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

By Aaron Bobrow-Strain

Categories: Cookbooks, Food & Wine, History

Aaron Bobrow-Strain tells the history of industrial white bread in the United States. He shows how store-bought sliced bread rose from a symbol of modern progress, purity and abundance in the early twentieth century to a symbol of everything wrong with the American diet. Bobrow-Strain argues that debates about what to eat have always been tied to larger questions of race, class, immigration and social status.

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• Shane Parrish: “White Bread teaches us that when Americans debate what one should eat, they are also wrestling with larger questions of race, class, immigration, and gender.”