White bread

What can the history of America's one-hundred-year love-hate relationship with sliced white bread tell us about contemporary efforts to change the way we eat? How did white bread, once an icon of American progress, become "white trash"? Fluffy industrial loaves are about as far from slow, local, and organic as you can get, but the story of social reformers, food experts, and diet gurus who believed that getting people to eat certain food could restore the nation's decaying physical, moral, and social fabric will sound very familiar. This book teaches us that when Americans debate what one should eat, they are also wrestling with larger questions of race, class, immigration, and gender. Here the author argues that what we think about the humble, puffy loaf says a lot about who we are and what we want our society to look like. As he traces the story of bread, from the first factory loaf to the latest gourmet pain au levain, he shows how efforts to champion "good food" reflect dreams of a better society, even as they reinforced stark social hierarchies. As open disdain for "unhealthy" eaters and discrimination on the basis of eating habits grow increasingly acceptable, the subject of this book is a timely examination of what we talk about when we talk about food.