The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [99]
Graham claimed that the store-bought white flour everyone used was from exhausted soil, “artificially stimulated” with animal manure. It may seem odd to worry over such a natural version of artificial stimulation, but weakened food is a very old concern. Ancient Romans were already worried about the health consequences of farming depleted soil. Even the world that made the shift from hunting-gathering to farming, ten thousand years ago, must have been impressed by this special thing being asked of farmland, and must have worried if lesser fruits would thus be grown there. In a natural orchard, much fruit falls and disappears, as do the droppings of every animal that ambles through. Now consider our strange behavior: picking all the fruit, cleaning the place up, shooing the animals, asking the land to do the whole thing again next year, and in the end taking our bodies out of the food chain. If all we do is eat, and in death we rot in parks where no fruit grows, can our farm soil be rich enough to feed us? What if the fruit is plump, but falsely so?
Clearly we did not have to wait for twenty-first-century farm practices to start worrying. It is a valid question, and also a powerful metaphor: eating and eating, and not getting fed. Graham’s disciples from around the country created the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity and wrote articles to fill it. They set up “Graham boarding houses” in Boston and New York where young people could eat the diet, exercise, and talk about not having sex—a subject almost as compelling as talking about having sex, and nearly identical. Graham meanwhile became reclusive, suddenly started eating meat and drinking alcohol, and died at fifty-seven. You would think that this would have discredited the movement, but it didn’t. His ideas about grain and internal cleanliness have never gone away.
The identification of happiness with Mom’s home-baked bread may seem like a natural idea to us, but that is only because we are used to it. Mothers used to cook everything, and surely many of them were indifferent bakers. As the century went on, packaged and canned foods replaced much that mothers used to make at home, from scratch. One of the last holdouts on the American dining table was bread. By the second half of the century, moms started to get that premade, too. The idea of Mom’s bread as a vision of happiness was at its most anxious and insistent when it started to disappear as a reality. Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book of 1883 held that “[n]othing in the whole range of domestic life more affects the health and happiness of the family than the quality of its daily bread.”2 What an extraordinary and bizarre claim. After all, once packaged sliced bread came in, in 1928, it took over fast, and many have asserted that there has been nothing greater since. Today, most homes do not think of the health and happiness of the family as dependant on how good the bread is. Mrs. Lincoln, however, seemed not to doubt it in the least. By the arrival of the twentieth century, the idea was so well established that it was ready to be mocked. The following is from the curmudgeonly lawyer Clarence Darrow’s autobiographical novel Farmington of 1904:
[Today] even the street signs…advertise “pies like mother used to make.”…I cannot say that I looked upon my mother even as a cook exactly in the light of the street-car advertisements…. I am quite certain that it is only after long years of absence, when we look back upon our childhood homes, the bread and pies are mixed with a tender sentiment that makes us imagine they were better than in fact they really were.3
For an antisentimentalist, there could be no better