White Bread (8 page)

By the end of the 1900s, progressive concern with bakery conditions had spread throughout the entire nation. In Montgomery, Alabama, for example, progressive women's groups drew up a white list of acceptable establishments and launched a boycott of offending bakeries that caused an immediate 25 percent drop in sales.
42
By 1913, every major city was home to several sanitary bakeries, and small towns were close behind. In 1915, the
Ogden Standard
in Utah proudly declared that the town's thirty thousand people enjoyed access to no fewer than six sanitary bakeries producing “loaves of bread that our ancestors of only a generation ago would think beyond the power of a baker.”
43

At first, changes in bakery facilities themselves—the introduction of shining surfaces, crisp white uniforms, medical inspectors, and mechanical mixers—seemed like enough to assuage most anxieties about bread. But doubts lingered, and old fears resurfaced. Consumers and their expert health advisors knew that germs and bacteria were invisible, but not much else. They believed that bread could be dangerous, but didn't know
how
. Thus, fear remained fairly amorphous and questions abounded. Did baking really kill all germs? Editors at the influential
Chautauquan
didn't think so: “Dough kneaded with the hands always runs the risk of contagion,” they wrote in a special section on preventing disease. “The germs of cholera, typhoid, and scarlet fever, for example, might be carried in this way easier than in most others.”
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And what about bread mold? One Chicago civic group railed against “disease germs arising from moldy bread,” while Ellen Richards warned housewives to stand ever vigilant against molds and bacterial growth that infected bread with “sticky masses” and blood-colored clots.
45

Yeasts were microscopic. Were they also germs? Fascinated by the new world of microbiology, the authors of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on baking science frequently adopted the language of disease.
The Complete Bread, Cake, and Cracker Baker
, for example, casually noted that leavening contained “numerous organisms of disease,” which produced “numerous sources of disease action.”
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And raw food guru Eugene Christian, known for his incendiary tract “Why Some Foods Explode in Your Stomach,” offered this memorable image of bread's living biology: “Bread rises when infected with the yeast germ, because millions of these little worms have been born and have died, and from their dead and decaying bodies there rises a gas just as it does from the dead body of a hog or any other animal.”
47

Seen in that light, fermentation did seem a little scary, and this made easy fodder for food faddists. C. H. Routh, an influential British doctor, argued that yeast-leavened loaves created “a fit nidus [nest]” for the growth of bacteria. And he was but one voice making this connection. During the late nineteenth century, fear of fermentation led to a small craze for chemically leavened “aerated bread” on both sides of the Atlantic. New York City health commissioner Cyrus Edson went as far as to declare, “Bread which is wholesome should not be raised with yeast, but with a pure baking powder.”
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Faced with associations between bread and the scary world of microbes, ordinary people tried to make sense of a paradox: how could bread baking, something people had done for millennia without apparent ill effects, be so horribly, horribly dangerous?
Undercooked
bread offered an easy way to reconcile this contradiction. Failure to cook bread properly must be what unleashed nature's living bestiary into innocent stomachs. As
Mother's Magazine
warned, children's “bread must be thoroughly cooked, for if the yeast spores escape the heat, as soon as they come into contact with the sugar in the stomach they grow and produce fermentation.”
49

With little actual evidence that poorly baked bread made people sick, the generalized cloud of anxiety around bread production gradually converged into one (slightly) more reasonable fear: by 1913, the country's food experts and health campaigners fixed their attention on the handling of bread
after
it left the bakery. Consumers could view bakery cleanliness with their own eyes and, at least in theory, pure food laws guaranteed the integrity of ingredients—but nothing protected the loaf itself. “While most bakeshops are now sanitary,” a speaker observed at a national convention of state health officials, “the conditions under which [bread] is handled after it leaves the place is subject to serious criticism … [even the purest bread] may be swarming with the germs of filth.”
50
Readers of
Good Housekeeping
, the country's leading Pure Foods advocate, voted unprotected bread one of their top five food safety concerns, and the
Journal of the American Medical Association
concurred. In a 1913 statement reprinted by newspapers around the country, America's leading medical journal warned that even bread baked in sanitary bakeries risked contamination by deadly microbes during delivery.
51

The solution to this problem was obvious: bread must be wrapped. As the public cry for wrapped bread spread across the country between 1912 and 1914, however, bakers balked. Wrapping bread was complicated and labor intensive. Materials and machines were not yet adequate for the job, and it would probably damage flavor, they argued. It would certainly raise costs. Even some bakers who had eagerly adopted the mantle of “sanitation” blamed demands for wrapping on “zealous inspectors,” “pure foods magazines,” and fickle consumers lured by the novelty of “sealed package food preparations.” Nevertheless, backed again by women's and consumers' organizations, state and local governments across the country pushed aside objections from the national baking industry lobby to pass laws requiring bread wrapping, and by 1920, store-bought bread was almost universally wrapped.
52

Not surprisingly, these new regulations favored larger, more automated bakeries that could afford wrapping machines. Those companies, in turn, fanned the flames of consumer fear. Perfection Bakeries, for example, ran a national ad campaign warning in bold type, “State health authorities condemn unwrapped bread. … They know that dust, heavily laden with the germs of tuberculosis and other diseases is easily blown onto unwrapped bread. … When you eat bread that leaves the bakery unwrapped you are eating disease and dirt.”
53
Once again, the language of cleanliness had become a club with which big bakers bludgeoned smaller competitors.

In the end, the language of “clean” bread made big bakers appear the heroes, when they could so easily have played the villains. Thus, even while plotting to control the nation's bread, William Ward could also, in good conscience, bask in the glow of commendations from mayors and public officials all over the country calling the Ward Bakeries champions of “civic hygiene” and the “public weal.”
54

Small bakers simply could not compete against the massed economic and cultural power of the trusts. Thus, even as the country's consumption of bakery bread soared in the first decades of the twentieth century, the number of bakeries fell dramatically.
55
Ironically, the language of “knowing where your food comes from” had facilitated the
distancing
of consumers from their bread production, as underground but local bakeries and home baking gave way to centralized palaces of industrial efficiency. Married to brute economic power, the language of health and purity swept away small bakeshops and skilled jobs like so much flour dust. Lung-stricken journeymen in New York's cellar bakeries had long held out against misery in the hopes of one day opening their own shops. Now they—and their former bosses—could only hope for a place on the unskilled assembly line of a bread factory. There they would enjoy better working conditions, perhaps, but no hope of starting their own bakery.

Even that stalwart icon of all that was good—“Mother”—came in for harsh criticism under the banner of hygienic diet.
Scientific American
, women's magazines, and home economics textbooks portrayed careless home baking as a threat to family health, while other observers wondered whether even the most careful housewife could produce safe bread. “The modern bakers' oven has a germ-killing power that is far beyond that of a household oven,” the
Atlanta Constitution
warned, and a New Castle, Pennsylvania, reporter confirmed that baking factories' “great white ovens … properly kill the yeast germs.” “You and your little oven cannot compete. … It is scientifically proven that home baking is a mistake from every standpoint.”
56

Ellen Richards compared home-baked loaves with “laboratory bread” and found the former lacking. For Richards, tradition and lack of control meant that home-baked bread was not just inferior but also potentially dangerous. “The custom of some housewives of wrapping the hot loaf in thick cloth that the steam may soften the crust is entirely wrong from a bacteriological standpoint,” she argued, and extra care was needed for coarse breads, which contained particularly resistant bacteria. She urged housewives to follow strict sanitary procedures and educate themselves by conducting yeast gas experiments in test tubes and Petri dishes. To drive home the weight of her warning she stressed,
“Every case of typhoid fever is due to somebody's criminal carelessness.”
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Faced with these risks, why experiment or chance the criminal carelessness of homemade bread when the scientific bakery was near?

Backed by the urgent language of food purity and public health, dramatic changes in the way the country got its bread seemed reasonable, even necessary. The destruction of craft baking, the replacement of skilled labor with machines, and the concentration of baking into ever larger and more distant factories were not solely the product of insatiable greed or capitalist competition. They arose out of often well-meaning and earnest concern for food safety.

In 2010, the only trace of the Ward Baking Company's sparkling palace of automatic baking was a faint white gleam shining off the concrete rubble in a chain-linked vacant lot. In an age of resurgent artisan baking, Ward's Brooklyn bread factory was demolished to make way for high-end real estate development. Looking around Prospect Heights, though, with its retro-chic bars, vintage stores, and yoga studios, it was clear that it wasn't just the bakery building that was gone. In an age marked by nostalgia for old ways and artisanal authenticity—when consumers living in expensive condos associate purity with small scale and the touch of human hands, not the reverse—the very utopian dreams of scientific eating embodied in the Ward Bakery seemed preposterous.

It's easy, from our vantage, to discount the wondrous appeal of industrial purity and hygiene, but this attitude does disservice to a time when food-borne illnesses were the leading causes of death, when disruptions in the provision of a single staple could unleash fears of famine and rebellion. We should think twice before dismissing consumers who flocked to sanitary factory bread as mere dupes of corporate propaganda. Nostalgia for Great-grandma's bread and neighborhood bakeries omits a few details.

Yet, for all that it made food safer or brought more air and light to bakery workers, the great wave of efficiency and hygiene sweeping through the United States during the early twentieth century did not address the root causes of food insecurity. Thanks to the combined efforts of social reformers and food scientists, the country's loaves would no longer carry typhus (if they ever really had), but they would still be the stuff of poverty. Food reformers' confidence in the gospel of hygienic eating fueled great victories, but also helped buttress social discrimination.

Thanks to widely circulating discourses of scientific expertise and efficiency, bread consumption choices became a way in which people positioned themselves and were positioned within social hierarchies. Of course, bread choices have
always
been about positioning oneself and being positioned within social hierarchies. Combined with the language of purity and contagion, however, it acquired powerful new stakes: early twentieth-century bread choices were not just about class and distinction in general, but rather about a specific form of social difference constructed around the very lines of life and death, health and disease.
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In the 2000s, as in the 1900s, Americans had many opportunities to contemplate food safety. And yet, compared to the 1900s, Americans had very little to fear. Thanks to modern medicines and, yes, government regulation, food-borne illness was no longer one of the nation's top killers. Even some food safety advocates conceded that widely cited estimates of the prevalence of food-borne illness might be exaggerated. Still, fears continued, sometimes escalating into panic.
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These fears were not without basis. In a world of cutthroat competition and broken oversight, food processors take short cuts. They accelerate production lines to breakneck speeds, and accidents happen. They cut costs by recycling unsafe waste products as animal feed, sourcing fresh produce from distant corners of the planet, and cramming livestock into unsanitary feedlots. Avoidable illnesses sicken and kill real people. But resurgent anxiety about food safety also reflects other, more social dynamics. History suggests that anxiety about food contamination generally intensifies during periods of perceived upheaval: in moments of expanding globalization, rapid demographic changes, immigrant influxes, and swiftly evolving technology. The early twentieth century was one of those moments of upheaval, as was the early twenty-first.

That levels of anxiety about food can be correlated with concerns about immigration or urbanization does not make them less real. It does, however, challenge us to think about the social life of food fears in more nuanced ways. What unintended legacies will early twenty-first-century food safety anxiety produce? Will it yield consumer action and government legislation that address root causes of food-borne illness? Will it give rise to new, alternative networks of trust and accountability? What social disparities will it alleviate or amplify?