White Bread (6 page)

An Irish American in Robert Ward's Pittsburgh, my great-grandmother Florence Farrell made twelve to sixteen loaves of bread a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for ten kids and assorted neighbors. Her husband, P. T., a small-time Democratic politician and self-taught draftsman, insisted on homemade bread. The store-bought stuff, he proclaimed, was just “sacks of hot air”—and he was not alone in this feeling. Yet, by the 1930s, like nearly everyone in America, the Farrell family no longer ate homemade bread every week. Even in the 1920s, the seeds of that shift were in place; as my great-aunt recalled, “It sounds like we [kids] appreciated [our mother's] homemade bread, but the truth is we loved any bakers' bread, in our contrary way.”

At the start of the twenty-first century, a wave of neo-traditional food writers urged Americans to eschew anything “your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.” If your great-grandmother wouldn't have eaten it, they argued, it wasn't real food. This rule of thumb raised a few complications: I'm pretty sure my great-grandmother wouldn't have recognized Ethiopian
doro wat
or Oaxacan
huitlacochtle
as anything a human would eat, and yet they're two of my favorite foods. Neo-traditionalist's dreams of “real” food have racial and nationalist undertones, it seems. More importantly, they ignore the complexities and ambiguities of early twentieth-century Americans' relation to food: which version of my great-grandmother's bread am I supposed to treasure? The laborious homemade one her husband demanded, or the factory-baked one she eventually came to love? Food writers selling a particular dream of “great-grandmother's kitchen” rarely concern themselves with real people. What I want to know is how and why my great-grandmother's generation came to desire the store-bought staff of life.

“Convenience” is an easy answer, and certainly part of the historical explanation. While American preachers and social reformers (mostly male) had invoked “Mother's bread” as a symbol of all that was good and pure going back to the early 1800s, actual mothers had decried the relentless tedium of daily baking for just as long. Baking was arm-breaking work, complicated by fickle ovens and inconsistent ingredients. It kept women bound close to the home, tethered by the slow schedule of rising dough. As George Ward liked to brag, just one of his company's mixing machines “saved 1,600 women from tedium every fifteen minutes.” Or, as a Polish immigrant put it more bluntly, bakery bread was a “godsend to the women. It saved their strength and time for work in the mill.”
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Store-bought bread
was
a godsend, particularly in households without servants, and as economic pressures and new opportunities moved more women into the labor force. But convenience offers only a partial explanation for the popularity of store-bought bread. Florence Farrell never took a job outside the home, and her children recalled that she loved the sense of community created on baking days. Thanks to Florence's unpaid labor, homemade bread would also have been less expensive than even the most efficiently produced industrial bread until well into the 1930s. For the Farrells to have switched their allegiances, modern bread must have had some other appeal. None of my relatives remember exactly what that was, so we'll have to move from family lore to the terrain of history. To understand the attractions of modern bread more fully, we need to view it in a broader social context.

 

For bakers in the 1910s and 1920s, ever more efficient production of ever-greater quantities of bread was a decidedly ambiguous kind of progress. While consumers might buy newer, better automobiles as their prices fell thanks to industrial efficiency, they were unlikely to increase their consumption of bread, no matter how cheap and plentiful it got. Even worse, falling bread prices (or rising incomes) freed money in household budgets with which consumers could introduce more variety into their meals, displacing bread from its dominant place in the American diet. “Bread must compete with other foods for its place at the table,” one industry observer wrote, capturing a widespread anxiety, but it had few advantages in that fight: lacking the movie star looks of newfangled fruits arriving by refrigerated train from California, the novelty of modern wonders like Jell-O, or the exotic appeal of tropical sweets steaming in from Central America, bread was just basic. “Declining consumption” was every baker's nightmare, and it was assumed to be inevitable.
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Instead, something remarkable happened during the first decades of the twentieth century: per capita bread consumption
increased
.
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Modern factory bread wasn't just a more convenient version of the ancient staple—it was something new. Its ingredients may have remained more or less unchanged, its basic shape may have been preserved, its familiar taste maintained (in a watered-down form), but modern bread was somehow completely transformed. It had taken on shiny new meanings, found a new place on the American table and in the country's lunch pails.

Bakers worked hard for that increase, advertising relentlessly, doing everything possible to distinguish more or less identical loaves from one another through branding. They joined forces to promote bread consumption, collectively touting its healthful properties, sponsoring sandwich recipe contests, and even partnering with wheat growers and electric appliance makers to give toasters away at cost. But none of that would have saved bread if bakers hadn't capitalized on a new ethos of scientific eating spreading through the country. Scientific eating had several different facets, which we'll revisit in later chapters. For now, I'll argue that the appeal of modern bread lay in the way it resonated with a growing cultural embrace of science and industrial expertise as a buttress against rapidly escalating fears of impurity and contagion.

When Florence Farrell came of age at the turn of the century, the ability to make good bread was the mark of a good bride—her highest art. It was, in Victorian domestic ideology, “the very foundation of a good table” and “the sovereign” of the true housewife's kitchen, as Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe declared at the start of one of the century's best-selling books,
The American Woman's Home
.
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In the early twentieth century, however, ideas about family and motherhood began to change, and this would make possible—even imperative—the shift from homemade to store-bought bread. Industrial bakers like the Wards had mastered baking technology and designed its cutthroat business model, but the ultimate source of their product's success lay in a new way of seeing the home.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century a “culture of professionalism” had begun to grip the country's emerging middle classes. Powerful visions of expertise and efficiency were colonizing every corner of daily life, from how babies were born (with doctors, not midwives, in attendance) to fashion (hemlines raised for sanitary reasons) and interior design (smooth, easily cleanable surfaces, not Victorian fringe and ruffle). This fervent new belief in science, social engineering, and industrial efficiency aimed to sweep away old forms of knowledge and authority perceived as grounded in craft, intuition, and tradition. Training in fields ranging from medicine to teaching was standardized and professionalized, and new disciplines—sanitation, hygienics, and public health—were created to extend scientific rationality into new realms.
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By the 1900s, a whole class of professional experts, armed with official certificates, fancy titles, and evangelical fervor, had secured a place for itself in the country's rigid social hierarchies. Emboldened by success and unwavering in its confident belief in the superiority of scientific expertise, this class set its sights on the country's hearth. In the eyes of nearly every branch of this new army of professional experts, mothers stood on the frontlines of the battle for national hygiene and efficiency. They conducted the care, feeding, and education of the population, and they governed the most intimate spaces of everyday life. Organized under the banner of “home economics,” experts in household management and scientific motherhood believed that most of the nation's problems could be cured with careful attention to the workings of family life. “When the principles of hygiene are fully understood by women,” Emma Sickels proclaimed to a large audience at Chicago's Art Institute in 1891, “there will be comparatively little disease.”
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Scientific housekeeping, domestic hygiene, research-based meal planning, and efficient child rearing were supposed to liberate women from drudgery, but home economics aspired to even greater goals: by eliminating contagion, moral weakness, and inefficient energy use that sapped the stamina of the population, scientific household management would improve the very fabric of society from the hearth up.

For the mostly middle-class women who pioneered the field of home economics, the professionalization of domestic labor meant liberation and recognition. According to one of the movement's founders, Ellen Richards, women's work should properly be conceived as a professional occupation no different from doctor or engineer.
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This professionalization of housework was, in theory, a way to place
all
women's work on par with that of men. In practice, however, it was primarily a way for women social reformers to gain respect for
their
work. If household management was a science, every housewife was a scientist of sorts, but home economists were the real experts.

Home economists' authority required the existence of a population deemed in need of education and reformation. Luckily, thanks to tremendous influxes of “unclean” southern and eastern European immigrants as well as the growing visibility of other minority groups, the nation appeared replete with mothers mired in tradition and ignorance. Thus, for the bulk of the nation's mothers, the ascendance of home economics meant less that their work would receive recognition as a vital contribution to the nation and more that their perceived backwardness and resistance to expert advice would be seen as threats to the nation.

The new disciplines of domestic expertise buttressed their authority by propagating an emergency mentality—painting vivid pictures of looming dangers and imminent disasters that would befall the nation if their advice weren't heeded. Household cleanliness, or rather the lack thereof, topped social reformers' lists of impending threats. By the turn of the twentieth century, the hypothesis that invisible microscopic organisms caused many illnesses had gained widespread scientific acceptance and was, thanks to the efforts of Progressive reformers, beginning to take hold in popular culture. In the 1900s, diverse groups, ranging from the Boy Scouts to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, worked to preach this “gospel of germs” to the masses.
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School curricula impressed the “laws of scientific hygiene” on young minds, and public signage warned of the dangers of kissing and spitting. Public health had been entirely reconceived. It was no longer the solitary concern of government officials, but rather the duty of all. In this era obsessed with the dangers of contagion, “the slightest deviation from perfect cleanliness was a cause for social anxiety since the invisible passage of germs could put the health of the family, companions, and even the entire nation at risk.”
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The country's diet proved just as frightening as its cleaning habits, if not more so. Poor diet was a quiet killer and a silent drain on the country's stamina. By sapping the nation's vitality, inefficient diet appeared to be the root cause of nearly all of the nation's moral, physical, social, and mental problems. As health columnist W. R. C. Latson wrote in 1902, “The question of what to eat is one of the most important practical considerations of life. To know what to eat, how much and how often would go far toward solving some of life's gravest problems—poverty, weakness, disease, crime, and ultimately death.”
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It's not hard to understand the fervor with which early twentieth-century social reformers approached the question “What to eat?” Cholera, botulism, typhoid, and other food-borne diseases killed in large numbers across class and race lines. And while historians disagree whether America's food supply actually grew more dangerous as it industrialized after the Civil War, one thing is clear: starting in the 1870s, Americans strongly
believed
that their food system was getting less safe. This sentiment opened the doors to what food historian Harvey Levenstein called “the Golden Age of Food Fads,” as individual consumers sought safety in charismatic visions of better eating. It also underpinned collective mobilization, bringing together women's groups, consumer advocates, temperance unions, and other reformers for one of the most organized and sustained attempts to change the food system that history has known—the campaign for pure food, waged from the 1880s to the 1910s.
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Then, as now, the question of what to eat was always more than a culinary matter. As historian James Harvey Young noted, “The crusade for food and drug control shared with overall Progressivism a deep worry about ‘purity': business, government at all levels, social conduct, even the bloodlines of the nation's populace seemed threatened with pollution and required cleaning up.”
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In the face of looming danger, social reformers' visions of food purity cross-pollinated easily with nativist politics and ideologies of racial purity. Indeed, as Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern argue in their history of germ scares, it often became difficult to distinguish between descriptions of food-borne contagion and the terrifying prospects of racial contamination.
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Food-borne diseases were widely associated with eastern and southern Europeans, Mexicans, and other “dirty” groups. Those groups' hunger was just as commonly, and perhaps more rightly, associated with political instability. Jacob Riis's widely read 1890 exposé,
How the Other Half Lives
, gave most comfortable Americans their first glimpse of this looming danger. The book took readers on a tour of New York's tenement slums filled with the babble of foreign tongues, ragged children, tubercular parents, and “queer [dietary] staples found nowhere [else] on American ground.” It offered a vision of a world where the masses clawed and fought for sustenance, where “the cry for bread” filled the air. America need not care about its poor for altruistic reasons, Riis argued. It was a question of self-preservation: “In my mind there is a closer connection between the wages of the tenement and the vices and improvidence of those who dwell in them,” he warned. “Weak tea with a dry crust [of bread] is not a diet to nurse moral strength.” In the book's much-discussed final pages, Riis graphically drove this point home with an account of a ragged father driven to violence against wealthy Fifth Avenue shoppers by his children's desperate need for a crust of bread.
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