Bread, Coffee and Beer

“Joe Paff tells me that when he grew up in the late Thirties in a steel town on the edge of Pittsburgh, ‘as long as my father was unemployed and we were dirt poor, we ate very well. My father made his own beer. My mother baked bread and canned her stewed tomatoes, and my brothers brought home rabbit, pheasant and other game. As soon as my brothers and my father got jobs in the booming steel mills, we were now well off. My father had a new car. We ate Wonder Bread, store-canned tomatoes, and my father drank Iron City Beer. Moral: The victory of these debauched foods was the product of American prosperity and TV advertising that made my mother and father think that’s what they ought to eat to emulate the middle class they saw on TV shows. My mother finally denied having actually baked bread.’”

See the column by Alexander Cockburn.