White Bread Read online

  16. Jonathan Fox and Libby Haight, eds., Subsidizing Inequality: Mexican Corn Policy since Nafta (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2010); Gisele Henriques and Raj Patel, Policy Brief No. 7: Agricultural Trade Liberalization and Mexico (Oakland, CA: Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy, 2003).

  17. Kamp, The United States of Arugula.

  18. Julie Guthman, “ ‘If They Only Knew’: Color Blindness and Universalism in California Alternative Food Institutions,” Professional Geographer 60, no. 3 (2008): 387–97.

  19. This dynamic can sometimes be flipped: the food of one’s own group can be seen as “bad,” while that of other groups is “good” (i.e., “exotic” or “different”). Although this changes the location of approval/disapproval, it maintains the overarching idea of clear-cut divides between “us” and “them,” “good” and “bad.” In more theoretical terms, we can think of diet as an arena of Foucaultian biopolitics. Because visions of good food link individual preferences to the overall health of society, straying from the norm has real consequences. We ascribe social virtue to people who share our vision of good food. And when a person or group fails to embrace our dream of good food, it isn’t seen as an innocent difference—it represents a potential threat to the health of society. For a reading of Foucault through the lens of diet, see Aaron Bobrow-Strain, “White Bread Bio-politics: Purity, Health, and the Triumph of Industrial Baking,” Cultural Geographies 15, no. 1 (2008): 19–40.

  20. See chapter 3 for an extended discussion of this moment. Also Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); James C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).

  CHAPTER 1. UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS

  1. Daniel Block, “Purity, Economy, and Social Welfare in the Progressive Era Pure Milk Movement,” Journal for the Study of Food and Society 3, no. 1 (1999): 20–27; DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food; Susanne Freidberg, Fresh: A Perishable History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

  2. James Harvey Young, Pure Food: Securing the Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Clayton A. Coppin and Jack C. High, The Politics of Purity: Harvey Washington Wiley and the Origins of Federal Food Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Lorine Swainston Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 1879–1914 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999); Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

  3. Coppin and High, The Politics of Purity; Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders; Young, Pure Food.

  4. Estimated by comparing Ward Bakery production figures with New York City consumption statistics. New York consumption figures from “Greatest Egg and Bread Eating City,” Olean (NY) Evening Times, August 5, 1910, 3.

  5. “Farm Boy’s Opportunities,” Iowa Homestead, June 9, 1910; “Table and Kitchen,” Evening News, September 18, 1900, 8.

  6. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980).

  7. Ibid.

  8. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005); Wiebe, The Search for Order; Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998); Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (New York: Norton, 2008).

  9. Wiebe, The Search for Order.

  10. National Association of Master Bakers, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Convention of the National Association of Master Bakers (Chicago: National Association of Master Bakers, 1915). Data on bread production in the preceding paragraphs calculated from Panschar, Baking in America; Donald R. Stabile, “Bakery Products,” in Manufacturing: A Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide, eds. David O. Whitten and Bessie Emeric Whitten (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990); “Flavor of Today’s Bread Is Much Better Than Many Critics Are Willing to Admit,” Western Baker, January 1937, 21–22; “The Story of American Efficiency,” U.S. News, October 31, 1938; T. E. King, “Largest and Most Wonderful Bakery in the World,” Baker’s Helper, September 1, 1925, 497. On Perry County baking history, see Saxon Lutheran Memorial, Heritage of Cooking: A Collection of Recipes from East Perry County, Missouri (Frohna, MO: Saxon Lutheran Memorial, 1965).

  11. On the idea of “fresh” food and its role in the industrialization of eating, see Freidberg, Fresh.

  12. My discussion of the Ward Baking Company draws from Carl Alsberg, Combination in the American Bread-Baking Industry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1926); the Edward L. Bernays Papers, MSS 12534, “Ward Baking,” box 1:401, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; “Big Bread Concern Formed,” New York Times, April 1, 1909, 1; “The Story of an American Business Success” (advertisement), New York Times, November 8, 1911, 5; “$30,000,000 Baking Company Formed,” New York Times, June 22, 1912, 17; F. C. Lane, “Famous Magnates of the Federal League: R. B. Ward, the Master Baker,” Baseball Magazine, September 1915, 24–33; J. C. Jenkins, “The Bread We Eat,” National Magazine, June 1916, 665–83; Stuart Bruce Kaufman, A Vision of Unity: The History of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers International Union (Kensington, NY: Bakery, Confectionery, and Tobacco Workers International Union, 1986); Stabile, “Bakery Products”; George S. Ward, “The Public Responsibility of the Baker of Bread,” McClure’s, June 1925, 86–99; “Bread Takes Its Place among Great Industries,” New York Times, October 11, 1925, 10; “Ask an Inquiry into ‘Bread Trust,’ ” New York Times, December 9, 1925, 21; “Government Opens Bread Inquiry Here,” New York Times, February 9, 1926, 2; “Suit Is Filed to Halt Baking Merger,” New York Times, February 9, 1926, 1; “Congress Takes up Big Baking Merger,” New York Times, February 2, 1926, 1; “Baking Concerns Hit Congress,” New York Times, July 1, 1926, 13; “W. B. Ward Named in $4,260,000 Suit,” New York Times, February 16, 1929, 13.

  13. “Bread Takes Its Place among Great Industries.”

  14. “Big Bread Concern Formed.”

  15. Ward, “The Public Responsibility of the Baker of Bread”; Julia M. Sample, MSS. 1801 (1938), Manuscript Division, WPA Federal Writers’ Project Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  16. Quote from Truman Pierson, “A Layman’s View of Baker’s Bread,” American Baker, January 26, 1927, 344. On the allure of novel foods in the early twentieth-century American diet, see Freidberg, Fresh; Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). On widespread fears of declining consumption, see Panschar, Baking in America; Phipard, “Changes in the Bread You Buy”; Alfredo de Matteis, The Human Side of Bread (New York: n.p., 1936).

  17. Burke, “Pounds and Percentages”; L. Wolfe, “The Growth of Bread Production,” Baking Industry, April 12, 1952, 122. Some of this increase can be accounted for by southerners switching from corn bread to white wheat bread, which also speaks to the modern allure of white bread.

  18. Catharine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York: J. B. Ford, 1869), 170, 173.

  19. Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976). This section also draws from Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Megan J. Elias, Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Elizabeth Murphy, “Expertise and Forms of Knowledge in the Government of Families,” Sociological Review 51, no. 4 (2003): 433–62; Nancy Tomes, “Spreading the Germ Theory: Sanitary Science and Home Economics, 1880–1930,” in Rethinking Home Economics, eds. S. Stage and V. Vicenti (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1997); Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Books, 2005).

  20. “Science in Households,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 15, 1891, 6.

  21. Ellen Swallow Richards, Euthenics: The Science of Controllable Environment (Boston: Whitcomb & Barrows, 1910).

  22. Tomes, The Gospel of Germs; Suellen M. Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  23. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 169.

  24. W. R. C. Latson, “The Times Answers by Experts: On Health Reform,” Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1902, A4. Or, as a reader of Good Housekeeping insisted, “Take care of the digestive organs and the heart and brain and soul of humanity will as a rule take care of themselves. Improper nourishment, indigestion, and an illy sustained body are factors in crime, while content and prosperity are promoted by a health diet.” Harry Douglas, letter to the editor, Good Housekeeping, September 1894, 132.

  25. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table, 86; Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness. On the Pure Foods Movement, see Goodwin, The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders; Young, Pure Food.

  26. Young, Pure Food.

  27. Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, “The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society,” Milbank Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2002): 757–88. See also Nancy Tomes, “The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now,” Public Health 90, no. 2 (2000): 191–99.

  28. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890), 172–73.

  29. “Bread Does Not Advance,” New York Times, August 25, 1897; Howard B. Rock, “The Perils of Laissez-Faire: The Aftermath of the New York Bakers’ Strike of 1801,” Labor History 17, no. 3 (1976): 372–87.

  30. “A Bread Riot in Newark,” Cedar Rapids Evening News, July 28, 1903; “Dough Dumped into Gutters by Strikers,” Evening Record, August 10, 1903, 1; Kaufman, A Vision of Unity; Rock, “The Perils of Laissez-Faire”; “$250,00 for Hospital,” New York Times, November 23, 1925, 23; “Ward Fund Gives Million to Help the Poor,” New York Times, January 11, 1926, 1. A cynical reader might also note the fact that Ward’s most sensational charity donation occurred at almost exactly the same time as the formation of the Ward Food Products Corporation.

  31. Michael Williams, “Fletcherizing with Fletcher,” Good Housekeeping, May 1907, 505.

  32. For example, a 1903 domestic advice column presented home-baked bread as self-evidently more sanitary than “dark, dingy cellar bakeries.” “Domestic Science,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 13, 1903, 53.

  33. Quoted in Kaufman, A Vision of Unity, 1.

  34. Ibid.

  35. “Inspectors Find Foul Bakeshops,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 3, 1906, 2. This account of the Chicago bakery sanitation movement also draws from “Disease-Breeding Bread,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 6, 1894, 6; “Chicago Licensing Bakeries for Sanitation,” New York Evening Post, June 2, 1895; “Dirty Dough in Bakeries,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 14, 1907, 1; “Clean Up the Bakeries,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 22, 1907, B4; “Sanitary Inspection,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 6, 1907; “City Makes War on Spoiled Food,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 9, 1907, 5; “In 1,000 Bakeries Only 30 Get ‘O.K.,’ ” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 31, 1908, 2; National Association of Master Bakers, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Convention of the National Association of Master Bakers; “Making Daily Bread of Chicago,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 11, 1909, E3; “Evans Fights for New Bakers’ Law,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 11, 1909, 3; “Cellar Bakeries Raided,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 14, 1913, 1.

  36. “In 1,000 Bakeries Only 30 Get ‘O.K.’ ”

  37. Minutes of the Hearings of the New York State Factory Investigating Committee (New York: New York State Factory Investigating Committee, 1911); “Bakeshops Menace Health in the City,” New York Times, November 15, 1911.

  38. “Cellar Bakeries Anti-trust Issue,” New York Times, December 4, 1912, 10.

  39. “I Want to Know Where My Bread Comes From!” (advertisement), Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, January 11, 1929, 8; “Warning: State Health Authorities Condemn Unwrapped Bread” (advertisement), Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, April 2, 1912, 24.

  40. “A Perfect Loaf of Bread” (advertisement), New York Times, November 10, 1911; “Clean Bread Has Come to New York” (advertisement), New York Times, November 9, 1911, 9; “Our Physician Guards Your Interests” (advertisement), New York Times, November 24, 1911, 10; “Behind the Scenes in New York” (advertisement), The New York Times, December 1, 1911, 8; “Warning: State Health Authorities Condemn Unwrapped Bread” (advertisement); “Bakeries Here Are Now Models of Cleanliness,” Atlanta Constitution, November 7, 1914, 9; “The Clean Bakery” (advertisement), Lima (OH) Times-Democrat, October 11, 1916; “We Look upon Our Bread Factory as a Civic Institution” (advertisement), Oakland Tribune, April 20, 1924, 2-B; “Wholesome Bread Is Healthy” (advertisement), Emporia (KS) Daily Gazette, March 25, 1927, 12. See also Harry Barnard, “Sanitation in Bakeries,” American Journal of Public Health 11, no. 5 (1921): 407–9; Nels August Bengston and Donee Griffith, The Wheat Industry, for Use in Schools (New York: Macmillan, 1915).

  41. “The Clean Bakery” (advertisement). Examples of widespread public interest in sanitary bread can be found in numerous letters received by Pure Foods crusader Harvey W. Wiley (Harvey W. Wiley Papers, MSS 416, “General Correspondence,” box 163, Library of Congress, Washington, DC) as well as in the messages of praise from public officials collected by the Ward Baking Company for its seventy-fifth anniversary celebration (Bernays Papers, MSS 12534, “Ward Baking,” box 1:401).

  42. Helen Christine Bennet, “Cleaning up the American City,” American Magazine, September 1913, 48.

  43. “Bakeries in Ogden Are Praised by Expert,” Ogden (UT) Standard, July 2, 1915, 6.

  44. “Some Potent Curatives and Preventives of Disease,” Chautauquan, March 1895, 763–70.

  45. “Disease-Breeding Bread”; Ellen Richards, The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning: A Manual for Housekeepers (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1882).

  46. J. Thompson Gill, The Complete Bread, Cake, and Cracker Baker (Chicago: J. Thompson Gill, 1881), 27.

  47. Quoted in “Uncooked Foods,” Good Housekeeping, July 1913, 98.

  48. C. H. Routh, Infant Feeding and Its Influences on Life; or, The Causes of Infant Mortality (New York: William Wood, 1879); A. Cressy Morrison, The Baking Powder Controversy (New York: American Baking Powder Association, 1907).

  49. Reprinted in “School Lunches,” Fitchburg (MA) Daily Sentinel, January 22, 1916, 7.

  50. “On Filthy Food War Is Declared,” Atlanta Constitution, August 26, 1909, 2.

  51. Harry Barnard, “The One Objection to Baker’s Bread,” Good Housekeeping, May 1913, 694; Harvey Wiley, “Returns from the Good Housekeeping Food and Drug Ballot,” Good Housekeeping, March 1913, 398. For an example of the many newspapers reprinting the Journal of the American Medical Association’s statement, see “Unwrapped Bread” (advertisement), Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, November 28, 1914, 7.

  52. For examples of the struggle over bread wrapping, see “Asheville to Have Wrapped Bread,” Lumberton (NC) Robesonian, March 25, 1915, 7; Mrs. Harvey Wiley, “Why Bread Should Be Wrapped,” Syracuse Herald, April 10, 1912; “Would Buy Wrapped Bread,” Washington Post, March 2, 1914, 4; “Assert Bread Wrapping Is Trust Scheme,” San Antonio Light, July 31, 1914, 5; “Warning: State Health Authorities Condemn Unwrapped Bread” (advertisement); “State Authorities Condemn Unwrapped Bread” (advertisement), Fort Wayne Sentinel, April 3, 1911; “Read What the Ladies Home Journal Says about Unwrapped Bread” (advertisement), Fort Wayne Sentinel, June 3, 1919; “
Bread Wrapping: Its History and Development,” Baking Industry, August 24, 1968, 51–56.