White Bread (10 page)

It seemed improbable, but then that reminded me of another watershed moment in industrial baking that appeared equally inconceivable in its time. Perhaps by delving into the political life of another moment in which industrial abundance, once deemed impossible, felt just within reach, I can gain some purchase on my dream of affordable artisan bread in the United States. And, in the process, we can understand a bit better the hidden costs of seeking technological fixes to food system dilemmas.

On July 6, 1928, what would become the world's first loaves of automatically sliced bread steamed out of the ovens of the Chillicothe Baking Company in northwestern Missouri. The slicing machine's inventor, Otto Rohwedder, unappreciated and down on his luck, had achieved something nearly every member of the industrial baking establishment thought impossible. Retail bakers had used machines to slice loaves at the point of sale for years, but few people in the industry believed that bread could be automatically sliced as it came off the assembly line. Bread was too unruly. What would hold the sliced loaves together? How would slicing affect the chemistry of taste? What would prevent sliced bread from rapidly molding or staling? Many bakers actively opposed factory slicing. Otto Rohwedder's initial design for a five-foot-long “power driven multi-bladed bread slicer” dated back to 1917, but he found no takers for the idea and had almost given up hope. For Rohwedder's friend Frank Bench, owner of the Chillicothe Baking Company, installing the machine was a favor and a last shot in the dark. Bench's bakery was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy—what did he have to lose?
3

The results astounded all observers. Sales of sliced Kleen-Maid Bread soared 2,000 percent within weeks, and a beaming
Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune
reporter described housewives' “thrill of pleasure” upon “first see[ing] a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows … definitely better than anyone could possibly slice by hand.”
4
The news spread rapidly. Sliced bread took off first in Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois, then spread throughout the Midwest by late summer 1928. By fall 1928 mechanical slicing hit the West Coast, and appeared in New York and New Jersey by October. Slicing got easier too, as bakers realized that the wooden pins Rohwedder and Bench had used to hold sliced loaves together were not necessary; the wrapper sufficed. By 1929, an industry report suggested that there was practically no town of more than twenty-five thousand people without a supply of sliced bread. Some bakers dismissed sliced bread as a fad, comparing it to other Roaring Twenties crazes like pole sitting, barnstorming, and jazz dancing. Nevertheless, as bakers wrote in frantic trade magazine articles, anyone who resisted the new technology would be crushed by the competition.
5

The Arnot Baking Company in Jacksonville, Florida, learned this the hard way. For two long years it tried to hold out against the new technology, even as it hemorrhaged customers to bakers offering sliced bread. Arnot reduced prices and increased the richness of its doughs, but still the company's unsliced loaves lost market share. Finally, in 1931, Arnot installed a slicer and reported an immediate 600 percent increase in sales.
6

By 1930, half a dozen companies manufactured commercial bread slicers, and by 1936, 90 percent of the country's commercial bread was sliced.
7
The industry's conservative estimates showed that bakeries offering sliced bread increased sales 100–300 percent. Anecdotal reports spoke of increases of up to 3,000 percent.
8

While awaiting deliveries of mechanical slicers from hopelessly backordered manufacturers, bakers asked themselves a logical question: What's so great about sliced bread? “Why does anyone want sliced bread anyway?” one baker wondered in an essay for a trade magazine. “The housewife is saved one operation in the preparation of a meal. Yet, try as one will, the reasons do not seem valid enough to make demand for the new product.”
9
He had a point. How much extra work is it really to slice your own bread?

Quite a bit, as it turned out. And the reason for this difficulty lay in the very processes of industrialization bread had undergone in the preceding decades. Recall that in the 1920s, instead of baking their own bread or buying it face-to-face from a neighborhood baker, consumers were increasingly purchasing loaves from far-off factories. Instead of seeing, smelling, and touching bread directly, they were picking up loaves sealed in hygienic wrapping. Despite all the emphasis on “knowing
where
your bread came from,” consumers had no good way of judging
when
it had come. They needed a new way of judging freshness, and they found it in squeezable softness. More squeezable loaves appeared fresher, even if they weren't. Marketing surveys revealed that while consumers didn't always like eating soft bread, they always bought the softest-feeling loaf. Softness had become customers' proxy for freshness, and savvy bakery scientists turned their minds to engineering even more squeezable loaves.
10

As a result of the drive toward softer bread, industry observers noted that modern loaves had become almost impossible to slice neatly at home. Without exaggeration and with only a little bit of whimsy, we can speak of a messy collision between the preternaturally soft loaves of machine-age baking and the dull cutlery of turn-of-the-century kitchens. Consumers, marketing experts, and baking industry research all agreed: neat, perfect—toaster and sandwich ready—slices could only be achieved mechanically.
11

Practical considerations, then, played a key role in sliced bread's rapid acceptance. But what about housewives' “thrill of pleasure when … first see[ing] a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows”? A little saved labor couldn't explain a thrill like that. How did this simple invention become America's “best thing”? To understand that, we must return to the ethos of scientific eating, to a different manifestation of the early twentieth-century veneration of industrial food. Sliced bread may have endured because of the convenience it offered, but its immediate exaltation speaks to something more visceral: a powerful emotional resonance between the spectacle of industrial bread and a larger set of aesthetics and aspirations gripping 1920s America.

Consider the precise symmetry of the sliced loaf, each of its pieces “the exact counterpart of its fellows.” Calibrated within a sixteenth of an inch, the loaf's tranches articulate a perfect accordion, a white fanned deck. Note the plane of the slice. Each face reveals an intricate lacework unmarred by aberrant holes. There are no unneeded flourishes, no swags added by the baker. If we could, for a moment, let go of our postmodern attachment to the roughed-up and irregular landscape of artisanal bread, the sight would take our breath away. Industrial bread exudes a modernist aesthetic, and it didn't get that way by accident.

During the 1920s and 1930s, an obsession with machines and progress changed the look of America's material life. Streamlined design channeled a love of industrial efficiency into the nooks and crannies of Victorian frill and Craftsman style. It began with vehicles—smoothing, tapering, and lengthening their lines to help them slip efficiently through air. It was a seductive look, all speed and glamour, and it spread quickly to objects with no need to foil drag. Irons, pencil sharpeners, and kitchen mixers got lean and smooth. The country's first pop-up toaster, the 1928 Toastmaster, looked like an Airstream camper. Even vegetables got remade in the image of rocket ships. As historian Christina Cogdell notes, “Carrots were being transformed [by plant breeders] from ‘short chubby roots' into ‘far' more ‘attractive' ‘long slim beauties.' ”
12

Bakers responded to this trend by smoothing out bread's bulges, squaring off pan bread's flared “balloon tops,” and lengthening loaves into Zephyr trains. Industry experts believed that “stubby, plump loaves of bread, the old fashioned design” would increase bread consumption because their slices were broader and thicker, but they were forced to accept consumers' desire for streamlined loaves. “Skinny bread is here to stay,” a gathering of professional bakers confessed in 1937, and, from Charleston, West Virginia, to Kingsport, Tennessee, bakeries touted the sleek design of their loaves. In advertising images of bread from the 1920s and 1930s, loaves look for all the world like Bauhaus office blocks or Le Corbusier chairs.
13
This was more than just a visual style. It was a political statement about the future. Tellingly, at the peak of the streamline aesthetic in 1938, a food industry expo in Zanesville, Ohio, presented a loaf of sliced bread under the theme of “Utopia.”
14

This combination of food, technology, and the future would not have seemed unusual. At the turn of the century, Americans' appetite for utopian thinking seemed limitless. Hundreds of utopian manifestos and novels filled bookstores, utopian clubs debated the means of achieving progress, and utopian communities sprang up, attempting to turn the dream into practical reality. Of all the writing on utopia, Edward Bellamy's
Looking Backward
captured the country's imagination most. In the 1888 novel, which remained popular for decades, Julian West, a young Brahmin of Gilded Age Boston, falls into a deep sleep and awakens in the year 2000 to find the United States transformed into a socialist utopia. Centralized factory production meets all human needs and resources are publicly owned. People are educated, long-lived, and free to pursue whatever leisure activities they desire. War and crime have disappeared. As West explores this new world, he comes to understand how cruel and inefficient his own era was.
Looking Backward
was a not-so-subtle indictment of robber barons, speculation, and greed, a paean to cooperation and redistribution. It sparked Bellamy Clubs, inspired experiments in collective living, fueled growing interest in cooperatively owned enterprise, and sold more copies than almost any other book of its time.
15

Bellamy's utopian socialism was not without critics, in large part because a competing utopian vision had begun to grip the country's most influential circles: the dream of universal prosperity achieved through cutthroat competition and unregulated markets that would take early twentieth-century elites by storm. The themes of
Looking Backward
did not sit well with proponents of economic “survival of the fittest,” a harsh interpretation of Darwinism popularized by Herbert Spencer and fervently embraced by American industrialists. Still, the novel remained popular because it captured a feeling that everyone from Andrew Carnegie to the most militant Red could agree upon: that rapidly emerging technological progress held out the possibility of a world of social harmony built on abundance and efficiency.

In the late 1920s that utopia seemed just within grasp. Wireless radio, liquid-fueled rockets, long-distance air flights, and talking pictures offered dramatic evidence of a world to come. High-tech foods like streamlined sliced bread promised a future of ease, one in which the very material constraints of biological existence that had limited humans for millennia were overcome by science. This Promethean dream looked different from competing political perspectives: Socialists hated industrial trusts but envisioned a world of shared abundance made possible by industrial food production. Capitalists, on the other hand, relished cheap industrial food as a means of placating increasingly organized and militant workers. Either way, it was the same vision: technology would usher in good society by conquering and taming the fickle nature of food provisioning.

This was another incarnation of the ethos of scientific eating. And, as in the previous chapter, delving into it will help us understand one more piece of Florence Farrell's switch to store-bought bread.

“To begin then with the very foundation of a good table—
Bread:
What ought it to be?” Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe posed this question in their path-breaking compendium of domestic advice,
The American Woman's Home
.
16
The book, which quickly found a place as the essential primer of Victorian domesticity in the United States, promised modern answers to modern problems. Yet, the Beecher sisters' thoughts on bread had a timeless air: “Bread-making can be cultivated … as a fine art,” guided by “the divine principle of beauty,” they argued.
17

Less than fifty years later, however, the Beechers' invocation of art and aesthetics as the basis for “what bread ought to be” had all but vanished from cookbooks and other food writing. Mary D. Warren, one of countless purveyors of domestic advice who followed in the Beechers' footsteps, captured the new spirit of bread. In a 1923
Ladies' Home Journal
article, “Science of Oven Management,” she insisted, “Modern inventions have made an exact science of baking, and there is no reason whatever for failure. … One simply cannot bake by guesswork and expect to secure results, any more than one can ascertain with certainty a sick person's temperature by merely feeling his brow.”
18

Thus, by the 1920s, bread making was widely imagined as a techno-science. References to art, craft, and instinct in the making of bread would remain subordinate to rules and exactitude until the late 1960s. Like family health care, baking was to be a terrain of control and expert measurement rather than art and aesthetics. “Modern baking is scientifically done. Nothing is left to chance,” an elementary school textbook read. “The baker has studied the principles of baking and understands the working of the laws that govern his product. In his bakery there is a laboratory with microscopes, tubes, balances, and other instruments, the materials to be used are tested by experts. … [The modern baker] is guided by scientific laws.”
19