White bread had long stood as a symbol of wealth and status—and in America, racial purity—but during the first decades of the twentieth century this association expressed itself in a unique way. Thanks to the way industrial bakers positioned their product as an icon of scientific progress, the superiority of white bread didn’t appear to be a matter merely of taste or culinary preference. It was an expression of responsible citizenship. To eat white bread was to participate in the process of building a better nation.
The very whiteness of modern bread helped confirm this dream. At least since the early medieval period, whiteness has had a Janus-faced social and religious symbolism in the West; the color could equally stand for life or death, purity or pallor. In the early twentieth century, however, the meaning of white was increasingly stabilized around notions of purity and control. At a time when white America’s collective sense of the ambiguous shades of racial whiteness was more unstable and fractious than at any other time in its history, the simple color white provided a safe and reassuring haven—an uncontaminated field. Whiteness, as never before, had become synonymous with control over threatening disorder, and this association manifested itself in multiple arenas, including food production. Whether in clothing, kitchens, appliances, or water closets, the color of scientific control was white.29
Dr. Woods Hutchinson, a leading national pundit on matters related to health, for example, wrote in praise of the color white in an American Magazine article: the color white—particularly from whitewash and white paint—represented an important means of forcing immigrants to adopt higher standards of cleanliness. “Anything in the way of dirt or garbage which showed up against this shiny [white] background was so conspicuous,” Hutchinson argued, “that shame alone compelled the Polacks and Hungarians in the district to get rid of it in some way.” If, as early twentieth-century experts loved to repeat, “dirt was matter out of place,” white had been normalized as the defining measure of whether something was in or out of place. “Whitewash,” Le Corbusier, one of the most influential modern designers of the early twentieth century, proclaimed, “is extremely moral.”30
Even Alfred W. McCann—one of the country’s fiercest anti-white bread crusaders—understood the visual discipline of the white loaf. McCann ardently promoted whole grain bread, but attacked corrupt bakers who took advantage of the “dusky color” of their darker loaves to conceal impurities. If this didn’t happen, he argued, “The white bread maker would not then point to his immaculate loaf, free from the faintest tint of color. He would not contrast the ‘chastity’ of that white loaf with the ‘defilement’ of the dark one.”31 In a time when bread production was increasingly taking place outside the home and out of consumers’ sight, the whiteness of loaves increasingly substituted for the direct ability to monitor the baking process and reassured consumers of bread’s compatibility with modern conceptions of purity, control, and progress.
Luckily, white bread was widely available. The invention of efficient porcelain and then steel roller mills in the mid-1800s had made highly refined flour inexpensive and available to the masses for the first time in human history. From the 1840s on, white wheat bread was no longer only for elites. Refined flour became standard fare for most consumers, and even the poorest Americans would have enjoyed an occasional white loaf. Still, these loaves were not particularly white by twentieth-century standards. Contemporary accounts described them in shades of creamy yellow—hardly the stuff of a modernist palette. This is where the trouble began.
SHINING WHITE OR WAXY AS A CORPSE
Making the creamy white of white flour match the bright titanium shade favored in other objects of scientific housekeeping, from appliances to cooks’ aprons to kitchen tiles, required more than efficient milling and sifting. Until the early 1900s, it required something more precious: time. All wheat flour whitens naturally through oxidation as it ages, and millers had traditionally matured their best product for one to two months. But natural aging took up valuable space, slowed inventory turnover, and inevitably led to losses from spoilage. Chemical bleaching, achieved by exposing flour to chlorine or nitrogen peroxide gas, on the other hand, produced oxidation instantly. As Scientific American proclaimed, with the 1904 invention of the Alsop bleaching process, “The uncontrollable and time-consuming aging and maturing of flour by nature … has been superseded by a safe, rapid, and far more effective process based on scientific principles.”32
Bleaching may have been practical and efficient, but even the science-obsessed American public didn’t like hearing words like “chlorine gas” in conjunction with their bread. Accustomed to outcry against pre-industrial bakers’ use of chalk, borax, and alum to whiten dark flour, many consumers and consumer advocates quickly decided that chemical bleaching constituted yet another form of bread adulteration. Influential progressive leaders and publications took up the anti-bleaching cause, and Harvey Wiley entreated his broad following to stand against those who “fool with flour.” “Save the bread of the nation!” he urged.33
The controversy came to a head in 1910 with a case that would last into the 1920s and influence food safety legislation into the twenty-first century. On April 9, 1910, looking for an opportunity to challenge flour bleaching in court, Harvey Wiley, then chief of the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, precursor to the FDA, ordered the seizure of 625 sacks of bleached flour sold by the Lexington Mill & Elevator Company of Lexington, Nebraska. The flour had been shipped across state lines into Missouri, placing the case in federal jurisdiction. This allowed the Bureau of Chemistry to charge Lexington Mill & Elevator with selling “adulterated, misbranded flour containing poisonous and deleterious ingredients.”34 The bureau hoped to establish two things with the case: that bleaching allowed millers to sell, or “mis-brand,” inferior flour as white, and that nitrate residues from the bleaching process constituted a dangerous ingredient.35
A Missouri jury quickly agreed with the government on both counts, but from there, the case wound its way through a drawn-out process of appeal. A federal court of appeals eventually reversed the jury’s decision, and in 1914, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the reversal.36
The Supreme Court’s decision hinged on the meaning of the word “may” in a line of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. The act had clearly empowered the government to condemn food that contains “any added poisonous or other added deleterious ingredient which may render such article injurious to health,” and the Bureau of Chemistry argued that nitrates of the type found in flour subjected to the Alsop process were clearly injurious to health. The Supreme Court, however, sided with Lexington Mill & Elevator’s argument that, although nitrates may harm health in large quantities, the government must prove that they do so in the specific amounts present. In a ruling that still guides government actions in arenas from genetically modified organism (GMO) labeling to herbal supplement regulation, the Supreme Court declared that it was incumbent on the Bureau of Chemistry to show that an ingredient may be harmful in the quantity typically present in a normal serving or dose.37
Forced to retry the case, the government brought a new set of charges against the mill, cleansed of references to health dangers. This time the government accused Lexington Mill & Elevator only of misbranding inferior flour, and, when the case finally came to trial, the bureau won. In a 1920 ruling that stood unchallenged, a lower court agreed that the mill had used bleaching to make a brownish flour look finer. The bureau won that battle, but had already lost the war.38
Wiley, long since forced out of government by a general shift away from aggressive consumer protection, was heartbroken. After the 1914 Supreme Court ruling, he had written in Good Housekeeping that the country’s flour would forever be “as white and waxy as the face of a corpse.”39 By the early 1920s, it was clear to him that nothing could hold back bleaching. The Supreme Court ruling and lower court victory took away the government’s ability to ban bleaching outright, forcing it to bring adulteration charges on a case-by-case basis. Even Wi
ley conceded that this was impossible given the vast quantity of flour shipped in the country.40
A few Americans retained enough of a Progressive Era skepticism about the practices of food processors to ensure a sizable niche market for unbleached flour. Gold Medal and other flour millers with roots in the Pure Foods Movement could still tout the health benefits of unbleached flour and seek out Wiley’s support for their product. But it was clear that the larger public had lost any doubts it had about bleaching. By 1930, when Scientific American introduced readers to the latest whitening agent—“Do-White … a finely-ground powder with a pleasing leguminous taste”—nearly all commercial flour was treated with chlorine gas, nitrogen trichloride, or nitrogen.41 As one Iowa miller committed to unbleached flour complained in a letter to Wiley, the public just wouldn’t buy anything that wasn’t “chalky white.”42
This would change in a few years, as the country latched onto a new set of health fears related to refined flour, which we’ll address in the next chapter, but for the time being, dazzling white bread was something to celebrate.
THE FINAL FRONTIER
One more great threshold of techno-scientific baking remained to be crossed, and sold to the public as the best thing since sliced bread—one aspect of baking remained largely untransformed by science, even as advanced machinery, precise measurements, temperature controls, and chemistry molded loaves to assembly-line production. Until the early 1950s, even the most cutting-edge bakers still fermented dough in much the same way as ancient Egyptians: they mixed a batch and waited for it to rise, mixed another batch and waited for it to rise. Temperature controls and chemical yeast nutrients could speed up batch fermentation, but dough’s biological rhythm still punctuated the otherwise smooth assembly-line flow of industrial baking. No matter how fast a baker could mix dough or speed it through ovens, production capacity was limited by the space available for giant troughs of dough just sitting around.
Beginning in the 1920s, scientists and engineers scrambled for a way to circumvent natural fermentation, but all failed. It was, in a sense, the seemingly unachievable Holy Grail of bakery science. Technology could speed up fermentation, but it was too much a part of bread’s flavor and structure to avoid altogether. Then, in 1952, John C. Baker, a chemist who first grew interested in bread while studying the effects of chlorine gas bleaching on flour, approached the problem from a new angle. Previously, scientists had worked to eliminate fermentation altogether, which was impossible, or to speed it up, which still left bakers waiting for batches. What if, Baker speculated, instead of eliminating or speeding fermentation, the microbial action of yeasts could simply be separated into its own industrial process removed from actual baking?43
In 1953, Dr. Baker released the first prototype assembly line based on this theory. In the Do-Maker Process, as he called it, an independent assembly line continually produced vats of liquid ferment—a broth of yeast, water, and yeast nutrients not unlike a French artisan bakers’ preferment, or poolish. The broth required four hours of fermentation time, but some was always on hand, ready to be injected into an ultra-high speed mixer, where it combined with a steady stream of flour and other dry ingredients. The result was a nonstop stream of “fermented” dough ready for panning and proofing. The Do-Maker Process cut three hours of waiting time off every loaf. More importantly, because transferring batches of dough required more hand labor than any other aspect of industrial baking, it reduced personnel costs by as much as 75 percent.44
Continuous-mix baking—or “no-time” baking, as it was dubbed—spread quickly and, like all significant advances in bakery technology, had an immediate and dramatic effect on competition. In 1967, a USDA study showed that astonishing growth in the productivity of large bakeries thanks to continuous-mix technology was putting small bakeries out of business in record numbers.45 Industrial bakeries without capital to install expensive continuous-mix equipment simply couldn’t compete.
The 1950s and early 1960s saw periods of sustained bread price spikes, so it’s not clear that consumers felt the benefits of cost saving and consolidation. They did like no-time bread, though. As a probably unintended side effect, the Do-Maker Process produced loaves with incredibly fine and uniform cell structure.46 Bakers immediately latched onto the marketing potential of this innovation, calling the product of continuous-mix baking “batter-whipped bread,” and hailing the fact that science had finally banished all holes from the country’s bread. Wonder bread advertising called batter-whipped bread “revolutionary,” and most consumers seemed to agree. The white shirts of the nation were finally safe from drips of jam leaked through unruly holes. No longer would haphazard gas bubbles remind eaters of bread’s natural origins.
INDUSTRIAL ABUNDANCE CONSIDERED
At the head of the La Brea Bakery production line in Van Nuys, towering steel vats hold liquid sourdough culture, the microbial progeny of Nancy Silverton’s original starter. Piquant and frothy, it is a liquid ferment like the Do-Maker’s broth, but once it’s mixed into batches of dough, all resemblance to continuous-mix baking ends. La Brea dough undergoes long, slow fermentation at cool temperatures in stainless steel troughs. Sumptuous amounts of time allow the dough’s flavors to fully develop. High-tech machinery handles the risen dough, but in exactly the opposite way as on most industrial production lines: tiny wire filigrees, steel fingers, and ingenious paddles divide and shape each piece without pressing out gas bubbles formed during fermentation. Jon Davis tells me that it took years of collaboration with a Japanese high-tech manufacturer to develop equipment that would encourage the natural holes that automatic dough handling typically sets out to destroy.
With its different approach to time and nature, the La Brea Bakery appears to channel a new industrial food aesthetic in which slowness and tradition are as important as speed and progress. Hominess and high modernism mix quite well at La Brea. This, in turn, seems to answer a question that a number of skeptical bakers and food writers posed during the 1920s and 1930s: Must we sacrifice quality ingredients and flavor in the name of industrial efficiency? Can’t we have both?47 La Brea, with its carefully made loaves and simple ingredients, suggests that maybe we can.
At the same time, much of the old aesthetic persists at La Brea. An industrial, scientific spectacle of perfectly controlled irregularity simply stands in for the old love of perfectly controlled regularity. Both aesthetics of control evince an equally strong confidence in modern technology’s ability to usher in a utopia of abundant good food. At the start of the twenty-first century, the idea that high-tech food holds the key to a better world has been tarnished by decades of experience with the health, social, and environmental consequences of industrial agriculture and food processing. But it still casts its spell. While La Brea’s dream of abundant good bread is harmless enough, the larger confidence in industrial food production has real consequences. At the very least, it narrows Americans’ sense of what kinds of changes in the food system are practical or possible.
Steeped in the dream of industrial plenty, for example, many skeptical observers of the alternative food movement voice doubts about the ability of small farmers and artisan producers to feed a rapidly growing world. Food historian James McWilliams captured this attitude in his book Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. Although he admitted to sharing the culinary pleasures of slow, organic eating, McWilliams berated members of the alternative food movement for believing that it could amount to anything more than an elitist trend. Heirloom farmers’ market tomatoes and handmade pain au levain were wonderful, but tackling world hunger required industry, efficiency, and scale.48
McWilliams was correct in one sense. Many expressions of the alternative food movement appear precious and far removed from the daily grind of poverty. But while defenders of industrial food production can make easy sport of rich locavores, they conveniently ignore the far greater elitism of oligopoly agribusiness, the myriad ways in which the dream of industrial plen
ty often made life worse, not better. Scientific household management, as Ruth Schwartz Cowan showed in her aptly named book More Work for Mother, placed more pressures on women, not fewer.49 Ever-larger and more efficient bakeries churned out ever-cheaper bread, but often at the cost of good jobs and community businesses. Cost savings from efficiency were not always passed on to consumers. And, as we will see in a later chapter, massive expansion of food production facilitated by technological advances sometimes created more hunger, not less.
Most early twentieth-century food writers, domestic advisors, and consumers couldn’t have imagined these counterintuitive outcomes of their dream of industrial plenty. Nevertheless, the ambiguous nature of industrial plenty was not completely lost on American bread eaters of the period. As industrial baking triumphed over small shops and home ovens, the country began to disagree about the nature of this new bread—first quietly and then, by the end of 1920s, vehemently. As the Great Depression took hold, community groups urged consumers to buy local bread from small bakeries or make it themselves.50 They also began to doubt the high modern aesthetic altogether. Had bread become too modern: too soft, too white, too defiled and denatured? Would soft bread make for a soft country?
Tapping into a much older line of American religious tradition, noted food gurus of the late 1920s and 1930s worried that industrial bread might erode moral behavior. In 1929, in bold type arrayed around a large picture of white bread, the New York Evening Graphic declared, “Criminals are made by the food that they eat as children—Science finds that white bread develops criminals.”51 For many household advisors and dietary experts, as the next chapter shows, industrialization had gone too far.
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