White Bread (19 page)

Self-styled nutritional realists countered that none of these foreign or domestic alternatives would work in the United States. Even government intervention couldn't change consumers' taste for pure industrial white bread, the realists argued. Look at Switzerland, they warned, deploying their favorite cautionary tale: in 1937, hoping to increase whole wheat bread consumption, Swiss officials imposed taxes making whole wheat bread 25 percent cheaper than white bread. It didn't work. Swiss consumers simply paid more to eat white bread.
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Influential home economist Helen Mitchell summed up the realists' attitude for the
Journal of Home Economics:
“Enrichment seems a desirable compromise between a
theoretically
better nutritional practice and a
realistic
one based on the psychology of food habits.”
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Thus, the urgency of war settled a long-running debate about how to improve industrial bread, sweeping aside more radical alternatives in the name of expediency.

Unlike mandated high-extraction loaves or the use of natural additives like milk solids, enrichment was cheap and easy. It required no significant reworking of production lines, no new equipment, no need to learn new baking techniques and, once sufficient supplies of vitamin powders could be assured, little additional expense. Bakers couldn't believe their luck. One simple flick of a compressed nutrient wafer into every batch of dough could put to rest decades of condemnation and restore the busted staff to its former glory.

Millers balked at enriching flour at first but, like bakers, they eventually saw the advantages. As one millers' association told its members, in a time when better nutrition was “needed by all Americans to make them rugged and strong for the all-out war emergency,” enrichment offered a chance to reverse decades of declining flour consumption. Because enriched bread and flour had “become corner stones in the national education program for better nutrition,” they could sweep away “the scientific basis for former criticism of [our] fine foods.”
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With bakers and millers on board, the industrial war food machine went into motion. And once it did, alternative health breads like McCay's Cornell loaf wouldn't merely be passed over—they could be denounced as national security threats by industry spokespeople along with USDA and FDA officials. Nevertheless, one important question still remained: How best to distribute enriched white bread? While many in the baking industry hoped to build demand for enriched white bread and boost corporate profits by selling premium-priced loaves to affluent tastemakers, nutritional realists rejected this route. True, they argued, poorer consumers might eventually spend more on bread to emulate wealthy eaters, but in a time of war, added nutrition was too important to leave to the whims of market forces and consumer choice. Synthetic vitamins didn't cost producers much and could easily be added to
all
bread.
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During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Robert R. Williams, a University of Chicago-trained chemist, found himself at the center of the debate over whether to mandate bread enrichment for all or to sell it as a premium-priced luxury. Born in 1893, the son of missionaries, Williams spent his childhood in southern India, surrounded by hunger. As a young teacher in the Philippines, scenes of deprivation haunted him. But it was during a stint as a low-level scientist with the colonial government in Manila that he first came to understand the moral and political weight of malnutrition.
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There, in 1910, spurred by the constant sight of listless, limbtwisted victims of endemic beriberi, Williams had set out to investigate suggestions that polished rice might cause the disease. He wasn't interested in colonial policy, or in the political reasons why millions of Asians might subsist on rice alone. Williams's goal was simpler and more technical: find a physiological cause and practical cure for the suffering he saw. After five years' work, he succeeded at the first part: beriberi was, as he had suspected, the result of malnutrition, caused by the lack of a factor he named “thiamin”—a plentiful substance in rice husks but completely absent in polished grains. The second half of Williams's dream—finding a cheap, politically viable cure to that problem—would take him more than twenty-five years.

In the meantime, Williams returned to the United States, where he joined the FDA to enforce Pure Foods laws and then helped lead national nutrition campaigns during World War I. During the Roaring Twenties, he entered the private sector as chemical director of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, then a hotbed of innovative applied science. In his spare time, however, Williams still pursued his driving passion. Finally, in 1936, after years of work, Williams announced that he had discovered an inexpensive method for creating thiamin in a lab.

True to his ideals, Williams registered the patent for thiamin synthesis to a nonprofit dedicated to funding humanitarian dietary research and set out to find industry partners who could deliver the product to people needing it most. At first, two companies answered his call: the pharmaceutical giant Merck, which agreed to mass-produce synthetic B1, and General Mills, which agreed to include it in select products. When the two companies approached Williams in 1938 with the idea of licensing synthetic B1 for use in flour, they tantalized him with the promise of massive economies of scale, a national advertising campaign, and direct access to the 15 percent of the U.S. flour market controlled by General Mills—but there was a cost. In return for pioneering the commercialization of B1 flour and enrichment products, General Mills and Merck demanded exclusive rights, a monopoly concession. Unless a government edict mandated enrichment of all flour products, General Mills' negotiators argued, no company would be willing to take the first step without guaranteed exclusive rights that would allow it to charge a premium price and recoup the costs of innovation.
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Williams's collaborators warned against the deal. “The advantages of licensing some large food company are obvious, but such a situation is charged with fulminate of mercury,” Williams's boss at the Bell Laboratories counseled. Not only would General Mills and Merck use their exclusive position to profit outrageously from Williams's public-health research, they might not even deliver products to the country's neediest. “I have been plagued by a number of misgivings,” Williams wrote to an ally in the USDA. “Perhaps the millers' genuine interest in the matter is limited to their specifically premium price flour; perhaps they even contemplate using the vitamin primarily for incorporation in even higher price package goods and are merely talking flour for its moral effect on us.” If General Mills and Merck decided to limit enrichment to top-shelf flours, Williams concluded, “[enriched] flour would go to consumers who have a varied diet and less need for the vitamin restoration than to the consumers of the lower price flours.”

A high-ranking FDA official friendly to Williams's cause concurred and raised the possibility of government action: “If the large flour producers could not afford to put B1 in their flour for the underprivileged, then possibly it should be a government function.” But in the end, the official backed a more gradual model—not unlike the route taken by supporters of organic-labeled foods in the United States today. He argued for enriching premium-priced products first, and then counting on the market to provide for poor consumers later. Wealthy consumers would buy premium-priced flour and bread because they were more “susceptible to education.” This would, eventually, lower prices, raise awareness, and “make itself felt among the lower income classes.”

Despite Williams's misgivings, Merck cut a deal with Standard Brands to produce enrichment tablets for bakery use, and by 1940, General Mills was mass-marketing enriched flour. Profits boomed for both companies, but Williams's fears proved prescient. After touring the country to promote enrichment in 1941, he reflected sadly that millers and bakers who adopted enrichment did so almost exclusively with an eye toward niche markets and premium charges. The American staple food had not been enriched—only a small luxury subset. As he complained in his diary, enrichment held sway only in the country's “silk stocking districts,” and even there interest was waning. Enriched bread, like organic arugula or patty pan squash, seemed destined to be an ephemerally trendy status item.

Only in the context of mobilization for total war could Williams and other nutrition scientists convince the country that enrichment mattered enough to make premium pricing unethical. By the time War Food Order Number 1 mandated across-the-board bread enrichment, many patriotic bakers and millers had already begun to internalize the minimal costs of adding vitamins to their products.

After the expiration of War Food Order Number 1 at the end of hostilities, more than half the country's states passed laws requiring bread enrichment, but they hardly needed to act. By 1947, a year after the repeal of mandatory wartime enrichment, industry marketing reports suggested that housewives had come to simply
expect
extra vitamins in their bread at no extra cost, and would continue to expect this in the postwar period.
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As the war ended, Victory Gardens weeded over and Meatless Mondays morphed into barbeque parties, but with enriched bread something had stuck. Consumers had begun to crave extra vitamins in their food.

This remarkable cultural shift began with efforts to convince home front fighters that enriched white bread was a lynchpin of national defense, not the staff of death. In the context of wartime mobilization, the campaign for enrichment had served as a kind of vitamin boot camp, teaching Americans to think about nutrition.

Early market research showed that bread buyers harbored deep-seated suspicions about bakers' enriched bread claims. Before the government made mandatory enrichment the norm, many housewives confused the word “enriched” with “richness,” assuming vitaminized bread was more fattening than regular loaves. Some believed that enriched bread was a medicinal product best reserved for sick family members, while others simply dismissed “enriched” as a meaningless advertising word.
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Food manufacturers had enriched a few products since the 1930s, and home economists had lectured about the importance of vitamins since the 1910s, but most Americans had no idea what it all meant. A 1940 Gallup Poll found that only 9 percent of Americans knew what vitamins did. In 1941, another poll revealed that only 16 percent could distinguish between calories and vitamins. “Funny how we never knew nothin' about vitamins or calories or dietin' when we was young … we must a-been tough ones to live through it,” admitted Mary Anne Meehan, a cook interviewed by a Works Progress Administration oral historian in 1939. “Now don't get me wrong. I believe in this vitamin and calory stuff alright,” she continued—but it didn't sound that convincing.
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If Americans were to accept the idea that individuals had a patriotic duty to eat vitamin-rich foods, a national education campaign would have to convince them. Bread seemed like a good place to start. As U.S. surgeon general Thomas Parran argued, bread enrichment offered “a way in which necessary vitamins can be put into the diet of all our people, rich and poor; for all of us eat bread in some form three times a day.”
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Just as Selective Service applied to every fighting-aged man in the country, bread touched virtually every civilian family. Bread would make a good boot camp in which civilians could learn to think about how the vitamin content of foods they ate affected national defense.

In January 1941 the National Research Council for Defense announced that enriched bread would help the country “withstand the stresses and strains of war,” and newspapers from Marysville, Ohio, to Brainard, Minnesota, from Amarillo, Texas, to Ogden, Utah, carried the story on their front pages. The surgeon general reinforced this message in a widely read
Better Homes and Gardens
article. Enrichment wouldn't just fix the busted staff of life, he insisted, it would turn bread into a weapon of national defense. “We are on the eve of a food revolution,” the
Science News Letter
proclaimed. “Our staff of life, bread, will be restored to an ancient estate, making it more worthy of bearing this proud title. Vitamins are coming to the rescue. … The new vitaminized flour will give modern America strength for defense in war.”
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The message echoed out from the advice columns of
Good Housekeeping:

to national advertising campaigns:

to local ad campaigns in cities and small towns across the country, like this one from Syracuse, New York:

to the bully pulpit of the U.S. Public Health Service:

The message couldn't have been clearer. As a Fleischmann's ad run in thirteen cities and three national weeklies declared, vitamin deficiency was “a bomb so powerful that it could stun a whole city—leave all the people, young and old, dull, stupefied, fumbling.” Bread fortified with Fleischmann's enrichment products was “the defense weapon the U.S. Government itself is urging the whole country to accept.”
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Red Cross and Civil Defense nutrition classes instructed housewives across the country to choose enriched bread.
Listen America
, a national radio program broadcast weekly during 1941 and 1942, put the same message in living rooms. Anthropologists developed strategies to communicate the importance of enrichment to immigrant groups, and
The Modest Miracle
, a Hollywood short feature sponsored by the Federal Security Agency and Standard Brands, touted vitamin bread in theaters. Meanwhile, community “Nutrition Weeks” sponsored by bakeries and government agencies combined nutrition classes, educational film screenings, and bakery specials.
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