White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain Page A

instructions found in cookbooks. Precise directions and exact measurements were oppressive vestiges of an inhuman system. Readers should “learn to feel for themselves through experience and experimentation,” as
Tassajara Bread Book
author Edward Espe Brown urged. Instructions in
Mother Earth News
for baking bread captured this new outlook perfectly, directing would-be bakers to knead until the dough “springs like a plump baby’s bottom,” and then enjoining them to “take this opportunity to grease the cans and light a joint.” 17
    During the first half of the twentieth century, experts from home economics and the baking industry had so thoroughly convinced Americans that only lab-coated professionals could succeed at the cryptic science of bread baking that counterculture food gurus took distinct pride in liberating it for the untrained masses. “Anyone can do this” and “Baking is easy” were constant refrains in counterculture cookbooks. Buddhist monk Edward Espe Brown, whose
Tassajara Bread Book
taught a generation to bake, went even further: the precise outcome of bread making didn’t matter. Instead, he counseled readers to understand baking as a deeply sensual spiritual practice, independent of attachment to perfect final products. 18
    The freeform revolt against culinary expertise could seem frivolous and self-involved at times. Mo Willet’s
Vegetarian Gothic
, for example, offered this dietary advice: “You should eat when you’re hungry, feast when you’re joyful, fast to get high, and sing of love all the time.” “Fill your bread with wholesome foods and lots of love and you’ll find yourself feeling good all over,” Willet glowed. 19 But there was method in the revelry. Just as industrial white bread stood for larger systems of oppression, upending decades of dietary expertise challenged all forms of authoritarian control. For Crescent Dragonwagon, encouraging imperfect cooking undermined “antinatural” uniformity in other realms, from the beauty myths of femininity to the lockstep war machine. Women, she argued, experienced cooking as an oppressive burden because generations of food experts had turned it into an overcontrolled, rationalized, and deadening imposition. Thus, treating cooking as a “creative, expressive art” undermined larger systems of gendered oppression. 20
    Similarly, her short stint as professional baker taught her the larger lesson that
“capitalism can’t work.”
After struggling to produce affordable bread without sacrificing ingredient quality or wholesome process, she concluded, “It’s impossible to make good, healthy bread at any kind of profit. Her reasoning was insightful, quite possibly true, and certainly revealing of the larger dream of “good bread” animating the counterculture. It’s worth quoting at length.
    If you got [your ingredients] in bulk enough to make it sizably cheaper, you’d be doing so much business, probably, that you would be shipping the breads all over the place—and then you’d have to add preservatives or have stale bread! I really believe the answer lies in small communities. But—and this is what brought all this to mind—it’s interesting that good bread, the symbol of the American dream (or rather, one of many symbols) cannot be produced within it now. I don’t consider myself, really, in it. I don’t mean that as arrogantly as it sounds—I just mean that I and the people I live with are surely not typical of Americans, and the bread we bake we don’t “produce.” Some people and their narrow definition of politics! Baking a loaf of brown bread in this society is revolutionary, if you know why you’re doing it. It is for us. 21
    Invocations of bread politics like this were standard fare in the counterculture, but Dragonwagon’s take was both intelligent and influential.