White Bread's Role in American Culture, Race, and Power

Introduction: The Cultural Weight of White Bread

In White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, Aaron Bobrow-Strain writes that "few foods have embodied so many dreams as industrial white bread, particularly during times of recession, war, and social upheaval" (ix). Few foods are indeed as controversial and culturally relevant. The term "white bread" has become a largely derogatory one, referring to something neutered, sterile, and painfully mainstream. Yet the symbolism of white bread runs even deeper than that relatively innocuous meaning. As Bobrow-Strain points out, white bread evokes racism, classism, and xenophobia. The "whiteness" of the bread parallels the dominant culture and its presumed purity.

White bread is presumed to be the stuff of the masses and remains closely linked to working-class stereotypes. No self-respecting urbanite eats white bread, except perhaps for the ironic Instagram shot. A deep-rooted mistrust of white bread — specifically its pre-sliced, plastic-wrapped incarnation — has embedded itself as deeply in the American psyche as the substance itself. White bread represents everything that is troubling about agribusiness and the corrupt relationship between food regulators and manufacturers. As Adler describes it, white bread is a "pale, starchy ghost."

White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf is both a comprehensive tome and a treatise on bread itself. Bread as a symbol of spiritual nourishment is a concept that reaches back to the Bible, when bread was manna from heaven. In the New Testament, several of Jesus's miracles were bread-related, such as the miracle of the loaves and fishes. As Bobrow-Strain points out, the word companion derives directly from the Latin words con and pan, meaning "with bread." Bread connotes community through the act of "breaking bread" with family and friends.

Bread as Spiritual and Communal Symbol

So where did things go wrong? Bobrow-Strain attempts to answer that question with his historical and social commentary on the evolution of bread — from physical and spiritual nourishment to its troubling modern incarnation as industrial white bread. Bobrow-Strain's commentary is rich and layered, and yet, as Adler points out, the author misses a significant opportunity to delve deeper into the politics of bread. His political emphasis rests primarily on the symbolism of white bread as an artifact of the dominant culture. White bread could not have more perfectly embodied life in the 1950s, with its promises of a fast and carefree lifestyle. Housewives could purchase their Wonder Bread loaves knowing that they had never before been touched by human hands, and their children could remain untouched by anything "colored" or "brown."

Purity is also an important component of Bobrow-Strain's argument. Copeland notes that in the early twentieth century, "Americans transitioned almost completely from homemade bread to store-bought bread — and specifically to bread made in large factories. Hygiene fears were a major reason." Hygiene was perhaps the single biggest driver of the shift away from home-baked bread and small-scale bakeries toward the packaged product in plastic bags. White bread was born out of paranoia, and that paranoia was itself deeply symbolic. On the most immediate level, the paranoia was linked to germs. Suddenly, everyone feared the microscopic organisms that permeated the environment, including foodstuffs, and this fear led to a revolution in American food production.

Hygiene Fears and the Rise of Industrial Bread

This is the primary area where Adler finds Bobrow-Strain's work lacking: the homogenization and mass production of foodstuffs in America has a sinister dimension that deserves further exploration. Yet Bobrow-Strain does address some of these problems, including, as Van Slooten notes, "the nefarious paths our governments have taken to control people's diet, their thoughts, their politics, even how they go to war."

Even without exploring the broader issues of agribusiness that Adler identifies, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf sheds light on a subject that most readers may have taken entirely for granted. As Van Slooten describes it, Bobrow-Strain's book is "a positively riveting account of the history of white bread, as in, industrial white bread." After all, there are other types of white bread that are neither neutered nor sinister. Fresh Italian bread from a local bakery is one example of how removing the germ from wheat is not the central problem Bobrow-Strain addresses in his book.

Conclusion: White Bread as American History

White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf is about the ways that food and power coalesce. There might be other products that can teach readers the same fundamental story, but white bread occupies a special place in the collective American psyche. Partly because of the symbolism of bread itself as spiritual sustenance, and partly because white bread serves as an emblem of whiteness in all its manifestations, sliced bread is a critical lens through which to understand American culture. Colloquialisms like "the greatest thing since sliced bread" illustrate how deeply white bread has penetrated the American imagination.