White Bread

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

  Williams’s collaborators warned against the deal. “The advantages of licensing some large food company are obvious, but such a situation is charged with fulminate of mercury,” Williams’s boss at the Bell Laboratories counseled. Not only would General Mills and Merck use their exclusive position to profit outrageously from Williams’s public-health research, they might not even deliver products to the country’s neediest. “I have been plagued by a number of misgivings,” Williams wrote to an ally in the USDA. “Perhaps the millers’ genuine interest in the matter is limited to their specifically premium price flour; perhaps they even contemplate using the vitamin primarily for incorporation in even higher price package goods and are merely talking flour for its moral effect on us.” If General Mills and Merck decided to limit enrichment to top-shelf flours, Williams concluded, “[enriched] flour would go to consumers who have a varied diet and less need for the vitamin restoration than to the consumers of the lower price flours.”

  A high-ranking FDA official friendly to Williams’s cause concurred and raised the possibility of government action: “If the large flour producers could not afford to put B1 in their flour for the underprivileged, then possibly it should be a government function.” But in the end, the official backed a more gradual model—not unlike the route taken by supporters of organic-labeled foods in the United States today. He argued for enriching premium-priced products first, and then counting on the market to provide for poor consumers later. Wealthy consumers would buy premium-priced flour and bread because they were more “susceptible to education.” This would, eventually, lower prices, raise awareness, and “make itself felt among the lower income classes.”

  Despite Williams’s misgivings, Merck cut a deal with Standard Brands to produce enrichment tablets for bakery use, and by 1940, General Mills was mass-marketing enriched flour. Profits boomed for both companies, but Williams’s fears proved prescient. After touring the country to promote enrichment in 1941, he reflected sadly that millers and bakers who adopted enrichment did so almost exclusively with an eye toward niche markets and premium charges. The American staple food had not been enriched—only a small luxury subset. As he complained in his diary, enrichment held sway only in the country’s “silk stocking districts,” and even there interest was waning. Enriched bread, like organic arugula or patty pan squash, seemed destined to be an ephemerally trendy status item.

  Only in the context of mobilization for total war could Williams and other nutrition scientists convince the country that enrichment mattered enough to make premium pricing unethical. By the time War Food Order Number 1 mandated across-the-board bread enrichment, many patriotic bakers and millers had already begun to internalize the minimal costs of adding vitamins to their products.

  After the expiration of War Food Order Number 1 at the end of hostilities, more than half the country’s states passed laws requiring bread enrichment, but they hardly needed to act. By 1947, a year after the repeal of mandatory wartime enrichment, industry marketing reports suggested that housewives had come to simply expect extra vitamins in their bread at no extra cost, and would continue to expect this in the postwar period.24 As the war ended, Victory Gardens weeded over and Meatless Mondays morphed into barbeque parties, but with enriched bread something had stuck. Consumers had begun to crave extra vitamins in their food.

  This remarkable cultural shift began with efforts to convince home front fighters that enriched white bread was a lynchpin of national defense, not the staff of death. In the context of wartime mobilization, the campaign for enrichment had served as a kind of vitamin boot camp, teaching Americans to think about nutrition.

  VITAMIN BOOT CAMP

  Early market research showed that bread buyers harbored deep-seated suspicions about bakers’ enriched bread claims. Before the government made mandatory enrichment the norm, many housewives confused the word “enriched” with “richness,” assuming vitaminized bread was more fattening than regular loaves. Some believed that enriched bread was a medicinal product best reserved for sick family members, while others simply dismissed “enriched” as a meaningless advertising word.25

  Food manufacturers had enriched a few products since the 1930s, and home economists had lectured about the importance of vitamins since the 1910s, but most Americans had no idea what it all meant. A 1940 Gallup Poll found that only 9 percent of Americans knew what vitamins did. In 1941, another poll revealed that only 16 percent could distinguish between calories and vitamins. “Funny how we never knew nothin’ about vitamins or calories or dietin’ when we was young … we must a-been tough ones to live through it,” admitted Mary Anne Meehan, a cook interviewed by a Works Progress Administration oral historian in 1939. “Now don’t get me wrong. I believe in this vitamin and calory stuff alright,” she continued—but it didn’t sound that convincing.26

  If Americans were to accept the idea that individuals had a patriotic duty to eat vitamin-rich foods, a national education campaign would have to convince them. Bread seemed like a good place to start. As U.S. surgeon general Thomas Parran argued, bread enrichment offered “a way in which necessary vitamins can be put into the diet of all our people, rich and poor; for all of us eat bread in some form three times a day.”27 Just as Selective Service applied to every fighting-aged man in the country, bread touched virtually every civilian family. Bread would make a good boot camp in which civilians could learn to think about how the vitamin content of foods they ate affected national defense.

  In January 1941 the National Research Council for Defense announced that enriched bread would help the country “withstand the stresses and strains of war,” and newspapers from Marysville, Ohio, to Brainard, Minnesota, from Amarillo, Texas, to Ogden, Utah, carried the story on their front pages. The surgeon general reinforced this message in a widely read Better Homes and Gardens article. Enrichment wouldn’t just fix the busted staff of life, he insisted, it would turn bread into a weapon of national defense. “We are on the eve of a food revolution,” the Science News Letter proclaimed. “Our staff of life, bread, will be restored to an ancient estate, making it more worthy of bearing this proud title. Vitamins are coming to the rescue. … The new vitaminized flour will give modern America strength for defense in war.”28

  The message echoed out from the advice columns of Good Housekeeping:

  The Army and Navy are using enriched flour and bread because of the extra health values they offer at no extra cost. You’re in the Army, too! It’s your patriotic duty to give your family these health values by using enriched bread and flour.29

  to national advertising campaigns:

  Enriched bread—a contribution to national defense. … The vitality, the vigor, and the health of our citizens is of prime importance in our national defense program.30

  to local ad campaigns in cities and small towns across the country, like this one from Syracuse, New York:

  Cabako Bakery—Defense Through Health31

  to the bully pulpit of the U.S. Public Health Service:

  The time has come when it is the patriotic duty of every American to eat enriched bread. Don’t buy plain white bread.32

  The message couldn’t have been clearer. As a Fleischmann’s ad run in thirteen cities and three national weeklies declared, vitamin deficiency was “a bomb so powerful that it could stun a whole city—leave all the people, young and old, dull, stupefied, fumbling.” Bread fortified with Fleischmann’s enrichment products was “the defense weapon the U.S. Government itself is urging the whole country to accept.”33

  Red Cross and Civil Defense nutrition classes instructed housewives across the country to choose enriched bread. Listen America, a national radio program broadcast weekly during 1941 and 1942, put the same message in living rooms. Anthropologists developed strategies to communicate the importance of enrichment to immigrant groups, and The Modest Miracle, a Hollywood short feature sponsored by the Federal Security Agency and Standard Brands, touted vitamin bread in theaters. Meanwhile, community “Nutrition
Weeks” sponsored by bakeries and government agencies combined nutrition classes, educational film screenings, and bakery specials.34

  These efforts didn’t fall on deaf ears. Industry studies reported large increases in demand for enriched bread in the wake of propaganda campaigns. “Probably no other food and nutrition program has advanced so rapidly as the national movement to fortify cereal foods with vitamins and minerals,” General Mills vice president R. C. Sherwood announced in an address to the American Public Health Association.35 Through their combined efforts, government officials, the media, and private companies had built a foundation of awareness such that the significance of enrichment need no longer be explained.

  Enriched bread had become “the biggest sales asset of recent times in the food field,” according to a grocery trade magazine. When, after the war, a U.S. Department of Commerce pamphlet offered career advice to demobilized GIs, it could confidently recommend commercial baking because “the war-time bread enrichment program has done much to increase consumption.” “Through vigorous advertising,” it continued, “the American public has been led to a new conception of the healthful qualities of commercially baked bread.”36

  But this wasn’t just about selling bread. Defense planners believed that the enrichment campaign would engender a broader consumer consciousness around nutrition and defense—and it did. As one study reported, “the flood of publicity on enrichment helped make the public ‘vitamin conscious,’ ” and facilitated the efforts of other food industries working to connect their products with national defense. According to another source, white bread enrichment had “started a trend in food advertising and nutrition education that cannot fail to educate the American public to the value of truly ‘protective’ foods.” As the influential nutritionist Hazel K. Stiebeling reflected after the war, bread enrichment campaigns trained Americans to take vitamins seriously. Indeed, this effort worked so well that government officials and bread advertising frequently had to remind consumers that enriched bread was not a medicine or miracle.37

  The speed with which this message spread stunned even its most ardent supporters. Well before V-J Day, public health officials and war foods planners had a sense that they had achieved something remarkable and long lasting. Patting themselves on the back, they called bread enrichment “one of the most valuable and successful activities” of modern civil defense and the “beginning [of] a new era in nutrition for the American people.” Bread enrichment, Thomas C.

  Desmond declared euphorically in the New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Nutrition’s landmark 1944 report, Food in War and in Peace, had been “the key to the final solution of this Nation’s nutrition problem.” Should this achievement be carried into the postwar period, he predicted, bread “will compete with milk for the title of ‘The perfect food.’ ”38

  Desmond was right. The habit of associating enriched bread with strength carried over into the postwar period, even as former GIs moved to the suburbs en masse. And that association breathed new life into industrial bread. Celebrating enriched bread’s tenth anniversary in 1951, the Journal of Home Economics marveled at how completely enrichment’s success had silenced skeptics and “food faddists.” A Colliers article written around the same time beamed, “On the tenth anniversary of enriched bread, many medical experts say that the accomplishment is one of the greatest nutritional advances in history.” The American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and scores of local newspapers published glowing commendations, praising the bread enrichment campaign for making the United States stronger and healthier. Robert R. Williams, for his part, coined the widely circulated sound bite, “Enriched white bread is bargain health insurance for millions.” A product of mobilization for world war, the association between industrial bread and security would continue into the Cold War.39

  ROCKFORD FILES

  After World War II, Rockford, Illinois, an industrial center built by European immigrants, daring inventors, and strong labor unions, was the stuff of middle-class dreams. Although Rockford’s economy was far more industrial than the national average, it suited America’s self-image to think of it as the country’s most “typical” city, and sociologists obliged with the label. In 1949, Life shared sociologists’ discovery with the country, declaring that Rockford was “about as typical as a city can be.”40 Market researchers flocked in droves to the shores of the Rock River to observe prototypical Americans in their natural habitat. So it was here, in mid-century Rockford, that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the American Institute of Baking, and the Baking Industry Research Advisory Council collaborated on the most elaborate experimental study of bread consumption in history. The findings of the study, which ran from 1954 to 1955, spoke to a country’s love affair with fluffy white bread: 95 percent of households bought white bread once a week; 75 percent bought it more than once a week. In total, Rockfordians ate about a pound and a half of bread per person per week, regardless of age or economic class.41

  In repeated blind tests, consumer preference was clear and overwhelming: sweeter bread was better, but more importantly, fluffier bread was better. Comparing loaves of different densities, families almost always chose the lightest. But, strangely, this bread was not entirely well loved. About a third of housewives in the study described supermarket bread as “doughy; gummy; soggy; not well baked,” about 15 percent thought the taste was terrible, and as much as 18 percent thought it too airy (despite the overwhelming preference for airy bread in blind tests). Depending on the year, between 60 and 75 percent of Rockford housewives registered major complaints about their staff of life.42

  In the mid-1950s, it wouldn’t have been hard to find these tepid responses affirmed by a whole range of white bread critics writing for popular magazines and newspapers. Whether you looked at Better Homes and Gardens, Sunset, or Harper’s, homemaker advice columns in small-town newspapers or the more lofty New York Times food section, it would have been hard to find anything good said about the taste of industrial white bread. In a steady stream of newspaper articles, letters to the editors from housewives, and popular magazine features, industrial white bread was described as “cottony fluff,” “cotton batting,” “fake,” “purposeless perfection,” “inedible,” “limp,” “hot air,” “a fugitive from a test tube,” and “a doughy mass of chemicals.”43

  Yet nationwide, Americans ate a lot of industrial white bread in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As in Rockford, the vast majority of households in the United States ate store-bought white bread at all three meals—totaling some 8.6 billion loaves a year in 1954 (not including home-baked bread, and store-bought whole wheat, raisin bread, and “ethnic” breads). Most people consumed three to seven slices a day, but an astounding 33 percent of the population finished off more than eight slices a day. And this level of bread consumption cut across class: while the wealthiest 10 percent of the country consumed bread in slightly smaller quantities, the remaining nine income deciles varied little in their daily intake. Age didn’t seem to matter either: adults and children ate bread at exactly the same rate. Only gender seemed to differentiate bread eaters: women, forbidden the staff of life by many popular diets of the time, ate the least, while men and boys, associating bread with bodybuilding strength, ate the most.44

  During World War II, bread consumption, driven by the rationing of other staples, accounted for as much as 40 percent of all calories consumed in the country daily. After the war, Americans could have abandoned bread, just as they traded ration books for TV dinners. Instead, the proportion of calories derived from bread settled in at 2530 percent and then, despite the absolute certainty with which food economists and baking industry specialists predicted rapid declines in consumption, hovered around the same point through the mid-1960s. Studies remarked the high percentage of daily vitamins, iron, and protein consumers derived from the much-derided staff of life.

  Why did postwar consumers continue to eat so much industrial bread, despite widespread popular conde
mnation of its flavor and texture? Americans could have abandoned bread as a staple, as many worried bakers feared they would. They didn’t. Nor did they choose other kinds of bread in large quantities. When, from time to time, big baking companies attempted to launch lines of whole wheat bread, they invariably fell flat. And despite the continued survival of small specialty bakeries, especially in cities, rye, whole wheat, and other “ethnic” loaves offered little competition, accounting for only 8-12 percent of bread consumption during the postwar period.45

  Part of the reason Americans stuck to gummy white bread lay in the way wartime enrichment campaigns had cemented a sense that industrial white bread built strength for individual and national defense. Despite their diverse complaints about store-bought bread, Rockfordians agreed on one thing: depending on the year, 96 or 100 percent of the USDA bread study’s sample responded that their bread was highly nutritious.46

  Legions of industrial white bread critics still voiced opposition during the age of Wonder bread, but as the 1950s advanced, scientific consensus turned against them. In 1958 Consumer Reports declared that it had reversed its long-standing objection to white bread, citing “an accumulation of evidence” and a particularly convincing experiment carried out in the ruins of postwar Germany by the former white bread critic R. A. McCance. In that 1946 experiment, published in 1954 and widely cited by champions of the new consensus, McCance and his partner, E. M. Woddowson, conducted a feeding trial on 250 orphans in Duisberg and Wuppertal. The researchers had divided the orphans into five groups and fed each group a diet consisting almost entirely of one of five different types of bread (enriched white, various grades of high-extraction dark white flour, and whole wheat). “To the surprise of Dr. McCance and his associates,” Consumer Reports informed readers, “no appreciable differences whatsoever showed up in the growth of the groups of children. All grew equally well.” In another widely publicized study of enriched bread’s impacts on child health, researchers in Newfoundland claimed that fortified loaves had given bursting energy to formerly lethargic children, increased child survival rates, and ended adult listlessness, without any increase in total calories consumed.47