White Bread Sociology

The study of one food item illuminates the reproduction of social inequality. One food item, such as white bread, has been used to created distinctions within one’s identity, social location, gender, race, and class. White bread introduces the ideas of gender, race, and class by distinguishing good, bad, proper, and non proper eating habits. Such distinctions relate to food preparation such as bento boxes in Japan and eating and food stigmas such as eating disorder within the male gender.

Gender serves as one distinction of the social consequences of white bread. White bread is considered a food that one consumes, however the way in which one consumes it and how much they consume it at a young age directly relates to a mother’s choice of what

Thus, the food that the mother provides must be of the utmost clean and healthy status. When white bread was first introduced it was necessary to have it in your household because, “To eat white bread was to participate in the process of building a better nation,” (white bread 64). Therefore, mothers felt the social pressure to have it in their households to show that they care about their children, their nation, and their children’s wellbeing. However, once the discovery that white bread was less hygienic than bread that was homemade or from a bakery the need for unprocessed bread within the household grew. “As Mother’s Magazine warned, children’s “bread must be thoroughly cooked, for if the yeast spores escape the heat, as soon as they come into contact with the stomach they grow and produce fermentation” (43). The ideology surrounding eating hygienic food grew and the responsibility for a mother to provide such high caliber bread for her child/children rose as well. Similarly to white bread, a bento box is also seen as a distinction of a good and caring mother. Spending hours on making, cooking, and constructing a bento box is a social responsibility of a Japanese mother. The number of hours a mother spends

The color of the bread itself is a distinction of race. It is believed that, “white is a moral color,” therefore it was believed to be moral to consume white bread (white bread 64). In addition, “White bread had long stood as a symbol of wealth and status - and in America, racial purity,” once again constructing societal pressures within races (white bread 64). If you were not white you were not believed to be as racially pure as those who were white. For this reason, white bread, “didn’t appear to be a matter merely of taste or culinary preference,” but as a racial distinction (white bread 64). The color white was a way to force, “immigrants to adopt higher standards of cleanliness” (white bread 65). If it was white than it was clean. A racial stigma is present within this idea because the idea that anything but white is not clean. Therefore, the color of an immigrants skin that is not white is perceived as dirty. White bread is clean and therefore preferred, if you didn’t eat bread that was white you were considered dirty among society, which introduces the idea of classes within society, the last