White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain Page B

The statement begins with a concise gloss on the pressures of capitalist baking—the constraints of efficiency and scale in a competitive, profit-driven context. Then, like so many critics in the American agrarian tradition, she offers small communities as an antidote. The statement never clarifies exactly how small communities baking their own bread might sidestep the capitalist system—historically they rarely have, even on the remote frontier—but it was a powerful vision. And it attached a feeling of profound agency to the simple act of baking one’s own bread. To bake was to stand apart from the system. With this elegant argument, Crescent Dragonwagon repositioned cooking as an act of resistance, turning domestic binds into the stuff of liberation.
    And yet, for all its radical anti-capitalist trappings, this dream of good bread also aligned Dragonwagon and the counterculture in general with a deeply conservative lineage. The countercultural dream of good bread challenged authority and expertise, stood against capitalist agribusiness, and sought to remake relations among people and between nature and society. Yet it also rested on rather orthodox myths of American individualism and independence. “Homemade bread,” Dragonwagon observed wryly, “is a symbolic thing. It’s American—it goes with pioneers and beginnings and family.” 22
    In this evocation of frontier independence and its foodways as the bedrock of good society, the counterculture drew heavily on Grahamism. Perhaps more surprisingly, given the counterculture’s disdain for regimen, the dream of good bread also gave new life to the ideologies of Physical Culture: sickness, both individual and social, was, in large part, traced back to weak, duped individuals’ descent into an unnatural diet. Sickness might not have been a sin, but it did arise from individual irresponsibility. To be sure, this was a more politically conscious vision than MacFadden’s. Dragonwagon and her comrades believed that individual irresponsibility could only be understood in the context of a poisonous, corrupt System in need of radical change. But, like MacFadden, they didn’t reflect much on what values and assumptions got smuggled in with their utopia of self-defense through good food. At the very least, they failed to recognize how easily their vision of good bread and good society could be recast in accordance with entirely capitalist and individualistic values.
DOMESTICATING THE COUNTERCULTURE
    On October 23, 1969, the United States celebrated its first National Day of Bread, sponsored by the country’s millers, bakers, and grocers and enshrined by congressional resolution. 23 Most Americans missed it, though. There were a few other things going on in the country. The National Day of Bread fell in the midst of Chicago’s Days of Rage and only a week after hundreds of thousands of Americans mobilized across the country in the first National Moratorium Day of antiwar protests. It came after a long summer that saw the Stonewall uprising, Manson murders, Woodstock, stepped-up nuclear testing by the Soviet Union, and the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals from Vietnam. Two extraordinary events—the moon landing and the ‘69 Mets’ underdog World Series victory—brought the country together a bit that summer. But mostly it felt like things were coming apart at the seams. In other words, for anyone threatened by social turmoil and political upheaval, it was a good time for a National Day of Bread. Celebrating bread allowed besieged conservatives to talk about family, Christianity, and old-fashioned values. What little press coverage the National Day of Bread received unanimously featured churches and happy families—quite different from the images of upheaval and bloodshed shown on nightly TV.
    During the summer and fall of 1969, arguments about Vietnam, long hair, and tofu might have turned many kitchen