White Bread (35 page)

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

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 Particular 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.

23
.  Louisa May Alcott, “Transcendental Wild Oats,” in
Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands
, eds. Clara Endicott Sears and Louisa May Alcott (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915).

24
.  Sarah Josepha Hale,
The Good Housekeeper
(Boston: Weeks & Jordon, 1839), 17.

25
.  “Vegetarian Festival,”
New York Daily Times
, September 5, 1853, 1; “College Rebellions,”
New York Daily Times
, January 8, 1854, 4.

26
.  “Vegetarian Festival.”

27
.  Albanese,
Nature Religion in America
, 117.

28
.  “Quackery, Deceptics, and Humbug of the Age,”
Wisconsin Herald and
Grant County Advertiser
, September 20, 1845, 1; “Humor,”
Chicago Daily Tribune
, January 20, 1875, 3.

29
.  Quoted in Iacobbo and Iacobbo,
Vegetarian America
, 54.

30
.  Reprinted in William Mathews,
Hours with Men and Books
(Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1877).

31
.  Iacobbo and Iacobbo,
Vegetarian America;
Richard W. Schwarz,
John Harvey Kellogg, M.D.: Pioneering Health Reformer
(Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 2006). On the connection to 1960s counterculture, see Warren James Belasco,
Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

32
.  Tompkins,
Racial Indigestion
.

33
.  Dugan's Baking Company,
Dugan's Fiftieth Anniversary
(Brooklyn, NY: Dugan's Baking Company, 1953).

34
.  Little has been written on McCann's food crusades, although several books address his involvement in debates about evolution and creationism. This section draws primarily on his newspaper columns and books, including Alfred Watterson McCann,
The Science of Keeping Young
(New York: George H. Doran, 1926); Alfred Watterson McCann,
Starving America
(Cleveland: F. M. Barton, 1913); McCann,
The Science of Eating
. Also “Medicine Man McCann,”
Time
, January 14, 1924.

35
.  McCann,
The Science of Eating
, 203.

36
.  McCann,
Starving America
, 64.

37
.  Quoted in Harvey A. Levenstein,
Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 13.

38
.  McCann,
The Science of Eating
.

39
.  My discussion of MacFadden and Physical Culture draws gratefully on these secondary sources: Susan Currell, “Eugenic Decline and Recovery in Self-Improvement Literature of the Thirties,” in
Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s
, eds. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Robert Ernst,
Weakness Is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991); Griffith,
Born Again Bodies;
Carolyn de la Peña,
The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American
(New York: New York University Press, 2003). See also
www.bernarrmacfadden.com
.

40
.  Bernarr MacFadden,
Strength from Eating: How and What to Eat and Drink to Develop the Highest Degree of Health and Strength
(New York: Physical Culture Publishing, 1901), 133.

41
.  Bernarr MacFadden,
Vitality Supreme
(New York: Physical Culture Publishing, 1915), 139.

42
.  Griffith,
Born Again Bodies
.

43
.  Albert Edward Wiggam,
The Fruit of the Family Tree
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924), 4.

44
.  On the eugenics movement in the United States, see Edwin Black,
War against the Weak: America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
(New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003); Elof Axel Carlson,
The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea
(Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001); Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell,
Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).

45
.  Currell and Cogdell,
Popular Eugenics
.

46
.  B. G. Jeffries,
The Science of Eugenics: A Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood
(Naperville, IL: J. L. Nichols, 1920), 6.

47
.  Quoted in Currell, “Eugenic Decline and Recovery in Self-Improvement Literature of the Thirties,” 49.

48
.  Paul Bowman Popenoe,
Modern Marriage: A Handbook
(New York: Macmillan, 1925).

49
.  Charles F. Collin, letter to the editor,
Physical Culture
23 (January 1910): 100.

50
.  Griffith,
Born Again Bodies
, 117. In formulating this idea, MacFadden took euthenics—a popular alternative to eugenics typically associated with the feminine realm of home economics whose proponents believed in the possibility of racial betterment through education and environmental manipulation—and gave it a macho spin.

51
.  Woods Hutchinson, “The Color Line in Foods,”
American Magazine
, March 1913, 86.

52
.  Woods Hutchinson, “Some Diet Delusions,”
McClure's
, April 1906; “Why Not Eat What You Like?”
Los Angeles Times
, May 6, 1906; “Bread Eaters Lead the World” (advertisement),
Bedford (IA) Free Press
, July 6, 1915.

53
.  As one man remembered in an interview with the UCLA Oral History Program, “[During the 1920s,] my mother would give me sandwiches made on rye bread. And the kids would make fun of me … because they would be eating their sandwiches on white bread, on what we called
kvachehdikeh
, soft white bread. But my mother was a Jewish woman; she would go to the Varshehveh Bakery on Brooklyn Avenue and get good Jewish rye bread. And I remember feeling ashamed, somehow, that I was eating rye bread and the other kids weren't.” Interview with Fred Okrand, conducted by Michael S. Balter, February–December 1982, UCLA Oral History Program,
http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/Browse.do?descCvPk=27430
. See also Anzia Yezierska,
Bread Givers, a Novel: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New
(New York: Persea Books, 1975); Anzia Yezierska,
Hungry Hearts
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920).

54
.  Woods Hutchinson, “The Joy of Eating,”
Good Housekeeping
, May 1913, 668–74.

55
.  Ibid.

56
.  Logan Glendening, “Clean Bill of Health Given to White Bread,”
Simpson's Daily Leader-Times
, February 10, 1931, 4.