Aaron Bobrow-StrainRezensionen

Very much enjoyed this book. Didn't realize how political white bread was. Pleasantly surprised!

This was an interesting little book. It is indeed a social history, as it looks at how white bread has been seen in society, and it also looks at what that mass produced white loaf says about us. How does the white bread illustrate our aspirations, dreams, and hopes as a society? What does it say about class? Where do you belong if you eat it or not? Those are the kinds of questions this book strives to answer.

There are various ways to look at white bread, and those ways reflect where our society has been and where it will go. White bread has been a symbol of wealth, and now (at least in the U.S.), it has become a symbol of poverty, of white trash. How did that happen? This book goes over that. The author looks at the various social dreams that white bread has come to embody. There is the dream of cleanliness and industrial efficiency; the dream of being able to feed more people and, hopefully end poverty (or at least curb it; the dream of military and defense of the nation, where you needed well-fed soldiers and members of society, going along with the importance of nutrition. In other words, you wanted good nutrition because it was the patriotic thing to do, and so on. In looking at each dream or stage, white bread embodies those dreams and symbols.

The author also asks some hard questions. The one that stayed with me, a question I often ponder, is the one of elitism in high end and/or organic foods. Sure, you can get high end fresh baked bread, but only if you have access to a community bakery that draws on high end supplies for its bread baking operation. Poor people in essence are stuck with white bread because that is all they can afford. While there is some critique of this, I am not sure any real solutions are offered other than we need to be aware. Then again, it must be noted the author is one of those people who can afford to buy that high end whole grain bread. Not something to hold against the author, but it has to be considered; it's where he is coming from. The issue of access to good food for all is an important one, and it goes beyond just bread, but illuminating this is the story of white bread.

The book is a fairly easy read. You do get some interesting history of the U.S., history of immigrants, society, so on as well with the bread history. This is a trait of a microhistory, though this one is more social than historical. You get stories of the dynasties that created the great bread making industries. I particularly found interesting the story of Grupo Bimbo, the Mexican baking conglomerate that owns a good amount of brands most people in the U.S. think of as "American." I was aware of it (as a Latino, I am fairly aware of Bimbo), but I am willing to bet many readers may find that interesting as well.

Overall, this is an interesting book. You can read it a bit at a time, and you can learn a few things along the way. I do think it will give you a better appreciation not just of white bread, but of bread and the dynamics of feeding society.

Disclosure note: I won this book from a GoodReads First Reads giveaway.

An eye-opening account of the U.S. Immigration laws and systems as told through the story of Aida Hernandez. How one person can endure such turmoil in her life is amazing and speaks to the character of the person.

The book also did a good job of giving the history and evolution of immigration laws in the U.S. of which I was sadly ignorant.½

I'm not sure how I feel about this book. First, it is very well done; I liked the organization of the book and the chapters which unfolded the story of Aida as well as others that were important to her life. The research and caring that went into this book is obvious.

Aida is an "illegal" having been brought to the US as a child; which truly meant that the mother moved her and her siblings across town - from AugaPrieta Mexico to Douglas Arizona. In the past this town had almost open borders with community members crossing daily for jobs, business, family, etc. With the crackdown of the borders, life becomes much more complicated. Add to that complication is a history of family violence, early sexuality, and low education levels. Aida is seemingly a bright and happy young girl in spite of much of the violence she has witnessed between her parents and between her mother and the mother's boyfriend who is also the father of Aida's two younger stepsisters. From her on, life is one major complication to the next, many of Aida's own choosing. Life is "fun" there is little sense of future responsibility; she is impulsive. A relationship with a boy leads to a child when she is sixteen.

This story is about Aida's struggle to become an American citizen in spite of all the roadblocks, legal maneuvering, family struggles, and poor decisions on her part. Along with Aida's story is the story of Ema, a soccer player from Ecuador who is a lesbian. Ema's story tells of the journey from Ecuador to the United States and her meeting of Aida in one of the detention centers in Arizona. Ema and Aida become a couple eventually move to New York City and are legally married. Chapters on Rosie Mendoza are interspersed. Rosie comes from a similar background as Aida, but has managed to bring herself out of that level of poverty; she is a counselor who has strong influence on Aida.

One of the most interesting and troubling points of this book is the legal system, immigration laws, detention centers run by non-governmental entities, and now many people (businesses) are actually benefiting from the harsh laws and enforcement of them. Really, can I imagine living in a town where one in thirteen people are employed by some arm of the law. This is also the story of Douglas Arizona, a city made by copper mining but after the mines are closed, people remain.

Truly an interesting and thought-provoking book. Interesting quote: "Don't study the poor or powerless because everything you say will be used against them." (p 350). "Even well-meaning scholarship on poor people in American has sometimes helped reinforce the objectifying assumptions through which comfortable people blame struggling people for their own suffering." I have to admit that I'm somewhat guilty after reading Aida's story; at the same time, I realize that I'm not sure I would have done any differently if I had been in those shoes. - Life is complicated!

The House on Mango Street changed Aida Hernandez's life. In her darkest hours, she remembered the words of hope: "I have gone a long way to come back."

Aida wanted to dance. She wanted to finish high school and go to college. She wanted to become a therapist. She wanted to give her son a good home. She wanted to love and be loved. Her hopes were just like yours and mine.

But Aida's life held more horrors than any one body should be able to endure. She had survived even death but suffered from crippling CPTSD--Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She came from a legacy of abuse but a knife attack tipped her over the edge. It only took one mistake, a $6 mistake, to remove Aida from her son and family, locked up for months in a women's prison. They were not given tampons, or enough toilet paper, or adequate wholesome food. There were not enough beds or blankets to keep warm.

And that is when Aida saw The House on Mango Street on the prison library shelf and it started her reclamation and a life of helping the other women with her.

Aaron Bobrow-Strain's book The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez brings to life unforgettable women, and through their stories, explores the failure of Prevention Through Deterrence which posits that if the journey is horrific enough people will not come. Women suffer the most in this system.

He shows how American economic and political policies and the desire for cheap labor created the influx of illegal immigrants.

Immigrants in detention centers are treated like hardened criminals with shackles, solitary confinement, lack of medical care, meager inedible food, and a scarcity of hygiene supplies. They have no legal rights. They are provided no legal counsel. Border Patrol and detention centers have created jobs and business--paid for by the government.

Who are the people seeking refuge in America? What drives them from their homeland? What options are available for legal immigration? What happens to those who are apprehended? This book will answer all your questions. But you may not like the answers.

Justice. How many times have we forgotten this value?

The proceeds from this book will be shared between Aida Hernandez, the Chiricahua Community Health Centers to support emergency services for people dealing with domestic violence or sexual assault, and the author to offset costs of writing the book. Which for me means an instant add to my "to buy" list.

I thank the publisher who provided a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Good book for understanding the history and making of this American staple.

This one definitely had it's interesting parts but, for the most part, I wasn't super impressed. I did, however, really like the author's writing style in that, instead of writing up a chronological history, he broke the book into subjects and went chronologically in each section. That made it super easy to stay on the points he was trying to make.

Reading this made me realize that white bread probably isn't so bad after all. Sort of like the saying that if one thing doesn't kill you, another will. After all, white bread is the best choice for things like grilled cheese, french toast, hamburger and hot dog buns, and the perfect PB&J sandwich.

I thought it was neat that the author is currently living 20 minutes from our old town in Oregon. He teaches at the college where friends and family have gone and discusses the area in ways that are familiar to me.

I was really disgusted at his descriptions of the filthy conditions in early bakeries. YUCK! Also, I do not relate at all to the "white trash party" of the 2000s that he describes. Those were the years of my 20s---but maybe I was just too busy having kids to pay attention.

I was super annoyed with his ending thoughts. He spent 180 pages giving a pretty objective history and then spent the last few going off on fermentation. Who's to say we're not going to get an updated version in 50 years that decries the fermenting craze? All of a sudden there's a problem to solve? I think he would have done good to leave his "answer to the problem" out of it---especially since he didn't really spend any time presenting a problem to begin with.

I'll finish this JE with my favorite "bread memory". When my brother and I were grade schoolers in the late 80s, my mom, who was always on some weird diet kick, would buy her "health nut bread". (We had to stay out of this and eat the cheap .69 white bread, btw). Anyway, she'd take two pieces of health nut bread and put them together and bite into them like a sandwich. She'd make all kinds of "mmm" noises and tell us how great her "sandwich" was. We all knew it was just two pieces of bread. She would tell us that she was tricking her mind into believing there was meat or peanut butter in between the slices, when really there was nothing. I'll never forget that. Crazy wonderful mom.

White Bread is an informative look at the changing view of industrial white bread from the late 19th century to the 21st. It was interesting to see how ideas of bread reflected the greater societal changes. The author divides his book into chapters looking at how different ideas – of purity, control and abundance, health, strength, peace and security, resistance and status – affected how white bread was seen. The chapters tend to move chronologically but sometimes things seem a bit shoehorned into their respective sections. Also, while some of the author’s personal experiences are relevant, others are more of a tangent. I certainly learned a lot though and it made me think about where some of my ideas about food came from.

In a short introduction, the author points to the importance of bread through Western history. He then describes the current food trend of getting local-organic-artisan etc. and how it is a mark of status. In describing the ideas of bread, the author mentions that there is always a downside. Sometimes his negatives are just quickly alluded to in a couple sentences, as if he had to add it in for completeness sake.

In Dreams of Purity and Contagion, he looks at the change from the mid-19th c to the early 20th. Initially baked at home, bread quickly became something that was bought from large corporations. The Pure Foods movement of the early 20th c. targeted small bakers who were often immigrants seen as dirty and dangerous. Though the crusaders got regulations passed, it meant that control of bread baking was done only by large companies. The section on Control and Abundance looks at sliced bread and industrial achievements in making bread. I thought this one was a bit of a stretch.

The section on Health and Discipline features an interesting character, Sylvester Graham, who thought that eating well could cure all health problems. His recommendation for home-baked whole grain bread and fruits and vegetables sounds familiar – he is sometimes credited as the start of the vegetarian movement. Graham’s dream of a rural home and family growing their own food was idealistic but was built on exclusion of certain groups and called for women’s labor. Alfred McCann was fervently anti-white bread though his ideas were built on some shoddy science. Bernarr MacFadden promoted a Graham-like diet, but linked it to ideas of self-discipline and vigor. Throughout the book, the debate over whether white bread is healthy goes through various shifts. Bobrow-Strain relates these ideas to the current craze for gluten-free eating. He also links such ideas to the negative ones of racism and blame for those who aren’t eating right.

The interesting section on Strength and Defense relates the changes that occurred during World War II. White bread regularly began to be fortified and the author goes into all the politicking and maneuvering that happened. After the war, he quotes advertisements, newspapers and people extolling the power of white bread. White bread, it was implied, produced strong boys who could defend the country from Communism. This happened even as people found that the taste of white bread wasn’t appealing. Dreams of Peace and Security was also a good chapter, looking at the bread sent to Europe after the devastation of World War II, the attempts to get the Japanese to eat more bread and the start of the bread industry in Mexico. While the development in Mexico was part of the larger Green Revolution, the author points to the nuances that actually led to increased hunger and inequality. On how white bread became an insult – it started with countercultural ideas of natural food and food not churned out by the big corporations. However, the health movement has been somewhat co-opted by corporations again (though the author points to some good large-scale bakeries) and the denigration of white bread has led to class separation. His final recommendations are a bit puzzling. Despite some criticisms, an interesting and informative book that made me think.

Before 1900, most bread was baked by women at home. By 1930, most bread was baked by men in factories. Commercial bakeries were initially small and "associated with poverty rather than affluence", cutting costs by adding plaster or chalk or borax to flour, exploiting employees with long hours in inadequate ventilation; lung disease was rampant. The Jungle by Sinclair Lewis was intended to outrage the public about treatment of immigrants in the meat packing industry, but instead it frightened the public about germs in food, and partially as a consequence the Pure Food and Drug Act became law in 1906. Mechanizing bread production was not simple: "Imagine how crazy it would have made Henry Ford if his Model T parts shrank or grew with slight variations in temperature, collapsed in air drafts, deflated after minor production delays, and depended on fickle microbes for energy. Before bakeries could become mass-production assembly lines, bread's living nature would have to be tamed." As mass manufacture became feasible, advertisements stressed the sanitary conditions of government inspected factories, and the cleanliness of bread untouched by human hands. What about exposure to microbes during delivery? Solution: wrap the bread. How to tell whether the hidden bread is fresh? Solution: softness as proxy for freshness. But soft bread is difficult to slice with a dull knife. Solution: the invention of sliced bread.

The author states: "This isn't really a book about the history of bread. It's a book about what happens when dreams of good society and fears of social decay get tangled up in campaigns for 'good food.'" He traces bread as it is formed not only by technological innovations but by cultural pressures, as it is infused with vitamins for a nation at war, as it spreads through the world with the Green Revolution, as it is criticized by advocates of health food and other less savory "improvements" of body and mind, as it is enhanced with caramel coloring and wood pulp fiber to satisfy a revived preference for whole grain. He visits the epitome of the modern aesthetic, the best of both worlds: an "artisanal" factory, "an M. C. Escher optical illusion come to life"

The author has an eclectic background as baker and historian. The combination of personal anecdotes with academic context is engaging and informative. And, at 200 pages, unpretentious.

(read 24 May 2012)

American Dreamz (of "Good" Food)

Note: I received a free copy of this book for review through Library Thing's Early Reviewer program.

When is bread just bread? After reading White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain (2012), you'll realize that the answer to this deceptively simple question is likely "almost never."

Tied as it is to issues of class, race, gender, and nativism, the history of bread - which types of bread are considered the healthiest, which are are the most patriotic and "American," what methods of preparation are considered safest, which loaves are most valued by the affluent, etc. - reflects changing social mores as much as (or perhaps even more so than) it does evolving culinary tastes. Focusing on recent American history - the past 150 years, give or take a few decades - Bobrow-Strain doesn't so much trace the history of bread as he does examine how trends in bread consumption reflect deeper cultural ideas, fears, and ideals. Accordingly, the book is divided into six primary chapters, each dedicated to a different "bread dreams," namely: purity and contagion; control and abundance; health and discipline; strength and defense; peace and security; and resistance and status.

The mass production of (the titular) white bread in factories, for example, was initially celebrated as a safe, scientific, and superior way of delivering bread to the masses, in a time when women were otherwise tied to the kitchen and many small, family-owned bakeries were run from unsanitary basement kitchens characterized by brutal working conditions. Now derided as "white trash" food - ironically, in part due to its success and ubiquity - industrial white bread was once considered a healthier, more sanitary, even elite alternative to home-baked, locally bought, and whole wheat breads. Oh, how the times have changed! Or not. What comes around goes around - America's current love of freshly made artisan breads harkens back to the 1800s and earlier, before bread was made by robots and procured in giant grocery chains.

So too has the maxim of "knowing where your food comes from" changed with the times. Prior to the industrial revolution, this meant getting to know your local bread baker (and, more importantly, his kitchen) - or, preferably, having mom bake all the family's bread from scratch. (No small feat when one considers that bread has long been a dietary staple: from the 1850s though the 1950s, Americans got an average of 25-30% of their calories from bread. While this figure began to dip in the 1960s, it tends to rise in times of war and recession, particularly among the poor.) Later on, "knowing where your food comes from" was presented as a benefit of buying industrial white bread produced by faceless bakery conglomerates - an idea that seems laughable to the modern consumer.

White Bread is an engaging look at a foodstuff that, until now, hadn't received its proper due. Recent condemnations of industrial bread aside, historical and scholarly accounts of bread's history have mostly been lacking; with this engaging, meticulously researched, and passionate tome, Bobrow-Strain fills in the void. Especially useful to food activists, the lessons found in White Bread are important ones:

“ Thanks to an explosion of politically charged food writing and reporting that began in the late 1990s, members of the alternative food movement have access to a great deal of information about why and how the food system needs to change. Much less is known about the successes and failures of such efforts in the past. Even less is known about the rich world of attachments, desires, aspirations, and anxieties that define America's relation to the food system as it is.”

The history of bread in America provides countless illuminating examples of how national crusades for "better" food (however you define it: safer, healthier, cheaper, etc.), while well-intentioned, often draw upon and feed into harmful stereotypes and work to perpetuate the very oppression and inequalities they seek to eradicate. Food must be taken in context: everything's related. Food justice, feminism, worker's rights, racial equality, immigration, environmentalism (not to mention, nonhuman animals and veganism) - intersectionality is the word of the day.

So why the 4-star rating? Exhausted by the bald speciesism found in so many books written by non-vegan environmentalists (culminating in the particularly awful Gas Drilling and the Fracking of a Marriage), I promised myself that I'd stop requesting such items from Library Thing, no matter how much they might interest me. While I expected that meat might make an appearance in White Bread - a status symbol, the consumption of animal flesh has long been linked with class, gender, and race - I didn't anticipate that the author would be a former intern on a "kinder," "gentler," "sustainable" beef ranch. Bobrow-Strain peppers the book with anecdotes about his time as a purveyor of "happy meat," grass-fed beef, and raw milk - all of which is presented as a "radical" new way of looking at food. Uh, yeah, not so much. Exploiting animals? That's just business as usual. But rethinking who is on our plate, and why? Now that's extreme. (Such bold proclamations bring to mind Red Lobster's latest ad campaign: "We Sea Food Differently." If by "differently" you mean "exactly the same.")

And yet, the closest we get to any mention of veganism is Sylvester Graham, the 19th century Presbyterian minister and food reformer who advocated vegetarianism, temperance, and a return to "natural" foods as a means of achieving physical and moral superiority. Unfortunately, his vision of a simpler life was predicated on the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enforcement of rigid gender roles; and, in blaming the poor for their ills and ignoring larger social structures, his philosophy was classist as well. Not that I blame Bobrow-Strain for presenting this critique of "the father of American vegetarianism." Quite the contrary: it's essential for vegan activists to recognize, acknowledge, and overcome past wrongs - many of which are still in operation today. But in all his waxing sentimental about animal exploitation - on a book ostensibly written about bread - it's especially irritating that an oblique discussion of Graham's vegetarianism is the best - indeed, the only - counter to the oppression, violence, and waste that is animal agriculture. Slow, local, organic, and healthy foods - all receive their due. And veganism? Apparently that's so radical a notion it's not even worth mentioning.

Read with: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism by Melanie Joy (2010).

http://www.easyvegan.info/2012/06/07/white-bread-a-social-history-of-the-store-b...

For the past century, white bread has been so ubiquitous in America that it is difficult to imagine a time when bread was not only brown, but it was almost exclusively made in the home. Bread, particularly white bread, reveals much about society. From the types of bread different peoples eat to how bread is produced provides a glimpse at larger social and political issues centering on power relations.

The five major themes of bread evolution from the 1880s to the present are purity, naturalness, scientific control, perfect health, and national security and vitality. In each conception of bread production and consumption, these themes play a role that posits one segment of society on the defensive against the more powerful segments who would like to impose their version of good bread.

In the era of industrialization, food reform meant improved sanitary conditions of factories. Food never touching human hands, it was thought, was the best recourse for disease prevention. Regardless of the level of truth in this logic, factory bakeries were growing larger and larger to feed the masses of people now clamoring to purchase bread rather than bake it because these people believed that bread from small bakeries and from homes was more prone to impurities. Paired with this notion of hygiene was the notion of immigrants being unhygienic along with their bread and bakeries.

Revoking the model of white bread as more pure, the countercultural movement of the 1960s resolved to bring nature back into daily life. The ideals of this period harkened back to the time of Sylvester Graham of Graham cracker fame in the 1830s who espoused vegetarianism and whole grains. By romanticizing farm life and female domesticity, this mostly middle-class faction in society neglected to see how disparities in fields and factories worked against their idealisms.

Equally utopian in their ideals, people of the 1910s to the 1950s saw science as the answer. During this time period, leisure and abundance was on the rise due to increased efficiency and speed in factories. However, this increased reliance on petroleum-fueled factory production resulted in flavorless bread that contained chemical additives. Bread became whiter and softer than ever as it also got cheaper. Concurrently, the role of housewives moved from making food to buying food. This heterogeneous version of bread neglected diverse and older methods of bread production, relegating them to inferiority.

Health movements are inextricably tied to discipline and self-control. However these are often confused with moral virtue. The implications of this posit that those who do not adhere to a dietary regimen are lazy and irresponsible. Rather than making diet a public health concern, individual responsibility is touted. This serves to reinforce exclusions and social hierarchies, ignoring the root causes of health issues.

After World War II, the United States exported wheat to Europe to help stave off starvation and to Iran to undermine Communist forces. In the 1950s, propaganda was used to juxtapose white bread against Communism’s dark bread, citing the superiority of the U.S. baking system. During this time, the U.S. also sent wheat to Japan and helped Mexico produce a new strain of wheat to encourage consumption. The undertone of these efforts was that the American way of eating was superior and advancing wheat consumption would not only improve relations with foreign countries but it would also bring them around to America’s way of thinking and doing.

I really enjoyed this book, and I read it quickly. The research was well done, the writing was engaging, and the topic was close to my heart. The role of food in history and politics is gaining traction among academics, and I could not be more pleased. White Bread offers us a lens through which to view an everyday object in the context of social hierarchy, industrialization, and international relations.

Through this engaging history of white bread, Bobrow-Strain examines how various food movements have changed the way Americans eat. The author explicitly looks for lessons for the contemporary alternative food movement as he guides us through the fascinating evolution of white bread.

Bobrow-Strain's concluding argument that today's food movement might use the metaphor of fermentation rather than purity, naturalness, scientific control, perfect health, and nationalism is a provocative and helpful one. It offers a more radically democratic vision than that used by other food movements in U.S. history and one that the alternative food movement should be comfortable with.

Much more than a history of white bread, this book looks at how trends in American culture and history are reflected in the rise and fall of White Bread and wheat bread. The author includes a multitude of anecdotes to flesh out the story. While often overreaching in his analysis and undoubtedly liberal in his politics, Bobrow-Strain appears give an accurate picture of white bread's history and he's honest about his own ups and downs with bread.

This book, as the subtitle states, covers the social aspects of white bread and its winding road of status from the top to the bottom. In just 200 pages, the book covers in details how attitudes towards white bread (and the bread itself) have been shaped by health scares, immigrants, wars and globalization.

Interesting facts abound in this book, such as that the current gluten free trend is nearly 100 years old and that even WW2 and FDR couldn't stop keep people from their white bread.

No matter your feelings on white bread, this book gives a balanced report on both sides of the discussion.

This book isn't just a history of bread, it's also a history of the social movements relating to food, and how they have used popular fears to champion industrial bread and then artisan bread. The author does a great job of discussing the (sometimes) unintended side-effects of these social movements, discussing how conservative ideas of eugenics, class and race were promoted along with discussions about food.

It might be surprising to many people the relationship something as simple as bread has had with so many aspects of our daily lives. While food in general can always be an indicator to the condition of a nation's well-being, looking at bread specifically can be an intriguing and insightful way to judge the social personality of a group of people. In the United States, we've gone from a nation of home-baked bread eaters to purveyors of bleached, chemical-laden loaves of industrialized white bread, and then back again to 'all-natural' bread just recently. Even if by 'all-natural' we mean bleached, chemical-laden loaves of industrialized bread with caramel coloring (brown dye) that is masterly crafted with holes and irregular shape so as to appear healthy. You know, because it's not the ingredients that affect how healthy a slice of bread is but its shape and color, obviously...

I was dubious upon reading in the summary that the author was going to draw correlations between racial/sexual prejudice, politics, culture, and other things with the way we eat bread, but they do always seem to be connected. While it is most likely that neither have a direct effect on the other they do seem to progress in a symbiotic manner, which I never considered until now.

White Bread was a great read. It's not the most comprehensive book being just under 200 pages, but this is always a positive thing for when it comes to popular nonfiction. It's still 200 pages of great information presented in a readable way, it doesn't overstay its welcome and while the book might not have made me an expert on the evolution of bread I do feel significantly more knowledgeable about the process and the basic history of bread-making over the past 100 years or so. Most importantly, Bobrow-Strain presents his information in a fairly objective way, only occasionally sounding like he has a an agenda and never coming off as a food Nazi, which is always a danger when writing about this particular topic.

I really liked the book, despite my alarm over the author's endorsement of unpasteurized milk. It was a fascinating, enligtening, and ultimately enjoyable experience and I'm glad to have won a free copy through Librarything's Early Reviewer program.

Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. This was a very enjoyable variation on telling a story of social transformation through a single commodity. Bobrow-Strain argues that, both in the US and outside, commercially produced white bread has stood in for and inspired various fantasies about progress—purity, scientific advance, a retro desire for handmade bread that ignores gender and socioeconomic constraints on a “good, natural” diet, national security, and so on. E.g., “while critics in the 1970s and today have noted the gendered contradictions of nostalgia for the lost days of Grandma’s cooking, less has been said about the vision of America smuggled in with the aroma of fresh bread. When counterculture food gurus … imagined the American past, they saw a halcyon world of independent cabins filled with nuclear families. Grandma didn’t slave in cotton fields or garment factories, nor did she struggle to save the farm from creditors…. [W]hen immigrants or people of color appeared in this America, they were scrubbed of actual history, eagerly waiting to share exotic new ingredients or a bit of ancient wisdom with their white audience.” The account of the rise of white bread (no pun intended) is also interesting, but I could have used more science, since a big part of the story was taming yeast and making unpredictable bubbles etc. tractable and entirely uniform, which here appears as undifferentiated “technological advances” allowing a highly processed, sliceable and tasteless loaf.

White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (Beacon Press, 2012), is an intelligent, insightful, and well-wrought presentation of "white bread's [ca. hundred-year] journey from modern marvel to low-class symbol" (p. 188). Academics (or, perhaps more often, academic publishers) refer to such books as "crossover books"; the intention is for the texts to cross over into the realm of popular literature. These are the books that are picked up by nonfiction book clubs; these are the texts whose authors are profiled on NPR; these are the works that make something of celebrities of their authors. Aaron Bobrow-Strain, therefore, has accomplished something that few academic authors are able to pull off so early in their careers. His academic colleagues may be envious--but writing such books is no easy task. The author--and even single-authored monographs of this sort are by no means the works of individuals operating entirely alone, as the acknowledgments attest--was fortunate to have helpful (and critical) readers and editors along the way. The result, in short, is award-worthy work.

Bobrow-Strain, who teaches politics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, understands the needs both to connect with his audience and to make history relevant. He does so by sharing some of his own story (explaining his evolving interest in so-called bread politics) and by bookending each of his main chapters with material of present-day concern. The historical material he presents is organized thematically around five or six "dreams" (think arguments, theories, perspectives, views) of bread and its symbolic importance throughout modern history, with an emphasis on the United States and, in turn, the world. (The book includes six dream-focused [and dream-subtitled] chapters, but Bobrow-Strain directly refers only to the first five dreams in his concluding chapter, as if the sixth was perhaps just a waking dream.) The organization is quite clever: The dreams typify major moments respective to white bread and, through chronological presentations, are the foil for the development and analysis of material of--to me--fascinating import and (the point of the book, in a way) remarkable relevance to the current rhetoric surrounding health and nutrition, food quality, standards, security, production methods, distribution channels, origins, ethics, politics, meaning, and more. Food provides a remarkable window into social and historical lives ("food is . . . central to how we think about social life" [p. 190]); Bobrow-Strain taps and translates these stories in an enjoyable and enlightening manner, using history as a "tool to think with" (p. 13).

I read White Bread concurrently with Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), and was pleased to see Bobrow-Strain's acknowledgment of the impact of Schlosser's work. (Yes, as I read the Schlosser text, I thought, "Oh, I wish these data were a touch more current!") Schlosser's data-heavy presentation offers history with what seems to be a teleological smugness; Bobrow-Strain is more curious, it seems, about the coincidences and seemingly contradictory reversals that his analyses reveal. (One example: "Strange as it might seem to contemporary foodies, in the early twentieth century the language of 'knowing where you food comes from' was a public relations coup for industrial food" [p. 40; my emphasis].) Perhaps direct comparison of the two works is unfair, though, since Schlosser is tackling the whole of fast food; Bobrow-Strain has narrowed his focus to one specific foodstuff. Nevertheless, I appreciated some of the technical details present in Schlosser's book, e.g., the description at the end of his chapter 5 as to how french fries are processed. I wish Bobrow-Strain had included a paragraph or so about, for example, the technicalities of the automated bread slicer (introduced in 1928 by the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri) or bread-wrapping machines. (I presume bread was initially wrapped in paper; a mention of cellophane wrapping is made on p. 180, but its introduction is not detailed.) I do, however, prefer Bobrow-Strain's method of citation (numbered endnotes) and applaud Beacon Press for allowing 38 pages of notes and a 19-page index: such components are neither indulgences nor trivial and thus support the scholarly nature of the work, enabling its use as a secondary source (and as a potential text in the college classroom). Beacon is also to be commended for a fabulous copyediting job--or perhaps the author was simply quite meticulous with the page proofs. White Bread thus offers examples of how to write--and how to produce--a serious book with mass-market appeal.

White Bread is Bobrow-Strain's second book. His first, a reworking of his 2003 doctoral dissertation on the peasant land reform movement in Chaipas, Mexico, at the end of the twentieth century, was published to many lauds by Duke University Press in 2007. I thank him for White Bread, wish him many years of health and productivity, and am already looking forward to his third offering. (And I thank LibraryThing and Beacon Press for the Early Reviewers copy.)

Over the last century, mass-produced bread has gone from nutritional staple to nutritionless fluff, and every place in between. "White Bread" is Mr. Bobrow-Strain's look at the central societal role of bread, not just on the American table but also in its discussions about morality, class, race, and the environment. Readers are taken 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, the author shows that the history of bread was leavened with good intentions and strong convictions--many of which succumbed to unintended consequences. Entertaining for fans of history and food, "White Bread" reveals yet another facet to the ever-complicated world of what we eat today.