Comments on: White bread, racial purity, and the longue duree

By: website

website — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 03:15:58 +0000

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 03:40:11 +0000

If I might add a very belated bibliographical offering– but from the proverbial “freshest advices”–here on the failed “mixed bread” campaign in Britain in 1795, in which sturdy rural laborers rejected efforts by the Pitt government and the “better sorts” to persuade (coerce, really) them to abandon refined “wheaten” breads for courser dark ones: J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, _The Village Labourer, 1760-1832: A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill_, esp. chap. VI, “The Remedies of 1795: Diet Reform.”

By: Historiann

Historiann — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 16:57:21 +0000

Thanks, Old Whig--I had forgotten about his earlier work. I posted a few years' back about a trip to Battle Creek, "the San," Graham, Kellogg, and the Whites. I think the SDA folks do a nice job with their public history sites.

By: Old Whig

Old Whig — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 07:36:16 +0000

woops — should read: “but also” rather than “by” in the fourth line.

By: Old Whig

Old Whig — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 07:35:35 +0000

Stephen Nissenbaum’s book _Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform_ has a lot about white bread. Nissenbaum looks particularly at Graham’s fear that bread made in commercial, esp. urban, bakeries was not only physically adulterated, by lacked spiritually nourishing qualities that came from bread baked in family hearths. Nissenbaum connects this to anxieties about the market revolution and the transition to an increasingly urban and industrial society. Haven’t read it since my exams, but liked it pretty well.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:52:15 +0000

As promised upthread, a few additional contributions to Historiann’s fascinating bibliography on early modern food and culture (as well as the cites in the thread itself)–in this case on Britain during the wars of the French Revolution: Samantha Webb, ” ‘Not so pleasant to the taste’: Coleridge in Bristol during the mixed bread campaign of 1795,” _Romanticism_, 12.1 (2006), 5-14; Roger Wells, _Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1793-1801_, chap. 12, “Dietary Expedients and Vested Interests: Recommendation Versus Compulsion, June 1795 to July 1800,” (Gloucester, 1988),pp. 203-218); and (not read, but cited in Webb and directly related to bread composition as “associat[ed] with Englishness”), Sandra Sherman, _Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism_ (Columbus, OH, 2001), chap. 2.

Less relevant, but bringing William Blake into the picture: “Blake, the Famine of 1795, and the Economics of Vision,” _European Romantic Review_, 18 (2007), 597-622. There’s a vast liturature on food rioting in Britain associated with these events, which Wells probably summarizes as well as anyone, and a vaster one on concurrent events in France, perhaps best summarized by Judith A. Miller, “Politics and Urban Provisioning Crises: Bakers, Police, and Parlements in France, 1750-1793,” _Journal of Modern History_, 64 (1992), 227-262.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 23:38:36 +0000

Thanks, everyone–more great cross-cultural intel about the cultural value of different grains & starches!

I think there’s lots more to be said about the American SW/el Norte too, but I’d have to start reading Espanol in order to dig it out myself. I don’t recall the early French colonists having as much of a hangup about food, but then the records we have are overwhelmingly from Church and official sources rather than letters or comments from the hoi polloi. Those French men who sought Native wives were pretty happy to have their meals farmed and furnished for them, and French religious (women and men) enjoyed eating what they found objectively disgusting (Indian prepared food, in particular) because it was a further mortification not to take pleasure in one’s food.

By: J. Otto Pohl

J. Otto Pohl — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:12:07 +0000

Cheap bread here in Ghana is usually white and too close to Wonderbread for my tastes. As a result I don’t eat a lot of it. Rather I eat a lot more rice, cassava, and plantains. Most current staples here such as cassava, plantains, maize, and peppers came from the Americas via the Portuguese. But, food is definitely associated with ethnicity here. Fufu is Akan, kenkey is Ga, and banku is Ewe. You are evidently not supposed to mix them and some people will not eat foods not associated with their ethnic groups. I got some strange looks once at a buffet combining okra stew with fufu rather than banku with okra stew. I told them I was creating a pan-African dish in honor of Nkrumah.

By: Contingent Cassandra

Contingent Cassandra — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 20:53:47 +0000

I’m pretty sure there were bread distinctions in 19th-century America as well. There are some very detailed descriptions in abolitionist literature of how slaves make ash-pones, and occasionally other corn concoctions (mostly gruel or a similar grain/water mix). I’m not sure what the master class was eating. I suspect both wheat and corn breads, but the corn bread was probably more likely to be a variety that required eggs and/or milk and/or fat of some kind and/or leavening (the point of the abolitionist descriptions is usually to emphasize the poverty of the provisions supplied by the master: corn, water, possibly a small amount of salt and/or sweetening (but quite possibly not, unless the slave had something to trade), a bit of pork or fish). I’m also not sure what northern readers of abolitionist works would have been eating, but the descriptions of ash-pone making definitely give the sense that this process is something exotic, unlikely to be familiar to readers.

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:47:29 +0000

For comparison in colonial Mexico and forward to the present:
Jeffery M. Pilcher, Que Vivan Los Tamales: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity. Albuquerque: UNM Press, 1998.