-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Trudy Eden, Aaron Bobrow-Strain. White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Page 875, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.875
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
White Bread reflects the political science background of the author in its focus on local and global politics. It purports to tell a story—less social than political—of how bread and power have been intertwined. Highlighting the invention and growth of factory-made white bread, the book skips among the decades and briefly roams internationally in an attempt to answer the larger question: “What's behind our fraught relationship with industrial food and, by extension, how does our relation with industrial food reflect our messy relations with one another?” (p. 8).
White Bread's substantive chapters are mostly arranged around “eras” of twentieth-century American history: the Progressive period, with its emphasis on cleanliness, purity, nutritional abundance, and Americanization; the Cold War; and the civil rights movement, with its subsequent decades of social shuffling and redefinition. It picks up the story of white bread in the early twentieth century with an industrial history of the Ward Baking Company, already a half-century old in 1900. Starting as a small bakery, Ward added packaged crackers and biscuits to its bread offerings in the late nineteenth century. Its success enabled it to open “‘Pittsburgh's first modern sanitary bakery’ in 1903” (p. 27) as well as to expand to other cities, buy up other bakeries, and, by 1925, reduce the competition to just two other corporations—the General Baking Company and Continental Baking Company. Bakeries, then, experienced the same kind of modernization using science and technology and corporate restructuring through take-overs and competitive elimination as other industries in the United States. In 1929, Ward changed its name to Wonder Bakeries and the name of its product to Wonder Bread, adding, like other corporations in other industries, another cultural icon to America's quickly growing pantheon.
