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I am just theologian enough to know that "Give us this day our daily bread" carries metaphorical meaning. But it has a literal sense too, of course, and one that would have made sense to every citizen of a wheat-eating culture until very recently, when the idea of daily baking all but disappeared. This book gives an account of the painful 20th-century demise of perhaps the world's greatest baking tradition, that of the French, and then its sweet and unlikely second rising toward the century's end. Along the way, Steven Laurence Kaplan raises powerfully important questions about the proper scale for an economy—about how big is too big, and how small is impractical—that go well beyond both France and bread. Indeed, Kaplan's book spurs thought about what a postmodern economy might look like, and whether it might be possible for it to deliver satisfaction instead of simply piles of stuff.
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The book doesn't raise these questions explicitly. Alas, it is either badly written or badly translated (or both). The writing is often a parody of academic cluelessness ("Encoded both as a material object and a symbolic object, bread constituted a complex multiple register on which social, biological, and spiritual destinies operated simultaneously"). More fundamentally, the book never manages to provide a straightforward chronology of the story Kaplan is trying to tell, and hence manages to provide both endless repetition and frustrating gaps. But since, as I say, the material is potentially of great interest, I will try to reassemble the tale as best I can.
In the beginning, bread was enormously important to the French. At the time of the Revolution, the average Frenchman may have eaten three pounds a day of the stuff. If it ran short, or the quality was bad, riots resulted; the very language reflected its ubiquity (think too of the English "bread-winner"). And of course there were all the associations linked with the Eucharist. "This is my body," Christ said, and in Kaplan's words "the model of the Eucharist undoubtedly reinforces the conviction that bread alone can perpetuate life in its deepest sense: that food only acquires providential force and status when it takes the form of bread."
Even today, says Kaplan, the French "have trouble imagining a real meal without bread." But they can apparently imagine a meal with a lot less of it—the average consumption is a sixth what it was in those older times. Much of the reason is that the French got richer, and as that happened "cereals were supplanted by foods long considered the prerogative of the well-to-do classes: fresh vegetables, fruit, cheese, fish, and especially meat." (Indeed, the French equivalent of "bread-winner" became "gagne-bifteck," or steak-earner, in the wake of World War II.) And this was a liberation in more than nutritional terms: as Kaplan documents extensively, the life of the urban baker up through the start of the 20th century was hard: hours of manual kneading in cramped cellars, the sweat from the forearms flavoring the dough.
As machinery replaced that monotony, however, another reason for the decline of bread appeared: it started tasting of less and less. Ever-bigger industrial bakers learned all sorts of tricks—chemical leavening agents, for instance, or the direct injection of yeast to replace sourdough. From an essentially living food, bread was becoming an industrial project, its makers obsessed with stressing the hygiene of their product even as consumers worried about its healthiness. It's a story that could be told about a wide variety of products in the Western world, their production rationalized at the expense of everything that made them special. In America and England, for instance, the best parallel is probably with beer: from thousands of breweries at the turn of the century, the few hundred that survived Prohibition were soon consolidated into a few dozen, who in place of dozens of styles of ale and lager brewed the same thin and fizzy golden swill.
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