White Bread Read online

  By 1930, half a dozen companies manufactured commercial bread slicers, and by 1936, 90 percent of the country’s commercial bread was sliced.7 The industry’s conservative estimates showed that bakeries offering sliced bread increased sales 100–300 percent. Anecdotal reports spoke of increases of up to 3,000 percent.8

  While awaiting deliveries of mechanical slicers from hopelessly backordered manufacturers, bakers asked themselves a logical question: What’s so great about sliced bread? “Why does anyone want sliced bread anyway?” one baker wondered in an essay for a trade magazine. “The housewife is saved one operation in the preparation of a meal. Yet, try as one will, the reasons do not seem valid enough to make demand for the new product.”9 He had a point. How much extra work is it really to slice your own bread?

  Quite a bit, as it turned out. And the reason for this difficulty lay in the very processes of industrialization bread had undergone in the preceding decades. Recall that in the 1920s, instead of baking their own bread or buying it face-to-face from a neighborhood baker, consumers were increasingly purchasing loaves from far-off factories. Instead of seeing, smelling, and touching bread directly, they were picking up loaves sealed in hygienic wrapping. Despite all the emphasis on “knowing where your bread came from,” consumers had no good way of judging when it had come. They needed a new way of judging freshness, and they found it in squeezable softness. More squeezable loaves appeared fresher, even if they weren’t. Marketing surveys revealed that while consumers didn’t always like eating soft bread, they always bought the softest-feeling loaf. Softness had become customers’ proxy for freshness, and savvy bakery scientists turned their minds to engineering even more squeezable loaves.10

  As a result of the drive toward softer bread, industry observers noted that modern loaves had become almost impossible to slice neatly at home. Without exaggeration and with only a little bit of whimsy, we can speak of a messy collision between the preternaturally soft loaves of machine-age baking and the dull cutlery of turn-of-the-century kitchens. Consumers, marketing experts, and baking industry research all agreed: neat, perfect—toaster and sandwich ready—slices could only be achieved mechanically.11

  Practical considerations, then, played a key role in sliced bread’s rapid acceptance. But what about housewives’ “thrill of pleasure when … first see[ing] a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows”? A little saved labor couldn’t explain a thrill like that. How did this simple invention become America’s “best thing”? To understand that, we must return to the ethos of scientific eating, to a different manifestation of the early twentieth-century veneration of industrial food. Sliced bread may have endured because of the convenience it offered, but its immediate exaltation speaks to something more visceral: a powerful emotional resonance between the spectacle of industrial bread and a larger set of aesthetics and aspirations gripping 1920s America.

  THE STREAMLINED LOAF

  Consider the precise symmetry of the sliced loaf, each of its pieces “the exact counterpart of its fellows.” Calibrated within a sixteenth of an inch, the loaf’s tranches articulate a perfect accordion, a white fanned deck. Note the plane of the slice. Each face reveals an intricate lacework unmarred by aberrant holes. There are no unneeded flourishes, no swags added by the baker. If we could, for a moment, let go of our postmodern attachment to the roughed-up and irregular landscape of artisanal bread, the sight would take our breath away. Industrial bread exudes a modernist aesthetic, and it didn’t get that way by accident.

  During the 1920s and 1930s, an obsession with machines and progress changed the look of America’s material life. Streamlined design channeled a love of industrial efficiency into the nooks and crannies of Victorian frill and Craftsman style. It began with vehicles—smoothing, tapering, and lengthening their lines to help them slip efficiently through air. It was a seductive look, all speed and glamour, and it spread quickly to objects with no need to foil drag. Irons, pencil sharpeners, and kitchen mixers got lean and smooth. The country’s first pop-up toaster, the 1928 Toastmaster, looked like an Airstream camper. Even vegetables got remade in the image of rocket ships. As historian Christina Cogdell notes, “Carrots were being transformed [by plant breeders] from ‘short chubby roots’ into ‘far’ more ‘attractive’ ‘long slim beauties.’ ”12

  Bakers responded to this trend by smoothing out bread’s bulges, squaring off pan bread’s flared “balloon tops,” and lengthening loaves into Zephyr trains. Industry experts believed that “stubby, plump loaves of bread, the old fashioned design” would increase bread consumption because their slices were broader and thicker, but they were forced to accept consumers’ desire for streamlined loaves. “Skinny bread is here to stay,” a gathering of professional bakers confessed in 1937, and, from Charleston, West Virginia, to Kingsport, Tennessee, bakeries touted the sleek design of their loaves. In advertising images of bread from the 1920s and 1930s, loaves look for all the world like Bauhaus office blocks or Le Corbusier chairs.13 This was more than just a visual style. It was a political statement about the future. Tellingly, at the peak of the streamline aesthetic in 1938, a food industry expo in Zanesville, Ohio, presented a loaf of sliced bread under the theme of “Utopia.”14

  This combination of food, technology, and the future would not have seemed unusual. At the turn of the century, Americans’ appetite for utopian thinking seemed limitless. Hundreds of utopian manifestos and novels filled bookstores, utopian clubs debated the means of achieving progress, and utopian communities sprang up, attempting to turn the dream into practical reality. Of all the writing on utopia, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward captured the country’s imagination most. In the 1888 novel, which remained popular for decades, Julian West, a young Brahmin of Gilded Age Boston, falls into a deep sleep and awakens in the year 2000 to find the United States transformed into a socialist utopia. Centralized factory production meets all human needs and resources are publicly owned. People are educated, long-lived, and free to pursue whatever leisure activities they desire. War and crime have disappeared. As West explores this new world, he comes to understand how cruel and inefficient his own era was. Looking Backward was a not-so-subtle indictment of robber barons, speculation, and greed, a paean to cooperation and redistribution. It sparked Bellamy Clubs, inspired experiments in collective living, fueled growing interest in cooperatively owned enterprise, and sold more copies than almost any other book of its time.15

  Bellamy’s utopian socialism was not without critics, in large part because a competing utopian vision had begun to grip the country’s most influential circles: the dream of universal prosperity achieved through cutthroat competition and unregulated markets that would take early twentieth-century elites by storm. The themes of Looking Backward did not sit well with proponents of economic “survival of the fittest,” a harsh interpretation of Darwinism popularized by Herbert Spencer and fervently embraced by American industrialists. Still, the novel remained popular because it captured a feeling that everyone from Andrew Carnegie to the most militant Red could agree upon: that rapidly emerging technological progress held out the possibility of a world of social harmony built on abundance and efficiency.

  In the late 1920s that utopia seemed just within grasp. Wireless radio, liquid-fueled rockets, long-distance air flights, and talking pictures offered dramatic evidence of a world to come. High-tech foods like streamlined sliced bread promised a future of ease, one in which the very material constraints of biological existence that had limited humans for millennia were overcome by science. This Promethean dream looked different from competing political perspectives: Socialists hated industrial trusts but envisioned a world of shared abundance made possible by industrial food production. Capitalists, on the other hand, relished cheap industrial food as a means of placating increasingly organized and militant workers. Either way, it was the same vision: technology would usher in good society by conquering and taming the fickle nature of food provisioning.

 
This was another incarnation of the ethos of scientific eating. And, as in the previous chapter, delving into it will help us understand one more piece of Florence Farrell’s switch to store-bought bread.

  NOTHING LEFT TO CHANCE

  “To begin then with the very foundation of a good table—Bread: What ought it to be?” Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe posed this question in their path-breaking compendium of domestic advice, The American Woman’s Home.16 The book, which quickly found a place as the essential primer of Victorian domesticity in the United States, promised modern answers to modern problems. Yet, the Beecher sisters’ thoughts on bread had a timeless air: “Bread-making can be cultivated … as a fine art,” guided by “the divine principle of beauty,” they argued.17

  Less than fifty years later, however, the Beechers’ invocation of art and aesthetics as the basis for “what bread ought to be” had all but vanished from cookbooks and other food writing. Mary D. Warren, one of countless purveyors of domestic advice who followed in the Beechers’ footsteps, captured the new spirit of bread. In a 1923 Ladies’ Home Journal article, “Science of Oven Management,” she insisted, “Modern inventions have made an exact science of baking, and there is no reason whatever for failure. … One simply cannot bake by guesswork and expect to secure results, any more than one can ascertain with certainty a sick person’s temperature by merely feeling his brow.”18

  Thus, by the 1920s, bread making was widely imagined as a techno-science. References to art, craft, and instinct in the making of bread would remain subordinate to rules and exactitude until the late 1960s. Like family health care, baking was to be a terrain of control and expert measurement rather than art and aesthetics. “Modern baking is scientifically done. Nothing is left to chance,” an elementary school textbook read. “The baker has studied the principles of baking and understands the working of the laws that govern his product. In his bakery there is a laboratory with microscopes, tubes, balances, and other instruments, the materials to be used are tested by experts. … [The modern baker] is guided by scientific laws.”19

  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.20 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.21

  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.

  MOTHER WAS A RANK FRAUD AS A BREAD MAKER

  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.22

  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.”23

  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.”24

  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.”25

  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.26

  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 measu
red rather by good administration than by simply the power to do.”27 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?

  WHITE IS A MORAL COLOR

  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.28 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.