White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

additives in bread. 11 Congress responded through the 1950s with hearings on the makeup of industrial bread and the safety of chemical emulsifiers, dough conditioners, softeners, and other additives. In 1951, for example, Congress gathered seventeen thousand pages of testimony on the bread question and headlines across the country asked, “Are We Eating Poisoned Bread?” 12
    Nevertheless, 1950s-era concerns about bread were different from those that would emerge later. In the 1950s, consumers and officials expressed their dismay at the state of bread in a language of public health, corrupt baking trusts, and adulteration that would have been immediately familiar to any food reformer of the Progressive Era. “Change the national food habits and we can still [have] a virile nation,” read one typical letter to the FDA about bread. It could have come straight out of the century’s first decades. 13 In the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, food reformers clearly drew on these Progressive Era roots, but they also created a new language for talking about the problems of diet. Rejecting the dream of public health expertise and government regulation in the service of national virility, the counterculture imagined individual eating itself as a form of activism.
    Food choices had already begun to factor into civil rights and early antiwar activism. Lunch counter sit-ins, political fasts, and the UFW grape boycott all linked sustenance and social change. The act of eating (or not eating) could draw attention to demands for rights and recognition. But none of those late-1950s and early-1960s movements believed that social change could be achieved solely by eating the right food. Bread’s role in these movements was indicative: to the extent that it factored into their struggles, bread served generically as a symbol of Christian commensality posed against worldly injustice, as in the
Wonder Bread
seriographs of Sister Corita, Daniel Berrigan’s antiwar poetry (
And the Risen Bread)
, or Thomas Merton’s socially engaged spiritual teachings (
Bread in the Wilderness
and
The Living Bread
). For these purposes, any bread would do, and social movements saw little reason to focus their attentions specifically on the evils of processed food. When Martin Luther King Jr. called for a boycott of Wonder bread in Memphis, for example, it was unfair hiring practices, not chemical additives, that concerned him. 14
    With the emergence of the “hippie” counterculture, however, food wasn’t just a tactic in the theater of social change. Changing diets had become an arena of politics in its own right—perhaps
the
arena. As Crescent Dragonwagon, author of the popular
Commune Cookbook
, declared, the ecology of human diet united all struggles against oppression, from black and women’s liberation to antiwar movements. Again, bread was indicative. As influential whole foods guru Beatrice Trum Hunter proclaimed, bread baking constituted “a revolt against plastic food in a plastic culture. The free-form loaf is but another aspect of the revolt against the mechanization of life.” 15
    Mostly middle-class, white, and buoyed by an upbeat economy, flower children and whole foods advocates exuded an optimistic sense that changing one’s lifestyle could change the world. Utopian dreams of leisure, freedom from oppressive experts, the pursuit of pleasure, and self-actualization flourished. Although segments of the counterculture would harden considerably after the upheavals of 1968 and into the grim recessions of the 1970s, much of it was as joyous and raucous as earlier generations of civil rights activists had been earnest and disciplined. 16
    Counterculture cooks threw off the heavy hand of home economics, dispensing with recipes and reveling in chance, experimentation, and imperfection. Counterculture cookbooks—often self-published—mocked their own authority, encouraging readers to distrust