White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

Binding: Hardcover
EAN: 9780807044674
ISBN: 0807044679
Item Dimensions:93062611897
Label: Beacon Press
Languages:EnglishUnknownEnglishOriginal LanguageEnglishPublished
Manufacturer: Beacon Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: March 06, 2012
Publisher: Beacon Press
Release Date: March 06, 2012
Studio: Beacon Press

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
How did white bread, once an icon of American progress, become “white trash”? In this lively history of bakers, dietary crusaders, and social reformers, Aaron Bobrow-Strain shows us that what we think about the humble, puffy loaf says a lot about who we are and what we want our society to look like.
 
White Bread teaches us that when Americans debate what one should eat, they are also wrestling with larger questions of race, class, immigration, and gender. As Bobrow-Strain traces the story of bread, from the first factory loaf to the latest gourmet pain au levain, he shows how efforts to champion “good food” reflect dreams of a better society—even as they reinforce stark social hierarchies.
 
In the early twentieth century, the factory-baked loaf heralded a bright new future, a world away from the hot, dusty, “dirty” bakeries run by immigrants. Fortified with vitamins, this bread was considered the original “superfood” and even marketed as patriotic—while food reformers painted white bread as a symbol of all that was wrong with America.
 
The history of America’s one-hundred-year-long love-hate relationship with white bread reveals a lot about contemporary efforts to change the way we eat. Today, the alternative food movement favors foods deemed ethical and environmentally correct to eat, and fluffy industrial loaves are about as far from slow, local, and organic as you can get. Still, the beliefs of early twentieth-century food experts and diet gurus, that getting people to eat a certain food could restore the nation’s decaying physical, moral, and social fabric, will sound surprisingly familiar. Given that open disdain for “unhealthy” eaters and discrimination on the basis of eating habits grow increasingly acceptable, White Bread is a timely and important examination of what we talk about when we talk about food.

Amazon.com Review:
Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2012: It's in, it's out, it's good for you, it's bad for you: over the last hundred years, bread has gone from industrial-strength cure-all to nutritionless fluff, and every place in between. White Bread is Aaron Bobrow-Strain's look at the central place of bread, not just on the American table but also in its discussions about morality, class, race, and the environment. Bobrow-Strain takes readers from the immigrant-run bakeries of the 1900s, which were associated with unsafe bread, to the shining promise of industrially-made loaves that could bolster Americans against communism, to the brown-bread revolution of the '70s and '80s. Along the way, Bobrow-Strain shows that the history of bread was leavened with good intentions and ironclad convictions--many of which succumbed to the ageless hobgoblin of unintended consequences. Entertaining for fans of history, food, and the history of food, White Bread reveals yet another facet to the ever-complicated world of what we eat. --Darryl Campbell

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