White Bread Quotes

“men sat around discussing the ethics of eating and farming, while women did all the work.23”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“Speaking very broadly, we can say that from the 1600s to as late as the 1950s, Europeans received between 40 to 60 percent of their daily calories in the form of bread.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“During the 1980s, however, fueled by the rapid segmentation of American society, consumer life diversified into ever-more precise niche markets. Massive department stores lost ground to boutique chains catering to narrow bands of consumers, who increasingly began to tie their identities to specific niche markets.50”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“By the late 1970s, whole wheat bread consumption had soared, industrial white bread sales had plummeted, and the country was experiencing an unprecedented revival of home baking.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“In theory, as long as food production continued to grow, it didn’t matter that a small percentage of the planet controlled most of the world’s resources and consumed the vast majority of its calories. The ideology of industrial agriculture held out the attractive fantasy that hunger could be alleviated through purely technical means—without needing to challenge power relations or alter the economic status quo. HOME”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“By the 1970s, knowledge of the Green Revolution’s negative effect on rural equality and its failure to alleviate poverty had become widespread, thanks in large part to work done around the world by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“no country in history had ever industrialized through laissez-faire and free trade. Active state intervention was necessary to achieve the promises of modernization.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“Dreams of perfect health through bodily discipline can easily become anxious nightmares.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“Whiteness, as never before, had become synonymous with control over threatening disorder, and this association manifested itself in multiple arenas, including food production. Whether in clothing, kitchens, appliances, or water closets, the color of scientific control was white.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“As the chair of the University of Chicago’s home economics department predicted: in the past, women were judged by their ability to make good bread, in the future they would be judged by their skill at buying it.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“Looking Backward was a not-so-subtle indictment of robber barons, speculation, and greed, a paean to cooperation and redistribution. It sparked Bellamy Clubs, inspired experiments in collective living, fueled growing interest in cooperatively owned enterprise, and sold more copies than almost any other book of its time.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“What becomes clear from the story of bread, however, is that fears of threat to the social body don’t remain neatly moored in purely alimentary realms. They overflow, combine with larger social anxieties, and reinforce other kinds of exclusion and distract from root causes.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“The destruction of craft baking, the replacement of skilled labor with machines, and the concentration of baking into ever larger and more distant factories were not solely the product of insatiable greed or capitalist competition. They arose out of often well-meaning and earnest concern for food safety.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“Centuries of European tradition had linked bread choices with class and status, but the movement for hygienic eating added a whole new level of consequence: individual decisions about bread didn’t just mark class differences, they placed eaters’ behavior in relation to the larger health of the nation and proclaimed, for all to see, whether one was fit and responsible—or in need of help.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“Organized under the banner of “home economics,” experts in household management and scientific motherhood believed that most of the nation’s problems could be cured with careful attention to the workings of family life.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“In 1929, a new sign went up over many of his factories: although Ward’s Tip-Top bread would continue to be made into the 1950s, the Ward Baking Company would henceforth and forever be better known as the Wonder Bakeries, makers of Wonder bread.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“At the very least, by the 1930s, the bread question had been decisively answered: the country had abandoned its home-baked loaves and craft bakery bread, both scorned as dangerously impure, and embraced air-puffed, chemically conditioned, ultra-refined marvels of modern industry.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“The emphasis on scientific diet and efficient household management as routes out of poverty was no match for the grinding structural forces keeping people poor: nativism, racism, political corruption, anti-worker laws, and monopoly power.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“An urgent need to know that one’s bread was pure proved instrumental in convincing Americans to embrace industrially produced loaves.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“But the history of battles over bread suggests that real change will happen only when well-meaning folks learn to think beyond “good food” and “bad food,” and the hierarchies of social difference that have long haunted these distinctions.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

“The word “companion” itself came into English from the Latin roots com and pan—“with bread.” To share bread, I thought, was to tap some ancient chord of togetherness.”
― Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf