White Bread (11 page)

Baking's traditional apprenticeship model gave way to formal study. The Wahl-Heinus Institute of Fermentology, the Wahl Efficiency Institute, the Chidlow Institute, and the Siebel Institute of Technology championed the scientific study of bread chemistry, biology, and engineering. Founded in 1919 and chaired by George Ward, the American Institute of Baking emerged as a center for research and education.
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Meanwhile, plenary sessions at meetings of the National Association of Master Bakers informed bakers of the latest scientific thinking on wheat chemistry, rational cost accounting, the effects of salts on fermentation biology, accurate measurement, efficient movement, the physiology of taste, bacteriology, and “bakeshop entomology,” among other topics.
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Industrial bakers did not conjure up the public's infatuation with scientific progress out of nothing to serve their own interests. Nevertheless, the ethos of scientific eating definitely helped bakers. And they certainly nurtured it. During the first decades of the twentieth century, displays of scientific expertise would provide a key weapon in professional bakers' all-out war against home bread making.

With small-scale bakeries effectively dispatched by machinery and oligopoly power, the fate of industrial baking turned on large-scale bakers' ability to outcompete women making bread at home. “For every master baker there are a thousand housewives, and every housewife is either a competitor or a customer,” George Haffner, president of the National Association of Master Bakers, warned at the group's 1915 annual meeting. Winning over housewives, he argued presciently, would require a full-scale mobilization, and science would be bakers' primary ally in this battle for bread.
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Convincing the country to fear small bakeries and their immigrant workers was one thing. Casting doubt on the safety of Mother's bread was a bit harder. Home bakers had tremendous sanitary advantage over distant factories. You didn't have to take a tour to see how your bread was baked, or guess at the health and habits of your baker. People had baked bread at home for millennia without disaster. As a result, industrial bakers and their allies in home economics could get only so far depicting homemade bread as a biohazard. Bakers would have to outcompete housewives on other fronts. They would have to make scientific bread appealing in its own right.

In this sense, bakers' mastery of science was a cultural performance, a theater of charisma, authority, and power. Carefully scripted displays of precision, control, and efficiency served two functions: they validated bakers' confidence in their own greatness, their special role in the march toward social progress. And they projected this self-image into a world of women deemed in need of education. “The average housewife today who bakes bread is living in the dark,” a speaker at the 1916 convention of the National Association of Master Bakers proclaimed. “She is ignorant of what the up-to-date method of baking consists; she has to be educated, the same as a child is educated to eat from a plate—the only difference being that our task is far harder than teaching a child, whose mind is receptive to instruction and learning.”
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A 1904
New York Times
story echoed this sentiment, quoting “the manager of a big bread factory” triumphantly and at length: “I am tired of hearing about that wonderful bread that mother used to make. Mother was a rank fraud as a bread maker. … Don't you remember how often her bread went wrong? … Mother sometimes blamed that on the weather, or maybe on fairies … but it was neither the weather nor the fairies. It was because mother didn't know how to mix dough properly, or because there was something wrong with her ingredients, and she didn't know enough to remedy it.”
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Bakers' smug paternalism might have infuriated the ranks of middle-class women championing food reforms and social improvement—except that they were just as ensorcelled as bakers. They had staked
their
authority on scientific expertise and its world-changing potential. This sparked considerable debate among home economists. Many believed strongly that housewives could efficiently make bread at home, and dedicated themselves to teaching women the science of baking. In general, however, the country's largely female purveyors of domestic advice and household education mostly embraced bakers' efforts to win over women.

According to leading home economists, Mother could still compete with even the largest bread factories on price, as long as one considered her labor “free.” She couldn't hope to compete on quality or consistency, however—not against the massed forces of assembly-line production, temperature-controlled fermentation, chemical dough conditioners, standardized ingredients, and professional ovens. By 1920, William Panschar contends in his history of American baking, the superiority of industrial production was widely accepted. “As engineers rather than craftsmen, bakers were able to produce consistently a high quality, uniform loaf of bread. The degree of control exacted over formulas, ingredients, and production processes were now far beyond the skills of a housewife to match.”
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Home economists' support for professional baking, in turn, reflected an important change in the beliefs about women's role in the family. As a Pennsylvania journalist explained in 1914, “The modern woman has out-grown the idea that a mother can best serve her children by slaving for them over the hot stove. Self-improvement is the mother's first duty.” Indeed, the reporter continued, time and effort squandered on pointless home baking was “responsible for most domestic misery.” Women should concern themselves with things they could do relatively well—looking beautiful, raising healthy children, and efficiently administering a modern household.
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In this new vision of domesticity, a good housewife was a professional manager making smart choices to maximize her family's health and prospects. As the chair of the University of Chicago's home economics department predicted: in the past, women were judged by their ability to
make
good bread, in the future they would be judged by their skill at
buying
it. “For after all, real efficiency in housekeeping is coming to be measured rather by good administration than by simply the power to do.”
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Responsible mothers delegated their family's staple food to more appropriate experts—professional bakers—and focused their time on policing the quality of competing bread brands. Housewives should be expert consumers, not bread makers. Nevertheless, at a moment when commercial baking was taking place farther and farther from homes as a result of industrial consolidation, a serious question remained: by what signs should expert housewives judge store-bought bread?

By the 1930s, America's loaves were slender beauties: long, white-wrapped packages. On the inside, however, slicing put bread's structure on display as never before. Crumb irregularities and unevenness that were once acceptable, or easily blamed on customers' deficient skills with bread knives, were now immediately apparent to anyone opening a package of bread. This alarmed bakers. Large uneven holes, so esteemed by artisan bread lovers today, had no place in the modernist aesthetic. Each one was an unacceptable reminder of bread's natural life, a tiny realm of imperfection unconquered by science. The perfect tapered loaf, the ideal slice thickness—all that came to nothing if bread's face looked worm-eaten. Thus, scientific bakers threw themselves into developing new dough-mixing equipment, loaf-shaping technology and, most importantly, chemical dough conditioners to ensure that every slice revealed the exact same architecture of tiny even cells. Consumers, for their part, admired the new look of bread, and accepted uniformity as a mark of quality.
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Indeed, only one aspect of the high modernist reengineering of bread's appearance stirred major controversy during the first decades of the twentieth century: flour whitening.

White bread had long stood as a symbol of wealth and status—and in America, racial purity—but during the first decades of the twentieth century this association expressed itself in a unique way. Thanks to the way industrial bakers positioned their product as an icon of scientific progress, the superiority of white bread didn't appear to be a matter merely of taste or culinary preference. It was an expression of responsible citizenship. To eat white bread was to participate in the process of building a better nation.

The very whiteness of modern bread helped confirm this dream. At least since the early medieval period, whiteness has had a Janus-faced social and religious symbolism in the West; the color could equally stand for life or death, purity or pallor. In the early twentieth century, however, the meaning of white was increasingly stabilized around notions of purity and control. At a time when white America's collective sense of the ambiguous shades of racial whiteness was more unstable and fractious than at any other time in its history, the simple color white provided a safe and reassuring haven—an uncontaminated field. Whiteness, as never before, had become synonymous with control over threatening disorder, and this association manifested itself in multiple arenas, including food production. Whether in clothing, kitchens, appliances, or water closets, the color of scientific control was white.
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Dr. Woods Hutchinson, a leading national pundit on matters related to health, for example, wrote in praise of the color white in an
American Magazine
article: the color white—particularly from whitewash and white paint—represented an important means of forcing immigrants to adopt higher standards of cleanliness. “Anything in the way of dirt or garbage which showed up against this shiny [white] background was so conspicuous,” Hutchinson argued, “that shame alone compelled the Polacks and Hungarians in the district to get rid of it in some way.” If, as early twentieth-century experts loved to repeat, “dirt was matter out of place,” white had been normalized as the defining measure of whether something was in or out of place. “Whitewash,” Le Corbusier, one of the most influential modern designers of the early twentieth century, proclaimed, “is extremely moral.”
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Even Alfred W. McCann—one of the country's fiercest anti-white bread crusaders—understood the visual discipline of the white loaf. McCann ardently promoted whole grain bread, but attacked corrupt bakers who took advantage of the “dusky color” of their darker loaves to conceal impurities. If this didn't happen, he argued, “The white bread maker would not then point to his immaculate loaf, free from the faintest tint of color. He would not contrast the ‘chastity' of that white loaf with the ‘defilement' of the dark one.”
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In a time when bread production was increasingly taking place outside the home and out of consumers' sight, the whiteness of loaves increasingly substituted for the direct ability to monitor the baking process and reassured consumers of bread's compatibility with modern conceptions of purity, control, and progress.

Luckily, white bread was widely available. The invention of efficient porcelain and then steel roller mills in the mid-1800s had made highly refined flour inexpensive and available to the masses for the first time in human history. From the 1840s on, white wheat bread was no longer only for elites. Refined flour became standard fare for most consumers, and even the poorest Americans would have enjoyed an occasional white loaf. Still, these loaves were not particularly white by twentieth-century standards. Contemporary accounts described them in shades of creamy yellow—hardly the stuff of a modernist palette. This is where the trouble began.

Making the creamy white of white flour match the bright titanium shade favored in other objects of scientific housekeeping, from appliances to cooks' aprons to kitchen tiles, required more than efficient milling and sifting. Until the early 1900s, it required something more precious: time. All wheat flour whitens naturally through oxidation as it ages, and millers had traditionally matured their best product for one to two months. But natural aging took up valuable space, slowed inventory turnover, and inevitably led to losses from spoilage. Chemical bleaching, achieved by exposing flour to chlorine or nitrogen peroxide gas, on the other hand, produced oxidation instantly. As
Scientific American
proclaimed, with the 1904 invention of the Alsop bleaching process, “The uncontrollable and time-consuming aging and maturing of flour by nature … has been superseded by a safe, rapid, and far more effective process based on scientific principles.”
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Bleaching may have been practical and efficient, but even the science-obsessed American public didn't like hearing words like “chlorine gas” in conjunction with their bread. Accustomed to outcry against pre-industrial bakers' use of chalk, borax, and alum to whiten dark flour, many consumers and consumer advocates quickly decided that chemical bleaching constituted yet another form of bread adulteration. Influential progressive leaders and publications took up the anti-bleaching cause, and Harvey Wiley entreated his broad following to stand against those who “fool with flour.” “Save the bread of the nation!” he urged.
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The controversy came to a head in 1910 with a case that would last into the 1920s and influence food safety legislation into the twenty-first century. On April 9, 1910, looking for an opportunity to challenge flour bleaching in court, Harvey Wiley, then chief of the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, precursor to the FDA, ordered the seizure of 625 sacks of bleached flour sold by the Lexington Mill & Elevator Company of Lexington, Nebraska. The flour had been shipped across state lines into Missouri, placing the case in federal jurisdiction. This allowed the Bureau of Chemistry to charge Lexington Mill & Elevator with selling “adulterated, misbranded flour containing poisonous and deleterious ingredients.”
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The bureau hoped to establish two things with the case: that bleaching allowed millers to sell, or “mis-brand,” inferior flour as white, and that nitrate residues from the bleaching process constituted a dangerous ingredient.
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