Authors: William Alexander
Sext takes place at midday when the sun is at its apex and one has become a bit weary and mindfulness is all but impossible.
A dog fed on fine white bread flour and water does not live beyond the 50th day. A dog fed on the coarse bread of the military lives and keeps his health.
—François Magendie, writing in the
Lancet,
1826
Weight: 205 pounds
Bread bookshelf weight: 33 pounds
Anne looked uncommonly grim as she appeared for breakfast in the kitchen, where I was munching on a slice of
pain de campagne
toast.
“How many weeks are left ?” She didn’t have to specify how many weeks of
what.
“I don’t know. A lot. Why?
“I’m getting fat.”
“You’re blaming the bread? I don’t think so. Look at me.”
“Have you weighed yourself lately?”
“Ninety-three kilograms.”
“Two hundred and five pounds? You’re getting fat.”
I’d forgotten that as a doctor (and a former resident of Canada), she knew the metric system.
It was true that we’d been eating a lot of bread lately, having toast for breakfast and slathering butter over peasant bread at dinner, and when I wasn’t making my own, I was coming home with armfuls of bakery bread to compare with mine. The Atkins diet this wasn’t. Yet my bread felt so . . . healthy. Made from my
own hand, eaten fresh, with a little whole wheat and rye, and now wild yeast—it looked and tasted wholesome.
Still, it was essentially white bread, that little bit of added whole wheat and rye notwithstanding. Let’s be honest, I was on a
white-bread diet.
I couldn’t even bring myself to say it out loud, these code words for bland, nonnutritious, boring. It’s easy to confuse white bread with Wonder bread and view it as a twentieth-century corporate evil. However, while whipping chemicals and air into bread and wrapping it, presliced, in cellophane may be a recent innovation, as long as there has been flour, millers have been sift ing out the coarse bran to make white flour, which has long been a symbol of purity and refinement. In fact, the English word
flour
comes from the French
fleur de farine,
literally, the “flower of the flour,” or the best of the flour, meaning the refined flour left after the bran is sift ed off. In ancient Rome and Greece, white bread was prized, though even the “bread and circuses” Romans knew that whole wheat bread was healthier. Which is why their wrestlers were forbidden to eat white bread while training for their circuses.
Yet the fact remains that bread made from sift ed flour has sustained a good portion of mankind for thousands of years. So what happened? When did a food that was basically healthy come to stand for blandness and nutritional emptiness? And was that reputation justified?
Certainly it was in 1937, nearly a decade after Dr. Joseph Goldberger’s death, when the vitamin that could prevent pellagra, Goldberger’s elusive PP factor, was finally isolated by an agricultural scientist at the University of Wisconsin. Oddly enough, this compound was extracted from a plant that was almost as common in the South as cotton, a crop that also grew up to the front steps of the shacks, with a leaf that on a windy day gave the air the heady smell of an old pipe: tobacco.
The cure for pellagra was right under their noses. Although
chewing or smoking tobacco did not supply the essential vitamin, the nicotine in tobacco leaves could easily be oxidized to make what was named nicotinic acid, the preventative and cure for pellagra. Recognized as an essential nutrient, nicotinic acid was added to the vitamin B family of water-soluble vitamins—that is, vitamins that are not stored in body fat and so must be consumed regularly—as vitamin B
3
.
Finally, a pellagra preventative was available as an inexpensive vitamin that could be synthesized in the laboratory. Thiamine, another vitamin in which Americans were deficient, had just been synthesized the previous year. But how to get these critical vitamins and others into the American diet? Well, what was the one food that everyone ate? Spurred by concern about public health and the readiness of the nation’s boys to go to war, action was taken, not by the government, but by millers and bakers who voluntarily started adding vitamin supplements to their flour and bread in 1938. Two years later, an American Medical Association panel recommended restoring riboflavin, thiamine, iron, and nicotinic acid to white flour to the levels in which they are naturally present in whole wheat flour. In the case of nicotinic acid, this would turn out to be sufficient to prevent pellagra. The word the AMA came up with for restoring nutrients lost in processing (After rejecting
restorative
) was
enriched.
*
By 1942, without a single piece of federal legislation having been passed, millers and bakers had embraced the enrichment movement so thoroughly that over 75 percent of all flour and bread products sold in the United States were enriched. A year later, the War Food Administration required that all flour and
bread sold to the government be enriched for the duration of the war, and that took care of the remaining 25 percent. Pellagra was all but wiped out. You won’t see the words
nicotinic acid
on the side of your bag of flour, however. Bakers, uneasy with a name that evoked tobacco, successfully lobbied for a new term, which we still use today:
niacin.
Following the war, the federal government, seeing the success of the program, naturally ended it, and enrichment was returned to voluntary status. The millers and bakers wisely ignored the government, and it became a de facto requirement: American flour would forever after be enriched. Even today the Food and Drug Administration only specifies what constitutes “enriched” flour (adding folic acid in 1996); it does not mandate its use.
The enrichment of flour, and eventually cornmeal as well, was so successful that few contemporary Americans have even heard of pellagra. Of course, no Americans had heard of it in 1900, either. I still wondered why pellagra suddenly appeared in the United States in the early twentieth century.
I brought the librarian at the research institute where I work a loaf of bread and a long list of interlibrary loan requests, and a few days later I learned that the conventional explanation involves corn. This didn’t take a lot of research, to be honest, as one oft -cited book on the subject is titled
A Plague of Corn.
Corn is high in niacin, but most of it is bound and cannot be metabolized in humans. Unless, that is, you first treat it by soaking the corn overnight in a limewater bath, which happens to be the first step in making tortillas. For centuries, Native Americans had been soaking their corn overnight in water to which either mineral lime (calcium carbonate) or wood ash had been added in order to soft en the dried kernels and make it easier to remove their thick, tough hull (think of popcorn).
Was it just the Native Americans’ good fortune that this chemical
soft ening treatment happened to release the niacin in maize, or did they also learn over the generations that families who ate treated maize were healthier? My reading suggests that the answer depends on how you view the Native Americans. What is certain is that their knowledge of the need for liming the corn was lost to the conquerors who defeated them. Corn was still soaked (or “tempered”) before grinding, whether stone-ground or crushed by industrial roller mills, but the lime was omitted; thus much of the niacin remained unavailable. This became a moot point around 1905 because a new invention, the Beall degerminator, was selling like hotcakes. Millers loved it because it greatly increased the shelf life of cornmeal and corn flour by stripping the fatty germ and outer bran from the kernel. Unfortunately, as with wheat, those were also the very parts of the seed where most of the vitamins and minerals were concentrated.
Corn was now nutritionally bankrupt, and this “plague of corn” is the conventional reason given for the rise of pellagra in the United States. As I read Goldberger’s original papers, however, something bothered me, something that is virtually un-mentioned in the literature. Goldberger kept meticulous notes, down to the weight (in grams, bless his heart!) of all the food his subjects were eating, and I noticed his pellagrins were eating a lot of bread, largely in the form of biscuits made with self-rising white flour (which is leavened with baking powder), denying themselves even the niacin present in yeast.
At the time that pellagra started appearing in the United States, corn consumption was on the decline and wheat flour consumption was on the rise, the completion of the railroads having resulted in the flow of inexpensive wheat from the Midwest. In 1931, during the peak of the pellagra epidemic, a survey of South Carolina farm families affected with pellagra found that corn was providing only 16 to 20 percent of their caloric intake.
I wondered, had corn gotten a bum rap? The scientific literature on pellagra nearly unanimously cited corn, ignoring wheat flour, but it seemed to me it might well have been bread, my beloved bread, that was primarily responsible for pellagra in the United States. Scientists, historians, and the government credited enriched wheat flour and bread with
preventing
new outbreaks of pellagra, but they did not connect changes in those same foods with the
cause.
Which brought me right back to my original question: What had happened to white bread? When did this sustenance food become unhealthy, and why? I pondered this as I made another piece of toast.
The Gillette safety razor became an object for heightening sexual pleasure when it received the “united thanks of two fond hearts” by allowing the honeymooner to shave off a 3-day beard. Underarm deodorant, toothpaste, mouth wash, Wonder Bread . . . and a host of other products were advertised as . . . ensuring the attentions of a new lover.
*
—Joel Spring,
Educating the Consumer-Citizen,
2003
Here’s why I’m still a working man: Back in 1952, if Floyd Paxton of Yakima, Washington, had offered me an opportunity
to invest in his new invention, little plastic clips to close bread bags, I’d have said—well, I’d have to have said, “I can’t. I won’t be born for another year yet.” But even if I’d been fifty at the time, I’d have said, “No thanks, Floyd. You can only charge a fraction of a cent for them. Do you know how many of those you’d have to sell to make any money?”
A hundred billion Kwik Lok tabs later, Floyd presumably knows, while I’m clipping coupons. The Kwik Lok Corporation sells over five billion bread tabs annually. Most of these wind up in landfills, but a handful end up in human intestines, which isn’t a bad percentage, all things considered. Unless you happen to be one of the unlucky ones. As foreign objects go, this is one you really don’t want to swallow. Kwik Lok tabs have been found to cause, in the words of one medical journal, “small bowel perforation, obstruction, dysphagia, gastrointestinal bleeding and colonic impaction.” It seems that the same tenacious qualities that make these clips so effective at staying attached to plastic bags make them equally effective at staying attached to your small intestine.
Still, there are worse things to swallow in a loaf of bread—for example, a double-edged razor blade. Like the one on the end of my
lame
right now. Yes, I finally had a real, professional
lame.
Well, almost. Charlie van Over had sent me home with one, which I’d promptly misplaced before I could use it. So I’d made my own from something I’d inexplicably found in my desk at work—an unapologetically nerdy little metal ruler, a quarter-inch wide, with engraved rule markings and a clip for your chest pocket.
Figuring I’d have less need to whip a ruler out of my shirt pocket for an impromptu measurement than I’d have for scoring dough, I removed the clip and ground one end of the ruler to make it narrow enough to fit into the slots of a double-edged razor blade. Surprisingly, I found double-edged razor blades near
the checkout counter at Kmart. This bothered me for days. Finally I asked Anne for a consult.
“What are they doing at the checkout counter? For that matter, why are they even still manufactured? I can’t believe anyone shaves with these anymore.”
She patiently listened to my diatribe about how the double-edged safety razor was good in its heyday, especially compared to its early predecessor—the jawbone of an ox—but the decades since have seen the introduction of the twin-bladed Trac II, the triple-bladed Mach3, the four-bladed Quattro, and, most improbable and redundant of all, the five-bladed Fusion, which we can only hope represents the end of this artificially extended evolutionary line. Choose your favorite weapon and number of blades, but any of these razors shave closer and nick less than the so-called safety razor invented in the late eighteenth century.
“How do they sell any?” I concluded. “Name me one person who even uses a double-edged razor.”
“My dad.”
By the way, if you’ll pardon one more digression—this one is worth it, trust me—I have it from an extremely reliable source who works in market research that when a razor company introduces a new razor, which they do every few years whether there is a consumer need for one or not, they intentionally dull the replacement blades of their existing razors to make the new one feel superior. So, caveat emptor. (That’s Latin for “the bastards!”)
In any event, I had no sooner thrown away my ten-dollar mail-order
lame,
with its nonreplaceable blade embedded in a stick of green plastic, and loaded up my homemade French-style
lame
with a fresh double-edged razor blade when I came across the following piece of information, staggering in its magnitude: My “authentic” French
lame
had recently been outlawed in France.
Boulangers
giving up their metal
lames
? Unthinkable! As was the
replacement: the fixed blade on a plastic stick I’d just thrown away. Indeed, “fixed” was just what
le docteur
ordered; the reason for this blasphemous law was that while Americans were merely digesting Kwik Lok tabs, the French were swallowing double-edged razor blades that had fallen off bakers’
lames
and ended up in loaves of bread!