White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2012: It's in, it's out, it's good for you, it's bad for you: over the last hundred years, bread has gone from industrial-strength cure-all to nutritionless fluff, and every place in between. White Bread is Aaron Bobrow-Strain's look at the central place of bread, not just on the American table but also in its discussions about morality, class, race, and the environment. Bobrow-Strain takes readers from the immigrant-run bakeries of the 1900s, which were associated with unsafe bread, to the shining promise of industrially-made loaves that could bolster Americans against communism, to the brown-bread revolution of the '70s and '80s. Along the way, Bobrow-Strain shows that the history of bread was leavened with good intentions and ironclad convictions--many of which succumbed to the ageless hobgoblin of unintended consequences. Entertaining for fans of history, food, and the history of food, White Bread reveals yet another facet to the ever-complicated world of what we eat. --Darryl Campbell