complicated dynamics of rural
poverty. 66 A large part of the appeal of dreams of peace through industrial food lay in the fact that the
single-minded focus on increasing productivity through industrial agriculture allowed policy makers to
ignore sticky questions of power and resource distribution. In theory, as long as food production con-
tinued to grow, it didn't matter that a small percentage of the planet controlled most of the world's re-
sources and consumed the vast majority of its calories. The ideology of industrial agriculture held out
the attractive fantasy that hunger could be alleviated through purely technical means—without needing
to challenge power relations or alter the economic status quo.
HOME TO ROOST
Crowded in with the glass offices of Mexico City's exclusive Santa Fe business district, Grupo Bimbo's
white stone headquarters look—there's no getting around it—like a giant loaf of sliced white bread set
on its end. As with many places in Mexico, contrasts between rich and poor leap out in Santa Fe. Chauf-
feured cars slide through the gates of Amgen, IBM, Bancomer, and Kraft, around armed guards who
shoo away street vendors. Carlos Slim, one of the world's two or three richest men, lives a couple of
miles away, enjoying a fortune built in part by acquiring state-owned companies on the cheap, while
more than 15 million Mexicans survive on less than $2 a day. Staggering inequality is a fact of life here,
but perhaps more than any other company in Mexico, Grupo Bimbo has thrived because of it.
Not that Bimbo is one of the country's most exploitative companies. In fact, Bimbo's founding family
places Catholic social teachings in the company's mission. 67 As a result, Bimbo is regarded by many
for its charity work, code of labor ethics, and environmental commitments. Nevertheless, Bimbo owes
its ascendance to inequality because, from the very start, it literally fed national dreams of reduced class
conflict and upward mobility. To be sure, the company innovated in other ways, but none of that would
have amounted to much if Bimbo hadn't offered the country affordable, edible aspiration. By the end of
the 1960s, the company had spread this dream to nearly every remote corner of Mexico. Eventually the
extraordinary dreams embodied in white bread evolved into the stuff of taxi drivers' humdrum break-
fasts. Today, Mexican elites eschew Bimbo for authentic brick-oven-baked European breads—even in
Mexico, soft white bread has lost its association with high-class status.
But for Bimbo, the impulse to expand hasn't stopped. During the 1990s, Bimbo expanded to Central
America, then Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. It also looked north, first shipping Mexican-made
production to U.S. border states and then, in 1996, buying the company's first U.S. factory in Escondido,
California. Having grown accustomed to nearly absolute control over Mexico's packaged bread market,