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 Breadis 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 Breadreveals yet another facet to the ever-complicated world of what we eat.--Darryl Campbell