On the History Behind ‘Whitebread Racism’

It turns out the term “whitebread”, used to insult white American racists/nativists has some actual history, involving actual… white bread?! White Bread and Your Humble Weekend Editor When I grew up in the American midwest in the 1950s - 1960s, white bread was sort of the “default” bread. Anything else was some ethnic variety (“German rye”), or for food nuts who wanted whole wheat. Now at my advanced age, I’ve learned to appreciate the virtues of many kinds of bread: whole wheat, pitas, tortillas, baguettes, and so on. While our usual starch Chez Weekend is Japanese rice, I nonetheless bake white bread from time to time. It’s mostly: Japanese shokupan (a very soft & moist Japanese bread flavored with milk and enhanced moisture uptake using a yudane/tangzhong technique to force water into the flour), or Mark Bittman’s famous recipe from the New York Times for no-knead bread, which yields a boule with a nice rustic crust and a chewy, tasty crumb. The latter was particularly the bread of…