White Bread

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

  Health experts, food writers, and ordinary bread eaters who still felt that there was just something wrong with industrial loaves would have to find a different language other than nutrition science to express their doubts. Aesthetic and epicurean arguments, which had played a surprisingly minor role in earlier battles over the staff of life, offered the only way forward. As white-bread critic Clarence Woodbury wrote begrudgingly in Reader’s Digest, industrial white bread exceeded homemade whole wheat bread in almost every arena except one—taste. “[White bread] is, undoubtedly, pure, sanitary, wholesome, nutritious, clean, white, and beautiful—but it is utterly tasteless.”48

  This aesthetic appeal often rang hollow against the muscle-bound science of enriched white bread advocates. Take, for example, Lee Anderson’s tirade, “Busted Staff of Life,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1947. “Modern bread may well be more digestible than the bread our mothers and grandmothers used to bake each week-end, more nourishing, more scientifically pure, more enriched with those essential substances which make hair grow, eyes see better, bones get harder,” Anderson conceded. “But Grandma’s bread was bread … and if Grandpa had to wear ‘specs’ at sixty-five and lost all his teeth at eighty because his diet was deficient in vitamins, no one ever complained that the bread was at fault.”49

  With friends like these, critics of industrial white bread needed no enemies. Enriched bread might taste like a “doughy mass of chemicals,”50 but at least you kept your teeth and eyesight. Children kept their competitive edge, and the nation as a whole was stronger. Driven by the security imperative of hot and cold wars, synthetic vitamin enrichment was deeply entrenched in the American dietary consciousness.

  LOOK, MOM, IT’S LOADED!

  Bakers didn’t create the association between enriched white bread and fighting vigor, but during the early Cold War, they worked hard to reinforce it. As fighting ended in the Pacific, bakers hoped to capitalize on the buoyant success of enrichment, but they had to wait. Famine had staked its claim on the immediate postwar period. With bad winters in Europe and crop failures throughout Asia, 1946 and 1947 were desperate years of worldwide grain shortage and mass starvation. In the United States, Truman, struggling to free up wheat for overseas relief, called on consumers to eat less bread and contemplated rationing the staple, something the country had avoided even in the darkest days of the war. Bakers reluctantly postponed their plans for a massive postwar advertising blitz focused on the health-building benefits of enriched bread and aimed at consumers, medical professionals, and nutritionists.51

  Then in 1948 and 1949, with the immediate global food crisis over, bakers mobilized to pick up where they had left off during the war. Advertising images of war industry workers and soldiers segued smoothly into images of children—mostly boys—engaged in competitive striving for physical and mental superiority. In these ads, boys lunged at fleeing girls, wrestled each other, triumphantly waved straight-A report cards, supported enormous weights, and grew bones, teeth, muscle, and brain cells at explosive rates. Mrs. Bohnet’s Bread in San Antonio helped a skinny boy drive railroad spikes with a toy hammer while burly tracklayers looked on in amazement. Hol-sum enriched bread gave “Johnny” the energy to swing from chandeliers over his listless, non-bread-eating sister, and a Town Talk bread poster showed a tiny bruiser tackling his grandfather on the football field. Even the Schneider Baking Company’s “Little Miss Sunbeam” reminded consumers that Uncle Sam wanted them to “reach for energy-packed bread.”

  Sometimes ads made the competitive message painfully clear— “Winners Eat Ward’s” and ads featuring running races come to mind. Other times it was less obvious, as in the widespread presence of scientific-looking charts and graphs against which parents could measure their child’s growth achievements against others’. “Most youngsters today are taller, healthier than children were a generation ago. … What about your children?” asked a Jane Parker ad from 1954.

  The message that bread was a weapons delivery system grew less explicit after the war, but it was still there. Under the title “Reach! Mom … It’s loaded!” a 1953 ad for Jane Parker enriched white bread, portraying a cowboy-hat-wearing, pistol-wielding boy reminded readers that bread was “loaded.” Most bread companies, it seemed, wanted to have their loaves associated with gunslinging cowboys in some way. Wonder, Wheatty, Merita, Jaeger, and Bond, to name a few, all hawked bread with images of Western action. Bread was for fighting, as one of the very last ad series in this genre—a 1970 Wonder bread ad featuring a discouraged boy with a black eye—made clear. That ad packed a stiff punch with the text “Bigger than Kevin. That’s how big I want to be” over the head of the beaten boy.

  With the country’s burgeoning fertility rates, the shift in focus from soldiers and war workers to children made sense. Baking industry advertising had focused on children in the past, of course. Before the war, however, it typically portrayed them as innocents to be protected through scientific hygiene, as cuddly objects symbolizing purity and wholesomeness, or as fragile objects of care. What changed after World War II was not the focus on children in bread advertising; it was the ubiquitous language of competitive striving used in that effort.

  Baby boomer nostalgia paints early Cold War childhood as an age of play and plenty. And it was, for many Americans, at least.52 But anxiety and competition underpinned play and plenty. Boys’ toys took an emphatically bellicose form and the new media of television served up a steady stream of aggressive masculinity and Manichean struggle. Of the top twenty-five TV shows in the late 1950s, nearly half featured cowboys. “In an era marked by anxiety over masculinity and intense hostility toward homosexuality, boy culture emphasized toughness and aggression,” the renowned historian of childhood Steven Mintz argues. And this could not be separated from the larger political culture: “During the Cold War there was a symbolic connection between the struggle with the Soviet Union and the battles boys acted out at recess and in backyards.”53

  By 1948, the jubilant optimism felt after V-J Day had been battered by one crisis after another, and was about to disappear for good. Although historians disagree avidly about just how actively afraid ordinary folks felt as they went about their daily business in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a strong current of anxiety clearly flowed beneath the shiny surfaces of the time. George Kennan defined the moment in his 1946 Long Telegram, which clearly and unflinchingly introduced the country to a world organized around two antagonistic, irreconcilable poles, with freedom, justice, free enterprise, and the American way hanging in the balance. Again.54

  Wonder bread rolled out its iconic “Builds a Body 8 Ways” ad campaign in the thick of the Berlin Airlift and, during its first year, it would have shared newspaper space with the first Soviet atomic bomb test, the first major FBI report on Communist subversives in Hollywood, the creation of the German Democratic Republic, the declaration of the People’s Republic of China, rising tensions on the Korean peninsula, and the last bloody gasps of the Greek civil war. Indeed, Wonder bread’s infamous campaign—which would later run afoul of the FTC for its extreme claims about bread’s ability to boost children’s performance—mapped fairly neatly onto the peak years of the Red Scare. Regardless of how scared Americans actually felt while slathering oleo on their morning toast and reading the paper, the promise of peace had been shattered and replaced by a commitment to perpetual readiness.55

  Atomic-age civil defense planners knew how important bread was. Reflecting back on the London Blitz and Berlin Airlift from the vantage of the early 1950s, civil defense experts noted that “under such conditions the consumption of bread rose to twice the usual level. Bread, the staff of life, apparently becomes all the more a staple food in times of severe stress.” After a nuclear attack, they concluded in numerous reports, bread would probably be the main source of food for the affected population. The USDA and other government agencies mobilized bakers to prepare for attacks and put the public on notice to expect a “bread and water diet when [
the] A-bomb strikes.” In 1951, the popular science and technology magazine Science News Letter urged New Yorkers to keep a good supply of spreads like jam and peanut butter on hand to perk up their bread and water diet in anything “short of a complete disaster.” Even if keeping peanut butter and jelly on hand for nuclear holocaust lunches wasn’t at the top of most housewives’ to-do lists, kitchens were still battlegrounds. The invisible germs and swarthy immigrants that threatened domestic hygiene and national vitality in the early twentieth century had given way to the Communist menace.56

  As in previous periods of national emergency, Cold War popular culture consistently depicted mothers as both the country’s first line of defense against invisible enemies—and, potentially, its weakest link. According to the emergent logic of permanent readiness, mothers would oversee the creation of warm, protective havens for the country’s future Cold Warriors, while guarding against maternal instincts that might produce overly soft “mamma’s boys.”57

  In the heat of the early Cold War, mothers made sure their families ate for victory, but not just so that they could fight in faraway lands. Cold Warriors would have to compete on multiple seemingly mundane fronts. As K. A. Cuordileone observed in his history of postwar manhood, competition on the high school football field, in the national marketplace, and in the international arms and science races blurred together into one critical effort aimed at demonstrating the superiority of the American way. Competitive spirit in the pursuit of individual happiness represented America’s secret weapon against the powerful machine of Soviet command and control.58

  In this context, health and vigor sold bread far more than taste or freshness. As the frequent Colliers contributor Robert Froman lamented in 1951, it grieved most bakers “that their bread is often judged not chiefly for its taste and appetite appeal, as are other foods, but for its nutritional values.”59

  The postwar association between industrial white bread and competitive vigor could easily have been reversed. After all, driven by consumers’ mistaken idea that softer bread meant fresher bread, the baking industry had begun using a witch’s brew of chemical dough conditioners to pump the standard white balloon loaf from its already fairly soft prewar seven cubic centimeters per ounce to its ethereal postwar ten cubic centimeters per ounce. If the country feared soft boys, why feed children history’s softest bread? Warren E. Siegmond, an heir to H. L. Mencken’s contrarian conservatism, took aim at white bread using just this argument. Writing in the American Mercury in 1958, he dared fathers to test the wisdom of their wives’ supermarket selection: “Make this simple test. Take a piece of white bread and tear out the center. Now roll it into a ball until the whole thing is a doughy mass of chemicals. Bounce it on the floor; it rivals rubber! Is this food that will see your child through an active school day?”60

  Christian Science Monitor critic Horace Reynolds made an even scarier observation about soft bread: “Modern industrialism has ruined American bread. … It’s so soft and spongy you can contract it with your hands, mold it any shape you’ve a mind to. … The soft, fluffy center is like a mouthful of powder puff. The more you eat the hungrier you get. This is what America’s staff of life has come to. It’s a pretty soft staff. The Russians are leaning on something more substantial. … What America needs is bread with crust to exercise the teeth and stick to the ribs, ribs to strengthen the heart for the tasks which lie ahead.”61

  A few took the warnings seriously: for a period, the New York public school system replaced its students’ standard white bread with a loaf based on McCay’s high-protein “Do-Good” defense bread, and the U.S. Congress convened long hearings about the safety of bread softeners. But the war-trained habit of associating white bread with vitamins, strength, and readiness survived those attacks. In fact, it deepened. While bread manufacturers lured moms with advertising images of tough boys doing tough things, a new scientific and public health consensus formed around the surprising idea that America’s pillowy soft bread measured up as sturdily, if not more sturdily, than the bread of any other land. By the end of the 1950s, even industrial bread’s most ardent critics would concede this point.

  AFTERMATHS OF ENRICHMENT

  Synthetic enrichment transformed the way America thought about and ate bread. Thanks to the imperative of building a strong national defense, it did so in a way that was relatively egalitarian. National health was too important to be left to the whims and fashions of elite consumers, which seem to drive present-day food movements. And this raises interesting questions for us today. Thinking back on the wartime campaign for enrichment, I can’t help but wonder what level of urgency it would take to move present-day America toward a future where everyone, not just elite shoppers, had access to healthy, safe, environmentally and socially responsible food. Perhaps expanding national security to include food security is just what we need.

  At the same time we should realize that during World War II, intense concern about nutrition and national defense pushed aside alternative ideas about improving America’s most important food, smoothing the way for the triumph of an expedient compromise dominated by mainstream nutrition scientists, industry voices, and government agencies. In the long run, by redeeming sliced white bread in the face of scientific criticism, the association of food and defense brought the country another step closer to the wholesale triumph of chemically infused, Styrofoam-textured white bread. Indeed, without the wartime campaign for enrichment and the government-backed dismissal of nonsynthetically enriched “health breads” that accompanied it, we might not have witnessed the postwar golden age of Wonder bread. Industrial bakers’ ability to associate their product with vigorous defense and spirited competition saved sliced white bread from declining consumption. Ultimately it helped lay a foundation for the postwar triumph of processed foods.

  Today, local foodies, health food advocates, and anti-obesity crusaders might consider industrial white bread a national security threat, not an asset. But, in some important way, they owe their ability to speak easily about diet and defense to the training Americans received in the WWII-era campaign for synthetic bread enrichment. In this sense, they inherit a language with the power to galvanize rapid change, stir communities into action, and join disparate interests with a common purpose. But they should also know that urgency comes with a price. Even the most well-intentioned food activists might find that playing the national security card facilitates unfortunate coalitions and limits options where they had hoped to open new horizons.

  5

  WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM

  Dreams of Peace and Security

  Bread comes from America and it does not come from Russia.

  —Hamilton Fish, 1947

  MUNDO BIMBO

  Even as anti-immigrant fervor gripped large parts of the United States during the 2000s, one unexpected border crosser was doing quite well in the land of white bread. Since 1996, Mexico’s industrial baking giant Grupo Bimbo had been quietly acquiring some of its northern neighbor’s most iconic bakery brands. After its takeover of Weston Foods in 2010 and of Sara Lee in 2011, Bimbo poised itself to become the United States’ largest industrial bread baker. With almost $10 billion in global sales in 2009, one hundred thousand employees, and operations in eighteen countries from Chile to China, it was already one of the world’s biggest. How did a Mexican company get so far baking such a supposedly “American” food? And how did pan gringo take hold in the land of corn tortillas anyway?

  When I first visited Mexico as a student in 1991, my lower-middle-class host family served pan Bimbo for breakfast—every morning for a hundred days: three hundred slices of the softest, whitest bread I had ever eaten. No matter how I begged to eat a more “Mexican” breakfast, no matter how much my host mother smiled and nodded at my pitiful pleading, Bimbo bread always awaited me on the kitchen patio. Perhaps my host mother believed that sliced white bread suited a gringo like me. Maybe it was just cheap and convenient. Twenty years later, sitting in a taxi on my way to Bimbo’
s headquarters, still trying to unscramble the mystery of those breakfasts, I asked the driver about the appeal of supermarket bread. Mexicans will never give up corn tortillas, he assured me. But there was something “attractive” about Bimbo bread. His family ate it at most breakfasts and some lunches. It wasn’t the flavor that drew him to white bread: Bimbo bread tastes like cotton, he confessed with a self-deprecating laugh. “I don’t know why we like it so much, but we do.”

  Understanding the ascendance of sliced white bread in Mexico requires a foray into the politics of what has come to be called “the Mexican Miracle,” a thirty-year period from the 1940s to 1970s marked by high levels of economic growth, explosive industrialization, and rapid urbanization. For better and for worse, that miracle rested on a foundation of cheap, “modern” foods like Bimbo—made possible by government subsidies and incredible advances in agricultural productivity. Just as Mexico’s industries and cities grew during this period, its farms came to look ever more like factories. Mexico produced unprecedented quantities of food, easily outpacing the country’s rapid population growth. And yet, in this new world of industrial food production, more Mexicans went hungry. Modern agriculture facilitated explosive industrial growth and social peace in the cities, but took a toll on rural workers and peasant farmers, forcing millions from the countryside into urban slums. Through all that tumultuous social change, Bimbo bread stood as a kind of promissory note, a graspable piece of a future yet to come.