It Starts With Wonder

I was surprised to see a television commercial, recently, for Wonder Bread, the factory produced bread-like product made of pure white flour (along with multiple nutritional supplements and chemical preservatives) and one of the most recognizable brands in the world.

Wonder Bread has a place in North American culture. It was one of the first mass-produced breads using flour made with roller mills in the late 1800s. Roller mills (as opposed to stone mills) produce the whitest, smoothest flour, also devoid of bran and germ, wheat’s most nutritional and flavourful components. It was also the first bread to be sold sliced, which, to consumers in the 1950s was the greatest thing since … you know what I mean.

These guys make a lot of money!

Today, the Wonder brand is owned by Flowers Foods of Thomasville, Georgia, along with many other recognizable brands, including Sunbeam, Nature’s Own and Dave’s Killer Bread. Flowers boasted $4.8 billion in annual revenue in 2022. The largest U.S. bread conglomerate is United States Bakery, with $20.5 billion in revenue the same year. The global bread industry is worth $497.5 billion.

I hadn’t seen or heard of a loaf of Wonder Bread for years. This new, vigorous advertisement was bizarre! It looks like the set of the “Barbie” movie!

“You can make a lot when it starts with wonder,” the woman beams at the start of the commercial. She’s making a “chicken tikka grilled cheese sandwich.” It looks scrumptious. The camera twirls and spins past bread and colour confetti, keeping time with an upbeat dance track.

You can make a lot when it starts with wonder!

“And Mark made a whole cookbook!” she continues, as a friendly looking man in a diner opens a cookbook called “Sundays.” There’s a cracked-boiled egg in front of him, and the waitress brings sliced white bread sticks that he’ll dip into the egg. 1

An artist paints a Wonder Bread bag with its red, blue and yellow balloons floating over a table.

“But it’s a lot more than just food!”

A bread slice piñata

The rest of the commercial is a small smorgasbord of art and craft objects using the Wonder brand as their subject: a neon Wonder sign, a piñata bread slice made by “Michelle,” and an earring of a miniature wonder bread bag by “Little Day Miniatures.” The parade of Wonder Bread “ingenuity” marches quickly past in this 30-second commercial.

The people in the commercial may be on drugs. I don’t know. They all seem to be having the time of their lives … but about what, I ask you? A doggie blanket with a Wonder Bread design? A Wonder blow-up doll standing in a shipping/receiving bay?

“All of this is made by those who wonder,” the narrator concludes, and we’re urged to visit the Wonder Bread website to check out more. End of commercial.

Is this about bread?

Nowhere in the commercial do we hear the word bread used. And maybe the advertising executives understand, through focus groups, that people won’t consider Wonder Bread as real bread. So, they sell the brand instead and capitalize on the word “Wonder,” as in “child-like wonder.”

Oh, those marketing people!

I shouldn’t behave like such a snob. I liked Wonder Bread as a kid, even though my mother never bought it. But I’m sure other bread in my 1960s childhood wasn’t much different. The generous slices toasted well and tasted faintly sweet and salty. They were great for spreading jam and peanut butter over. French toast was okay, fried in butter or bacon fat and smothered with artificial maple syrup.

Wonder-styled bread has its place, and I wouldn’t turn it down in a greasy diner breakfast. But naturally leavened bread made with a long, slow proof and finished with a dark crust in a hot oven (no conveyor belts) elevates everything made with bread to a higher level. Well, that’s what I think!

A bread-like substance

A year ago, in the Happy Monk newsletter, I posted a link to a video, “How the U.S. Ruined Bread,” by the video journalist Johnny Harris. It’s an entertaining video that encapsulates the long history of breadmaking. And it asks, “Why is bread so much better on the European continent?” Or France in particular.

“On every corner, there is a bakery pumping out delicious, fresh, well-made bread,” he enthuses, holding a beautiful crusty baguette.

“This is not easily available to me, and I want to know why. Why is it the U.S. just sucks at making bread?”

As Harris visits iconic bakeries (including Poilaîne) and Paris street cafés, he carries a bag of Wonder Bread, sometimes tied to the outside of his backpack.

“I believe that bread is a significant symbol for a bigger cultural phenomenon in the U.S.” In France, he suggests, there are 30,000 independent bakeries, compared to 3,000 in the U.S. That’s 50 times more bakeries per capita than in the U.S.

Dough conditioners, preservatives, bleaching agents

France, in other words, prioritizes bread within its culture. Most U.S. breadmaking occurs in factories that use dough conditioners, preservatives, bleaching agents and artificial flavours. Dough whippers, air pumps and heat-controlled rooms speed up the rising of the dough. Overnight fermentation, which produces layers of flavour, takes too much time!

And holding up his crumpled bag of Wonder Bread, Harris says, “I would argue that this is not bread anymore! It is a bread-like substance made from different processes … yet we use the same word for it.”

Bread: prime symbol

Harris’ rant is reminiscent of Henry Miller in his scathing essay, “The Staff of Life,” first published in 1947 in the second volume of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

“Bread: prime symbol,” Miller begins.

“Try and find a good loaf. You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread. Americans don’t care about good bread. They are dying of inanition, but they go on eating bread without substance, bread without flavour, bread without vitamins, bread without life. Why? Because the very core of life is contaminated. If they knew what good bread was, they would not have such wonderful machines on which they lavish all their time, energy and affection. A plate of false teeth means much more to an American than a loaf of good bread.”

From The Intimate Henry Miller, Signet 1959

Even today, people who travel to France taste the simple fare at street cafés and boulangeries return to North America with open eyes. How could we be so misguided? Where is the good bread, that most basic form of subsistence?

Physical and spiritual malaise

The relative scarcity of good bread in North America is symptomatic of spiritual malaise, physical malaise, and poor health, Miller suggests. If food isn’t consumed for its nourishment (for nothing is nourishing about most North American bread) or its enjoyment, there is nothing to be gained at all. The best diet in the world is useless if a person has no appetite, enthusiasm, or sensuality. Miller’s sardonic tone can make you laugh, but the overall effect is grim.

“On the whole, Americans eat without pleasure. They eat because the bell rings three times a day.

“Throw anything down the hatch to stop the gnawing and swallow a dozen vitamins. That way, you’ll make sure you’ve had your proper dose of the vital essentials.

“Should the vitamins fail, see a surgeon. From there to the sanitarium. And from there to the nut-house — or the dung heap. Be sure to get a Hollywood funeral. They’re the loveliest, the duckiest, the most sanitary, the most inspiring. … You can, if you like, have your dear lost one propped up in a natural reclining position, her cheeks rouged, a cigarette to her lips, and a phonograph record talking to you just as she once talked to you in life. The most wonderful fake imaginable.

“Jolly, what? O death, where is thy sting?

From The Intimate Henry Miller, Signet 1959

The most wonderful fake imaginable

Perhaps Miller takes things too far. He’s not for everyone, never has been. His works of fiction, including The Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and The Rosy Crucifixion, broke from literary norms and often blurred the line between fiction and autobiography. His commentary is brutally honest and can easily offend those with a delicate sensibility.

The courts considered Miller’s novels obscene and banned many of them in the U.S. until 1961. 2

But I can only imagine how Miller, who died in 1980, might have responded to the latest Wonder Bread ad: “It starts with wonder!”

Such a hardened old scribe, he wouldn’t be surprised that Wonder Bread still graces the supermarket shelves of North America 43 years later. And he would have laughed long at the “It Starts With Wonder” advertisement, and its cynical use of the word “Wonder” to sell what’s in the white bag on the supermarket shelf.

“Is there no depth to the depravity to which these people cannot sink?” he might say.

And he might still chuckle at the image of the rouged corpse with the cigarette to her lips.

“Nothing new under the sun. Prime symbol!”

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