Instead, something remarkable happened during the first decades of the twentieth century: per capita bread consumption increased.17 Modern factory bread wasn’t just a more convenient version of the ancient staple—it was something new. Its ingredients may have remained more or less unchanged, its basic shape may have been preserved, its familiar taste maintained (in a watered-down form), but modern bread was somehow completely transformed. It had taken on shiny new meanings, found a new place on the American table and in the country’s lunch pails.
Bakers worked hard for that increase, advertising relentlessly, doing everything possible to distinguish more or less identical loaves from one another through branding. They joined forces to promote bread consumption, collectively touting its healthful properties, sponsoring sandwich recipe contests, and even partnering with wheat growers and electric appliance makers to give toasters away at cost. But none of that would have saved bread if bakers hadn’t capitalized on a new ethos of scientific eating spreading through the country. Scientific eating had several different facets, which we’ll revisit in later chapters. For now, I’ll argue that the appeal of modern bread lay in the way it resonated with a growing cultural embrace of science and industrial expertise as a buttress against rapidly escalating fears of impurity and contagion.
ANXIETY AND EXPERTISE
When Florence Farrell came of age at the turn of the century, the ability to make good bread was the mark of a good bride—her highest art. It was, in Victorian domestic ideology, “the very foundation of a good table” and “the sovereign” of the true housewife’s kitchen, as Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe declared at the start of one of the century’s best-selling books, The American Woman’s Home.18 In the early twentieth century, however, ideas about family and motherhood began to change, and this would make possible—even imperative—the shift from homemade to store-bought bread. Industrial bakers like the Wards had mastered baking technology and designed its cutthroat business model, but the ultimate source of their product’s success lay in a new way of seeing the home.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century a “culture of professionalism” had begun to grip the country’s emerging middle classes. Powerful visions of expertise and efficiency were colonizing every corner of daily life, from how babies were born (with doctors, not midwives, in attendance) to fashion (hemlines raised for sanitary reasons) and interior design (smooth, easily cleanable surfaces, not Victorian fringe and ruffle). This fervent new belief in science, social engineering, and industrial efficiency aimed to sweep away old forms of knowledge and authority perceived as grounded in craft, intuition, and tradition. Training in fields ranging from medicine to teaching was standardized and professionalized, and new disciplines—sanitation, hygienics, and public health—were created to extend scientific rationality into new realms.19
By the 1900s, a whole class of professional experts, armed with official certificates, fancy titles, and evangelical fervor, had secured a place for itself in the country’s rigid social hierarchies. Emboldened by success and unwavering in its confident belief in the superiority of scientific expertise, this class set its sights on the country’s hearth. In the eyes of nearly every branch of this new army of professional experts, mothers stood on the frontlines of the battle for national hygiene and efficiency. They conducted the care, feeding, and education of the population, and they governed the most intimate spaces of everyday life. Organized under the banner of “home economics,” experts in household management and scientific motherhood believed that most of the nation’s problems could be cured with careful attention to the workings of family life. “When the principles of hygiene are fully understood by women,” Emma Sickels proclaimed to a large audience at Chicago’s Art Institute in 1891, “there will be comparatively little disease.”20
Scientific housekeeping, domestic hygiene, research-based meal planning, and efficient child rearing were supposed to liberate women from drudgery, but home economics aspired to even greater goals: by eliminating contagion, moral weakness, and inefficient energy use that sapped the stamina of the population, scientific household management would improve the very fabric of society from the hearth up.
For the mostly middle-class women who pioneered the field of home economics, the professionalization of domestic labor meant liberation and recognition. According to one of the movement’s founders, Ellen Richards, women’s work should properly be conceived as a professional occupation no different from doctor or engineer.21 This professionalization of housework was, in theory, a way to place all women’s work on par with that of men. In practice, however, it was primarily a way for women social reformers to gain respect for their work. If household management was a science, every housewife was a scientist of sorts, but home economists were the real experts.
Home economists’ authority required the existence of a population deemed in need of education and reformation. Luckily, thanks to tremendous influxes of “unclean” southern and eastern European immigrants as well as the growing visibility of other minority groups, the nation appeared replete with mothers mired in tradition and ignorance. Thus, for the bulk of the nation’s mothers, the ascendance of home economics meant less that their work would receive recognition as a vital contribution to the nation and more that their perceived backwardness and resistance to expert advice would be seen as threats to the nation.
The new disciplines of domestic expertise buttressed their authority by propagating an emergency mentality—painting vivid pictures of looming dangers and imminent disasters that would befall the nation if their advice weren’t heeded. Household cleanliness, or rather the lack thereof, topped social reformers’ lists of impending threats. By the turn of the twentieth century, the hypothesis that invisible microscopic organisms caused many illnesses had gained widespread scientific acceptance and was, thanks to the efforts of Progressive reformers, beginning to take hold in popular culture. In the 1900s, diverse groups, ranging from the Boy Scouts to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, worked to preach this “gospel of germs” to the masses.22 School curricula impressed the “laws of scientific hygiene” on young minds, and public signage warned of the dangers of kissing and spitting. Public health had been entirely reconceived. It was no longer the solitary concern of government officials, but rather the duty of all. In this era obsessed with the dangers of contagion, “the slightest deviation from perfect cleanliness was a cause for social anxiety since the invisible passage of germs could put the health of the family, companions, and even the entire nation at risk.”23
The country’s diet proved just as frightening as its cleaning habits, if not more so. Poor diet was a quiet killer and a silent drain on the country’s stamina. By sapping the nation’s vitality, inefficient diet appeared to be the root cause of nearly all of the nation’s moral, physical, social, and mental problems. As health columnist W. R. C. Latson wrote in 1902, “The question of what to eat is one of the most important practical considerations of life. To know what to eat, how much and how often would go far toward solving some of life’s gravest problems—poverty, weakness, disease, crime, and ultimately death.”24
It’s not hard to understand the fervor with which early twentieth-century social reformers approached the question “What to eat?” Cholera, botulism, typhoid, and other food-borne diseases killed in large numbers across class and race lines. And while historians disagree whether America’s food supply actually grew more dangerous as it industrialized after the Civil War, one thing is clear: starting in the 1870s, Americans strongly believed that their food system was getting less safe. This sentiment opened the doors to what food historian Harvey Levenstein called “the Golden Age of Food Fads,” as individual consumers sought safety in charismatic visions of better eating. It also underpinned collective mobilization, bringing together women’s groups, consumer advocates, temperance unions, and other reformers for one of the most organized and sustained attempts to change the food system that history has known—the cam
paign for pure food, waged from the 1880s to the 1910s.25
Then, as now, the question of what to eat was always more than a culinary matter. As historian James Harvey Young noted, “The crusade for food and drug control shared with overall Progressivism a deep worry about ‘purity’: business, government at all levels, social conduct, even the bloodlines of the nation’s populace seemed threatened with pollution and required cleaning up.”26 In the face of looming danger, social reformers’ visions of food purity cross-pollinated easily with nativist politics and ideologies of racial purity. Indeed, as Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern argue in their history of germ scares, it often became difficult to distinguish between descriptions of food-borne contagion and the terrifying prospects of racial contamination.27
Food-borne diseases were widely associated with eastern and southern Europeans, Mexicans, and other “dirty” groups. Those groups’ hunger was just as commonly, and perhaps more rightly, associated with political instability. Jacob Riis’s widely read 1890 exposé, How the Other Half Lives, gave most comfortable Americans their first glimpse of this looming danger. The book took readers on a tour of New York’s tenement slums filled with the babble of foreign tongues, ragged children, tubercular parents, and “queer [dietary] staples found nowhere [else] on American ground.” It offered a vision of a world where the masses clawed and fought for sustenance, where “the cry for bread” filled the air. America need not care about its poor for altruistic reasons, Riis argued. It was a question of self-preservation: “In my mind there is a closer connection between the wages of the tenement and the vices and improvidence of those who dwell in them,” he warned. “Weak tea with a dry crust [of bread] is not a diet to nurse moral strength.” In the book’s much-discussed final pages, Riis graphically drove this point home with an account of a ragged father driven to violence against wealthy Fifth Avenue shoppers by his children’s desperate need for a crust of bread.28
This was no idle threat. Most major cities had, at some point, experienced riots sparked by interruptions in bread supply or rising prices. The connection between good, plentiful bread and social peace was intuitively understood. Indeed, New York’s first large bakery, the New York Baking Company, was formed by a group of wealthy citizens hoping to prevent future eruptions of unrest like the one experienced during the citywide bakery strike of 1801.29
During the first decades of the twentieth century, industrialists like William Ward would not raise wages or bow to union pressures, but they were smart enough to know that thugs and guns could maintain social stability only for so long. When the Wards built their New York bakeries, the memory of Jewish bread riots in 1903 and 1905 had not yet faded, and the experience of a widespread 1910 bakery strike was fresh in the minds of many. So, while Ward increased his workers’ hours and lowered their pay despite record profits, he also endowed a home for the city’s elderly poor and a workers’ retreat in the Hudson Valley—a bucolic wonderland where Ward bakery workers could rent subsidized summer cabins and their children could escape the corrupting influence of tenement life for a time. In the factory itself, on-site doctors cared for workers’ health and taught them “healthy habits.”30
This was precisely the approach that most food reformers took as well. Outside of labor and socialist-leaning movements, the social tensions evoked by Riis and others were understood as a problem not of exploitation but rather of a lack of education and the corrupting influences of poverty itself. The issue wasn’t that workers couldn’t afford food, but that they didn’t know how to use their food budget efficiently, didn’t understand scientific principles of good eating, or didn’t have the means to cook properly.
Racial eugenicists, reaching the apex of their popularity during the 1910s and 1920s, believed that solving these social problems could be achieved only by purging society of inferior stock. Poor diet, in their minds, constituted clear evidence of unfitness. As Michael Williams argued in Good Housekeeping, alluding ominously to forced sterilization and other coercive measures favored by American eugenicists at the time, immediate action must be taken to eliminate “the dregs and waifs of our population” who simply could not “maintain true economy in nutrition.”31
Most home economists, however, inclined toward the more optimistic euthenics movement. For them, racial fitness didn’t begin and end with genes. It could be achieved by changing physical environments and teaching new habits. Social work and education would teach modern eating habits to the poor, while better urban planning and provision of what we today call “appropriate technology” would overcome the physical obstacles to proper eating. In a fashion reminiscent of many community-garden and anti-obesity campaigns designed to teach the poor about “healthy eating” today, reformers poured into the country’s urban tenements and rural hill countries. What they achieved was not an attack on the economic root causes of poverty, but the spread of a gospel of progress through healthy habits and hygienic eating.
These were well-meaning efforts. Even George Ward’s championing of cheap whole wheat bread for the masses can’t be glossed merely as a cynical attempt to increase market share—indeed, by all accounts it hurt the company. Yet, ideas about scientific eating were also metrics by which populations could be measured for worthiness. Following expert dietary advice became not just a matter of good practice but a requirement of competent citizenship. Even when reformers’ efforts to spread the gospel of good food failed, these failures had the effect of reinforcing social hierarchies. Rather than use these failures as an opportunity for self-reflection (maybe the poor actually need higher wages, not our gospel of good eating), reformers felt confirmed in their belief that poverty stemmed from the poor’s ignorance (only a fool wouldn’t want to eat hygienically).
Even when reformers failed to convince others to eat correctly, they themselves had deeply internalized their doctrine. Indeed, the greatest impact of this movement to shape how the masses ate was not on the masses, but on the habits and desires of the country’s professional classes. Thus, while many of the food reformers’ most ambitious projects—communal kitchens in tenement districts, for example—failed miserably, the power of hygienic eating flourished.
With this in mind, the choice of bakery over homemade can be understood as something more than just a question of taste or ease. Preference and convenience must be understood in relation to a whole series of deeply inculcated desires, responsibilities, and aspirations. Centuries of European tradition had linked bread choices with class and status, but the movement for hygienic eating added a whole new level of consequence: individual decisions about bread didn’t just mark class differences, they placed eaters’ behavior in relation to the larger health of the nation and proclaimed, for all to see, whether one was fit and responsible—or in need of help. The problem was that it was far from clear what kind of bread was most hygienic.
HOW OFTEN DO YOU INSPECT YOUR BAKERY?
To any late nineteenth-century observer, the answer to the question of what bread was most hygienic would have been obvious: home-baked bread was better. Bakery bread was one of the few processed foodstuffs widely associated with poverty rather than affluence, and bakeries themselves suffered under a cloud of suspicion. Except for a few “sanitary bakeries,” the vast majority of the country’s bakeries were more dark satanic mills than shining palaces.32 Poorly capitalized and facing cutthroat competition, the country’s small bakeries slashed any cost possible. They stretched and whitened cheap flour with plaster of Paris, borax, ground bones, pipe clay, chalk, alum, and other nefarious compounds. They invariably sold underweight loaves, and they worked laborers as hard as they could. As the lyrics of an 1884 union anthem from St. Helens, Oregon, asked, “Full eighteen hours under the ground, / Toiling and making bread! / Shut off from air and light and sound, / Are we alive or dead?”33
Beginning in the 1870s, labor organizations were able to bring these abuses to light and raise public outcry about “Slavery in the Baker Shops”—but not the outcry they hoped
for.34 Rather than rousing sympathy for exploited workers, unions and their allies succeeded in focusing the country’s outrage on dirty bread and the dirty hands that made it. Reports of “disease-breeding bread” had circulated since the 1880s, but with the attention called to Chicago’s meatpacking industry by Upton Sinclair’s muckraking journalism, concern about bread exploded in the mid-1900s. Months after The Jungle hit bookstores in February 1906, the city’s chief sanitary inspector declared that bakery “conditions rival those discovered in the worst of the packing houses.”35 Sensationalist descriptions of unventilated and pestilent cellar bakeries filled local newspapers and echoed through the city’s lecture halls. Sanitary inspectors painted pictures of dark, vermin-infested caves with raw sewage dripping from pipes into dough-mixing troughs, street dust and horse manure blown onto dough, bread cooling on dirt floors, and whole families sleeping on rag piles in bakeries, alongside their chickens. In the worst cases, bakers worked ankle deep in water and sewage when storms backed up city drains.
As pressure for a federal pure food law mounted, Chicago civic organizations, women’s groups, and self-styled sanitary activists conducted surprise bakery inspections and drew up “white lists” of acceptable establishments. Under pressure from these groups and driven from within by crusading health officials, the city government stepped up regulation. A 1907 ordinance established guidelines for bakery construction, outlawed sleeping in bakeries, and mandated regular inspections. Later, a second ordinance banned cellar bakeries outright.
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