Download White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf AudioBook Free
How have white bread, once an icon of American progress, become "white garbage"? In such a lively history of bakers, dietary crusaders, and communal reformers, Aaron Bobrow-Strain shows us that what we think about the humble, puffy loaf says a whole lot about who were and what we wish our culture to look like. White Bakery shows us that when Americans question what one should eat, they are also wrestling with much larger questions of competition, course, immigration, and gender. As Bobrow-Strain traces the story of bread, from the first factory loaf to the latest gourmet pain au levain, he shows how work to champion "good food" echo dreams of an improved society - even while they strengthen stark communal hierarchies. In the early 20th hundred years, the factory-baked loaf heralded a dazzling new future, a world from the hot, dusty, "dirty" bakeries run by immigrants. Fortified with supplements, this bread was considered the initial "superfood" and even sold as patriotic - while food reformers painted white bread as a symbol of most that was wrong with America. The annals of America's 100-year-long love-hate marriage with white bread reveals a whole lot about contemporary work to change the way in which we eat. Today, the alternative food movements favors foods deemed honest and environmentally right to eat, and fluffy commercial loaves are about as far from slow, local, and organic as you can get. Still, the values of early twentieth-century food experts and diet experts, that getting people to eat a certain food could regain the country's decaying physical, moral, and communal fabric, will appear surprisingly familiar. Given that wide open disdain for "unhealthy" eaters and discrimination on the basis of eating habits grow increasingly suitable, White Bakery is a timely and important study of what we discuss when we discuss food.
