“The refrain ‘If people only knew about their food’ gets uttered a lot by food activists today. Once we learn the perils of industrial eating, it seems, we will instinctively go back to something more authentic; something like our grandmothers’ simple world, where people understood the difference between good food and bad food.
“But what about all the people who know but don’t change? In this, sliced white bread offers a microcosm of our larger, fraught relationship with industrial eating. Industrial bread as we know it emerged in the 1890s and 1900s, amid widespread anxiety about germs and ‘dirty’ immigrants. In that moment of upheaval, industrial bread was a perfectly shaped, perfectly clean, perfectly white antidote to fears of racial contamination. During the Roaring Twenties, however, industrial bread itself became the target of considerable anger and anxiety. It appeared to be too pure, too perfect; critics said that it was making the country fat, dumb, and lazy. Since then, the contradictory embrace of and aversion to industrial loaves have repeated themselves endlessly—even during the Golden Age of Wonder Bread.”
[via Longreads]
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