White Bread

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

  53. “State Authorities Condemn Unwrapped Bread” (advertisement).

  54. These messages are collected in Bernays Papers, MSS 12534, “Ward Baking,” box 1:401.

  55. Calculated from Department of the Census, United States Department of Commerce, Biennial Census of Manufacturing (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1927 and 1935). See also Panschar, Baking in America.

  56. “Modern Bread-Baking: The Loaf Untouched by Human Hands in the Process of Making,” Scientific American, March 11, 1916, 282–83; “The Butter-Krust Bread Girl Keeps Being a Powerful Magnet,” New Castle (PA) News, October 6, 1914, 11; “Bakeries Here Are Now Models of Cleanliness.”

  57. Richards, The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning, 45.

  58. On food consumption and social hierarchy, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

  59. For an accessible overview of key issues raised here, see Grist’s forum on food safety reform: http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010–11–05-food-safety-modernization-act.

  60. Schlosser, Fast Food Nation.

  61. Elysa Batista, “Modern-Day Slavery Was Focus of Group’s Tour of Immokalee,” Naples News website, March 17, 2009, http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2009/mar/04/modern-day-slavery-was-focus-groups-tour-im-mokalee/.

  62. “If you’re not worried, you should be.” Douglass argues, “Think about where these illegals work, like chicken factories, fast-food restaurants, and other places where they handle your food.” William Campbell Douglass, “8 Ways Illegal Immigrants Are Making You Sick,” The Douglass Report, February 14, 2008, http://douglassreport.com. See also William Campbell Douglass, “Put Down That Drumstick,” The Douglass Report, n.d., http://douglassreport.com; Lourdes Gouveia and Arunas Juska, “Taming Nature, Taming Workers: Constructing the Separation between Meat Consumption and Meat Production in the U.S.,” Sociologia Ruralis 42, no. 4 (2000): 370–90.

  CHAPTER 2. THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD

  1. Julia Moskin, “Taking the Artisan out of Artisanal,” New York Times, March 10, 2004, F1.

  2. Rachel Dowd, “Dough Pros Rise Up,” Daily Variety, March 10, 2006, V1. For more on La Brea’s development, see the company’s webpage and Moskin, “Taking the Artisan out of Artisanal”; L. Joshua Sosland, “Prodigious Success,” Milling and Baking News, March 2007.

  3. My account of the “invention of sliced bread” draws from “Sliced Bread Is Made Here: Chillicothe Baking Co. the First Bakers in the World to Sell This Product to the Public,” Chillicothe (MO) Constitution-Tribune, July 6, 1928, 1; “Frank Bench Put First Sliced Bread on Market in Chillicothe,” Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, January 13, 1939, 1; “Sliced Bread on the Market Today,” Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, March 9, 1943, 1; Catherine Storz-Ripley, “A Slice of History,” Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, August 21, 2003, 1–2; J. M. Albright, “How the Bakers and Equipment Manufacturers Cooperated to Build Better Bread Baking Machinery,” Baking Industry, April 12, 1952; editorial, Baker’s Helper, September 28, 1928, 57.

  4. “Sliced Bread Is Made Here.”

  5. Peter Pirrie, “What the Engineers Say about Sliced Bread,” Bakers’ Weekly, October 5, 1929, 70; Bernard Kilgore, “Sliced,” Today, September 5, 1936, 15; H. A. Haring, “The Baker Slices His Bread and Cuts a Melon,” Canadian Baker & Confectioner, September 1930, 23–24; Gordon Darnell, “Darnell Talks on Sliced Bread,” Western Baker, November 1929, 9–10; “Comments on Sliced Bread,” National Grocers Bulletin, September 19, 1929, 62; editorial.

  6. W. H. Colson, “Building by Slicing,” Bakers’ Weekly, August 8, 1931, 43–44.

  7. Kilgore, “Sliced.”

  8. Haring, “The Baker Slices His Bread and Cuts a Melon”; Darnell, “Darnell Talks on Sliced Bread”; Colson, “Building by Slicing”; “Comments on Sliced Bread.”

  9. Haring, “The Baker Slices His Bread and Cuts a Melon,” 23.

  10. Darnell, “Darnell Talks on Sliced Bread”; “Bread Softness vs. Flavor,” Baker’s Digest, April 17, 1953; “Consumers Prefer Home Baked Taste in Bread, Institute Study Shows,” Food Field Reporter, January 19, 1948.

  11. Victor Marx, “A New Development in Sliced Bread,” Baker’s Helper, September 1929, 60–61.

  12. Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 108.

  13. “Skinny Bread Here to Stay,” Hagerstown (MD) Daily Mail, April 22, 1937, 11; “It’s Smart Because It’s Streamlined” (advertisement), Dunkirk (NY) Evening Observer, August 11, 1937, 14; “Look for the Streamline Wrapped Bread Products” (advertisement), Charleston Gazette, September 5, 1937, 2. Thanks go to John F. Varty for suggesting this connection between industrial bread and modern design. John F. Varty, “On Wonder: Why Mass-Produced Bread Looks a Little Like Bauhaus Furniture” (paper presented at the Society for the History of Technology, Minneapolis, November 3–6, 2005).

  14. “1939 Gasco Food Institute Opens Three Day Affair,” Zanesville (OH) Signal, October 19, 1938, 6.

  15. In the 1890s, only the Bible sold more copies than Looking Backward. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Jean Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America, 1886–1899: The Politics of Form (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988).

  16. Beecher and Stowe, The American Woman’s Home, 131.

  17. Ibid., 134.

  18. Mary D. Warren, “Science of Oven Management,” Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1923, 150–51.

  19. Bengston and Griffith, The Wheat Industry, 184.

  20. L. A. Rumsey, “Progress of Education in Making Bread,” Baking Technology, April 12, 1952, 126. Also see the American Institute of Baking’s account of its history: www.aibonline.org/about/history/.

  21. National Association of Master Bakers, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Convention of the National Association of Master Bakers; National Association of Master Bakers, Proceedings of the Nineteenth Convention of the National Association of Master Bakers (Salt Lake City: National Association of Master Bakers, 1916).

  22. National Association of Master Bakers, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Convention of the National Association of Master Bakers, 22.

  23. H. W. Zinmaster, “The 10 Cent Loaf” (paper presented at the the Nineteenth Convention of the National Association of Master Bakers, Salt Lake City, August 7–11, 1916), 58.

  24. “As Mother Used to Make It,” New York Times, July 24, 1904, SM9.

  25. “How Illinois Farm Homemakers Have Made Adjustments to Present Conditions,” Journal of Home Economics 24, no. 3 (1932): 240–43; May Van Asdale and May Monroe, “Some Other Experiments on the Comparative Cost of Homemade and Baker’s Bread,” Journal of Home Economics 8, no. 7 (1916): 380–83; David Samuel Snedden, Vocational Home-making Education: Illustrative Projects (New York: Teachers College of Columbia University Press, 1921); Frances Stern and Gertrude T. Spitz, Food for the Worker (Boston: Whitcomb & Barrows, 1917); Panschar, Baking in America.

  26. “The Butter-Krust Bread Girl Keeps Being a Powerful Magnet.”

  27. Mrs. Alice Norton, “Bread Is Still the Test,” Des Moines News, February 1, 1915, 5.

  28. Marx, “A New Development in Sliced Bread”; Charles Oliver, “Building a Loaf to Slice,” Northwestern Miller and American Baker, June 25, 1930.

  29. For an example discussing white milk, see DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food.

  30. Woods Hutchinson, “The Conduct of the Physical Life,” American Magazine, February 1913, 94–99. On the social history of white and whitewash, see Forty, Objects of Desire; Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

  31. Alfred Watterson McCann, The Science of Eating: How to Insure Stamina, Endurance, Vigor, Strength and Health in Infancy, Youth and Age (New York: Truth, 1921), 398.

  32. “Peroxide Also Bleaches Cereals,” Scientific American, Augu
st 1929, 183.

  33. Harvey Wiley, “Fooling with Flour: The Nation’s Bread Is in Danger,” Good Housekeeping, January 1914, 118–19; Harvey Wiley, “The End of the Bleached Flour Case,” Good Housekeeping, June 1914, 832; Harvey Wiley, “Our Wheaten and Breakfast Foods,” Good Housekeeping, March 1913, 393–94; Wiley Papers, MSS 416, “Bleached Flour,” boxes 115, 129, 132, 199.

  34. “USDA Notice of Judgment No. 2549, Supplement to Notice of Judgment No. 722, Alleged Adulteration and Misbranding of Bleached Flour,” October 18, 1913, in Wiley Papers, MSS 416, “Bleached Flour Case,” box 199.

  35. Ibid.; United States of America v. Lexington Mill & Elevator Company, 232 U.S. 399 (1914).

  36. Lexington Mill & Elevator Company.

  37. Ibid. On the ruling’s legacy, see Kirsten S. Beaudoin, “Comment: On Tonight’s Menu: Toasted Cornbread with Firelfy Genes? Adapting Food Labelling Law to Consumer Protection Needs in the Biotech Century,” Marquette Law Review (Fall 1999): 237–78; Peter Burton Hutt, “The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act: Regulation at a Crossroads: Article: FDA Statutory Authority to Regulate the Safety of Dietary Supplements,” American Journal of Law and Medicine (June 22, 2005): 155–74; James T. O’Reilly, “Losing Deference in the FDA’s Second Century: Judicial Review, Politics, and a Diminished Legacy of Expertise,” Cornell Law Review (July 2008): 939–79.

  38. Harvey W. Wiley to Mr. V. L. Clark, March 31, 1922, in Wiley Papers, MSS 416, “Bleached Flour Case,” box 199.

  39. Ibid.; Harvey W. Wiley to Hon. John H. Smithwick, March 2, 1921, in Wiley Papers, MSS 416, “Bleached Flour Case,” box 199; Wiley, “Fooling with Flour”; Wiley, “The End of the Bleached Flour Case,” 832.

  40. Harvey W. Wiley to Hon. John H. Smithwick, March 2, 1921.

  41. “Enzyme Bleaching Flour,” Scientific American, May 1930, 408.

  42. Harvey W. Wiley to Hon. John H. Smithwick, March 2, 1921.

  43. William J. Orchard, “The John C. Baker Do-Maker Process,” Baking Industry, April 23, 1953, 42.

  44. “Continuous Mixed Bread Launched in Southeastern New England,” Bakers’ Weekly, April 11, 1955, 32; Orchard, “The John C. Baker Do-Maker Process”; “Baldridge’s Introduces Do-Maker to Texas,” Southwestern Baker, October 1959, 25; Thomas Spooner, “Continuous Mixing,” Modern Miller and Baker News, October 31, 1959, 32; Hugh Parker, “Up-to-the-Minute Report on the John C. Baker Continuous Do-Maker,” n.d., Ruth Emerson Library, American Institute of Baking, Manhattan, Kansas; K. L. Fortmann, “Technology of Continuous Dough Processing,” Cereal Science Today, December 1959, 290–92.

  45. USDA Economic Research Service, Adoption of the Continuous Mix Process in Bread Baking (Ers-329) (Washington, DC: USDA, January 1967).

  46. “Continuous Mixed Bread Launched in Southeastern New England”; Parker, “Up-to-the-Minute Report on the John C. Baker Continuous Do-Maker.”

  47. These bakers, for example, worried that the industry’s emphasis on bread’s appearance and obsession with speed would eventually backfire: M. A. Gray, “Launching a Counter Offensive against Declining Consumption,” Northwestern Miller and American Baker, February 5, 1936, 1; William Owen, “Flavor—The Lacking Element in Modern Bread,” New South Baker, April 1938, 15–30.

  48. James E. McWilliams, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly (New York: Little, Brown, 2009). See also Robert Paarlberg, Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  49. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

  50. For example, “Members Urge That Citizens Patronize Home Industries and Services,” New Castle News, March 14, 1929, 14; “Factory Made Bread vs. Home Bakery Bread: The Bread Factories Reap Where They Sow Not” (advertisement), Spirit Lake (IA) Beacon, June 18, 1931, 1.

  51. “White Bread: Criminals Are Made by the Food They Eat as Children,” New York Evening Graphic Magazine, June 1, 1929.

  CHAPTER 3. THE STAFF OF DEATH

  1. Sarah W. Staber, “Christian Vande Velde’s Secret?” VeloNews, May 11, 2009, 1–2; Vanessa Gregory, “How a Gluten-Free Diet Powers On the Best Cycling Teams in the World—and How It Can Help You Perform Better and Recover Faster,” Men’s Journal, March 2010, 1–2.

  2. Gregory, “How a Gluten-Free Diet Powers On the Best Cycling Teams in the World.”

  3. Packaged Facts, The Gluten-Free Food and Beverage Market: Trends and Developments Worldwide (Rockville, MD: Packaged Facts, 2009); Caroline Scott-Thomas, “Gluten-Free Trend Could Fall Like ‘a House of Cards,’ ” FoodNavigator-USA.com, 2010, http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Financial-Industry/Gluten-free-trend-could-fall-like-a-house-of-cards.

  4. Information on celiac disease is drawn from R. J. Presutti, J. R. Cangemi, H. D. Cassidy, and D. A. Hill, “Celiac Disease,” American Family Physician 76, no. 12 (2007): 1795–1802. See also “The Squishy Science of Food Allergies,” New York Times, May 16, 2010; Gina Kolata, “Doubt Is Cast on Many Reports of Food Allergies,” New York Times, May 11, 2010. My thinking on this topic has been shaped by the work of several authors writing about the cultural politics of health: Marc Chrysanthou, “Transparency and Selfhood: Utopia and the Informed Body,” Social Science and Medicine 54, no. 3 (2002): 469–79; Mark Jackson, Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady (London: Reaktion, 2006); Ann Kerr, Brian Woods, Sarah Nettleton, and Roger Burrows, “Testing for Food Intolerance: New Markets in the Age of Biocapital,” BioSocieties 4 (2009): 3–24; Sarah Nettleton, Brian Woods, Roger Burrows, and Ann Kerr, “Food Allergy and Food Intolerance: Towards a Sociological Agenda,” Health (London) 13, no. 6 (2009): 647–64.

  5. See, for example, Chrysanthou, “Transparency and Selfhood”; E. Melanie DuPuis and Julie Guthman, “Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy, Culture, and the Politics of Fat,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 3 (2006): 427–48.

  6. The phrase “think outside the celiac box” comes from Allison St. Sure, “Think Outside the Celiac Box,” Sure Foods Living, April 14, 2009, http://surefoodsliving.com/2009/04/think-outside-the-celiac-box/. Another author refers to the “celiac iceberg,” arguing that celiac disease is just the most visible form of a much more widespread problem: Sayer Ji, “The Dark Side of Wheat: New Perspectives on Celiac Disease and Wheat Intolerance,” July 7, 2009, GreenMedInfo, http://www.greenmedinfo.com/page/dark-side-wheat-new-perspectives-celiac-disease-wheat-intolerance-sayer-ji.

  7. Kerr et al., “Testing for Food Intolerance.”

  8. See Jackson, Allergy; Nettleton et al., “Food Allergy and Food Intolerance.”

  9. The Weston A. Price Foundation (http://westonaprice.org) is a key source for this kind of analysis.

  10. Some natural foods proponents contend that people with celiac or gluten intolerance are better able to tolerate bread made with slow sourdough fermentation. One 2004 study is often cited in support of this theory: M. De Angelis, R. Di Cagno, S. Auricchio, L. Greco, C. Clarke, M. De Vincenzi, C. Giovannini, M. D’Archivio, F. Landolfo, G. Parrilli, F. Minervini, E. Arendt, and M. Gobbetti, “Sourdough Bread Made from Wheat and Nontoxic Flours and Started with Selected Lactobacilli Is Tolerated in Celiac Sprue Patients,” Applied and Environmental Microbiology 70, no. 2 (2004): 1088–96.

  11. In the same way, gluten-free proponents also drew energy from very real concerns about the U.S. health care system. It made sense to preemptively defend your body by going gluten free, they argued, because mainstream medicine was too conservative and narrow minded to perceive the silent damages of a modern diet. Under pressure from insurance companies to speed through patients, even doctors who cared couldn’t take the time for the long, slow diagnosis process needed to identify low-grade chronic food intolerances.

  12. I’m indebted to Melanie DuPuis for suggesting the phrase “Not in my body.”

  13. Thomas Tryon, The Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness; or, A Discourse of Temperance and the Particul
ar Nature of All Things Requisit for the Life of Man (London: A. Sowle, 1683); Plato, The Republic.

  14. C. B. Morrison, “Some Anti-fat Breads,” Baking Technology, October 1924, 304–6.

  15. The “graham cracker” was invented by Graham’s followers. Its unleavened form draws inspiration from Graham’s collaborator William Alcott, who opposed the use of yeast. In my discussion of Graham and his time, I draw gratefully on the following secondary sources: Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Ruth C. Engs, Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000); R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo, Vegetarian America: A History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004); Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980); Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming); James C. Whorton, Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000); James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  16. Albanese, Nature Religion in America.

  17. Quoted in Whorton, Nature Cures, 87.

  18. Sylvester Graham, Lecture to Young Men on Chastity (Boston: George W. Light, 1838), 194.

  19. The following paragraphs draw on Rosenberg, The Cholera Years.

  20. Albanese, Nature Religion in America, 126.

  21. Sylvester Graham, Treatise on Bread and Bread Making (Boston: Light & Stearns, 1837), 40.

  22. Ibid., 34.