White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf
- Dec 28, 2018
- 1 min read
★★★☆☆
Lest you think white bread is nothing more than, well, white bread, this social and political examination of the fluffy stuff will come as quite a surprise. White bread is society, its hopes and dreams, its aspirations and ideals—and, yes, its fears and bigotries—writ small (and sliced). What we’ve thought about the seemingly-innocuous store-bought loaf over the past 140 years says a lot about who we are and what we want our society, and, to a large extent, the world to look like.
A lot of ground is covered in just a couple hundred pages. Bobrow-Strain is a professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and though he does his best throughout White Bread to balance his natural inclination to write for academia with a desire to appeal to the masses, the book’s style would have benefited from a bit more of its subject’s airiness. To his credit, Bobrow-Strain did manage to make one of our most forgettable foods, if not as fascinating as I’d hoped, at least very interesting. I can easily imagine a multi-part documentary bringing this subject to life in a way the book couldn’t quite manage, but despite its shortcomings I am both glad and better off for having read it.
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