White Bread Read online

  These were the first such ordinances in a major city, and Pure Food activists around the country took Chicago as a model. There was still much work to be done, though: in 1908 only thirty of one thousand bakeries inspected under Chicago’s new ordinance passed without citation.36 At least they had been inspected. In New York, thousands of cellar bakeries went virtually unregulated. By 1910, however, with sensational accounts of filthy bakeries filling newspapers and stories of progressive action flooding in from Chicago and elsewhere, pressure mounted. Blue-ribbon commissions were appointed and “professional sanitarians” deployed.

  In November 1911, the New York State Factory Investigating Committee convened days of hearings on the city’s bakeries. Consumer protection advocate Frances Perkins, who would later become FDR’s secretary of labor and the country’s first female cabinet member, lent the proceedings celebrity status. During 1910, she had personally inspected one hundred New York bakeries, and found conditions revolting. 37 In her testimony before the committee, Perkins repeatedly emphasized bakeries’ criminal lack of ventilation. The toll poor air quality took on the lungs of journeymen bakers was horrific. As a public health doctor confirmed later in the hearings, nearly 100 percent of bakery workers in New York showed signs of tuberculosis, bronchitis, and other lung infections. When dealing with other industries, the committee showed concern for workplace safety, but when it came to bread making, it was more interested in hearing about workers’ hygiene.

  With a few exceptions, committee members darted around witnesses’ appeals for workplace safety regulations, restating the bakery problem as a question of how best to control immigrant workers. Commissioners’ questions focused on immigrant bakers’ beer drinking, tobacco chewing, sleeping habits, and spitting, their scabs, their lice, their sweat, their filthy hands, and their unwashed clothes. As the city health commissioner, Ernst Lederle, argued, cellar bakeries themselves were not the problem, the problem was that “the people were dirty and careless.”38

  Indeed, in both Chicago and New York, public uproar about cellar bakery conditions was hard to separate from larger anxieties about the habits of the nation’s new Jewish and Italian immigrants. Thus, even when Perkins and other witnesses defended workers’ hygiene habits, the commission voiced skepticism. In one revealing exchange, state assemblyman Cyrus Phillips argued with a public health doctor. “These men you have described are naturally and inherently unclean; aren’t they? And they don’t know how to do anything else?” the assemblyman queried. “Why, I guess that’s true,” the doctor ventured cautiously, but the assemblyman pressed on with his point about the nature of immigrant bakers: “No amount of inspection will improve them very much?” Then the doctor surprised those present in the hearing by responding that yes, he did believe that bakers’ habits could be changed. Assemblyman Phillips replied incredulously, “[You think] that they could counteract their natural and inherent tendencies?” “I certainly do,” the doctor repeated. The two officials weren’t talking about bread anymore, they were debating the nature of new immigrants. Sensationalist accounts of dangerous bread likely reflected unease about newcomers more than any real hazards posed by eating the product of their ovens. And this is, in the end, the grain of salt with which we must take fears of cellar bakeries—and a clue to why bakeries like the Wards’ flourished.

  Whether or not bread from small bakeries was actually unsanitary, the moral panic around dirt, germs, and immigrant habits was a gift for industrial bakers. “I want to know where my bread comes from!” an affluent woman demanded in a national advertising campaign for Holsum bread. “I don’t want bread from some nameless basement bakery. I want my bread from a bakery that’s clean as my own kitchen. … I’ve stopped baking but I still want clean bread.” Or, as an ad from Los Angeles more bluntly put it, “Many bakeries in New York, Chicago, and other cities are being condemned by health officers as unclean and unsanitary. How often do you inspect your bakery?”39 Strange as it might seem to contemporary foodies, in the early twentieth century the language of “knowing where your food comes from” was a public relations coup for industrial food.

  Bakeries across the country overwhelmingly adopted the new language of clean bread in their advertising, but it was the Wards, once again, who set the bar. Alongside reprinted news reports on the “shocking state of cellar bakeries,” the Wards invited New York to visit its bakeries. “You can see every detail in the making of Ward’s Tip-Top Bread. The human hand never touches bread at these, the greatest bakeries in the world—daylight bakeries, snow-white temples of cleanliness.” Transparency, cleanliness, and modernity displaced taste, cost, convenience, and even freshness in bread advertising. The “bare hand” became the greatest enemy of bread. As a Ward Bakeries ad in the New York Times stressed in italics, “Bread kneaded by hand or mixed by hand can never be made a truly clean sanitary product.”40 Of course, even bread “untouched by human hands” still required the presence of a few workers, and this bothered consumers bombarded by images of disease-ridden bakers. So the Wards’ advertising also trumpeted the company’s meticulous inspection of workers’ health and habits—even their moral character.

  Consumers around the country flocked to witness the spectacle of sanitary baking. They crowded around the glass of smaller “window bakeries,” where all operations could be viewed from the street, and lined up for tours of larger factories. One Ohio bakery even encouraged teachers to plan hygiene lessons for their students around tours of its factory. A trip to Stolzenbach’s scientific bakery, the company claimed, would instill pupils with “the great, lifelong value of a thorough understanding of the inestimable advantage of perfect cleanliness.”41

  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

  YOU AND YOUR LITTLE OVEN CAN’T COMPETE

  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.”44 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.”46 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.”48

  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.”57 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.

  THE TRIUMPH OF INDUSTRIAL BAKING

  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 provi
sion 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.58

  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.59 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.