White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

Perhaps more than any other food in the United States, what you think of sliced white bread says a lot about who you are. Over the past hundred years, it has served as a touchstone for the fears and aspirations of racial eugenicists, military strategists, social reformers, food gurus, and gourmet tastemakers.

1970s style arbiter Diana Vreeland famously proclaimed, “People who eat white bread have no dreams”

As important as it has been—both as sustenance and symbol—bread is not something that typically gets written about in diaries, described in letters, or remembered in oral histories.

Unlike other bewitching icons of industrial eating that mark the past century and a half—unlike Twinkies, TV dinners, Jell-O, and Jet-Puffed anything—bread was, and is, just bread.

My sources range from the letters of early twentieth-century food reformers to the records of Allied occupation forces in postwar Japan (detailing how teaching Japanese schoolchildren to eat white bread would improve their “democratic spirit”).

through all this, I began to understand that dreams of good bread and fears of bad bread are not innocent. They channel much bigger social concerns.

Rather, it’s a history of the countless social reformers, food experts, industry executives, government officials, diet gurus, and ordinary eaters who have thought that getting Americans to eat the right bread (or avoid the wrong bread) could save the world—or at least restore the country’s moral, physical, and social fabric.

Fluffy white industrial bread may be about as far from the ideals of slow, local, organic, and health food reformers as you can get today. But, in many ways, we owe its very existence to a string of just as well-meaning efforts to improve the way America ate.

The word “companion” itself came into English from the Latin roots com and pan—“with bread.”

There is a reason why the word “bread” means “food in general” in so many languages and why it has carried so much weight for so many people. “The bread question”—how to make bread, whether there is enough, how much it costs, and whether it is good enough—has haunted social and political life for millennia.

The world’s first class structures formed around bread distribution. Armies marched with it and formal religious ritual revolved around it. If I was desperately scrambling because I thought bread was important for a wedding celebration in Tucson, at least I had very good company.

Archeological evidence from Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic suggests that people were grinding plants into flour to make crude flat breads as early as 28,000 BCE.

Although the degree to which bread formed the central component of human diet varied greatly by region, epoch, and social hierarchy, the biblical proverb simply didn’t hold up even in the time and place of its writing: man did subsist on bread alone, or at least fairly close to it in the ancient Middle East.

Subjects of the Assyrian Empire ate a mixed diet of legumes, onions, greens, and meat from sheep and goats, but social order revolved around a centrally controlled bread ration.

soldiers were known for eating so much bread—a ration of four pounds per day—that Greeks called Egyptians artophagoi, “the bread eaters.”

In thirteenth-century Britain, for example, workers on feudal manors ate 70–80 percent of their daily calories in the form of bread and cheese. Beer, essentially liquid bread, made up much of the remaining 20–30 percent, with meat, fruit, and vegetables appearing as rare seasonal treats.

The advent of modernity didn’t do much to change Europeans’ reliance on bread. Residents of seventeenth-century Sienna consumed between two and three pounds of bread per person every day.

Speaking very broadly, we can say that from the 1600s to as late as the 1950s, Europeans received between 40 to 60 percent of their daily calories in the form of bread.

From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Americans got, on average, 25–30 percent of their daily calories from bread, a figure that began to dip significantly only in the late 1960s.

In October 1789, it was French women’s outrage over, among other things, the monarchy’s lavish dining during a time of high bread prices that tipped the balance in favor of the masses.

A number of different offenses triggered the march, but when the women reached Versailles, their anger shifted to bread. Chanting, “Bread! Bread! Bread!” and facing little resistance from sympathetic National Guardsmen, the women ransacked the palace.

As the royal carriage left Versailles for the last time, thousands of women surrounded it, triumphantly brandishing loaves of bread speared on the tips of bayonets.

From 1266 to 1863, the English Assize of Bread strictly regulated bread sales and bakery profits. But even that system wasn’t perfect, and bread riots regularly erupted during moments of waning faith in the benevolence of government.

The modern English word “lord” still carries this political history in its bones. Lord derives from the Old English title “hláford”— “keeper of the bread”—a privileged status, but also a perpetually anxious one.

Throughout history, the village baker was not the jolly, romantic figure we picture today. Not only was the baker the target of intense government regulation, but his almost absolute control over people’s sustenance made him socially suspect. Accused—often with good reason—of false weights, grain hoarding, hunger profiteering, and cutting flour with cheap whiteners like chalk, alum, or borax, bakers earned dubious reputations over the centuries.

On average, Americans today get less than a quarter of their calories from grain, and much of that takes the form of breakfast cereals and snacks. No single item accounts for anything close to a third of the U.S. diet anymore—not even high fructose corn syrup.

From the very first city-states, bread sustained serfs, merchants, slaves, kings, and gods alike—but they did not all eat the same bread.

In most times and places throughout history, the social order of bread arrayed itself in a spectrum from the lightest, whitest, and most wheaten for elites to darker, chewier, and more admixed loaves for the rest.

In early twentieth-century America, for example, it would have been almost impossible to escape the message, conveyed by food advertising, scientific studies, political cartoons, foreign correspondents, and even church sermons, that only savage peoples and unwashed immigrants ate dense, dark bread.

Whether white or dark bread constituted the best foundation for a vigorous, moral society was quite possibly the first great food fight. Plato debates this question in The Republic, concluding that the ideal polis must be built on dark, hearty rural loaves, not soft, citified white ones.

While the type of bread one eats has long marked one’s social position, more abstract ideas about what counts as “good bread” shape the very ground on which social groups interact.

And when back-to-the-land movements of the 1840s and 1960s contended that hearty whole wheat bread baked on independent family farms was a bedrock of democratic society, they rarely stopped to ask themselves who got left out of this invariably white and propertied vision.

It wasn’t just the high price tags, pale skin tones, or collective sensibility of the comfortably liberal, comfortably professional populace. In many ways, the thing that made me realize how affluent and how white the alternative food movement could be was the strenuous, back-bending-Berkeley-yoga-studio effort it made to insist that it wasn’t (or didn’t have to be).

As Julie Guthman, a keen observer of the Berkeley food scene, has noted, there is a difference between inviting others to sit at the table you’ve laid and engaging with people about how the table got made in the first place.

dreams of good food play a unique role in the creation of social distinctions: they link individual consumption decisions to the health of the whole society in a way that seems natural and physiological, not socially produced.

Often the problem was not the food dream itself, but what the dream made invisible.

In the 1830s, food guru Sylvester Graham—the man whose followers would give America both the humble graham cracker and the lofty belief that there is something morally virtuous about whole wheat—achieved celebrity status by blaming Irish and black New Yorkers for a cholera epidemic.

In retrospect, there was nothing wrong with Graham’s prescription for healthy eating. It was a bit ascetic for my taste—whole wheat bread, fruit, nuts, fresh water, and no spices, meat, sugar, caffeine, or alcohol—but it was probably a reasonable reaction against the country’s relentless diet of meat, boiled vegetables, white bread, and booze.

The problem was that his vision of better society through better eating made such a neat panacea that he missed the real reason poor New Yorkers died from cholera: grueling labor conditions, low wages, corrupt government, and profiteering by vendors of clean water.

Ironically, good jobs making processed foods that many would disdainfully label “bad food” have been replaced by low-paid work serving eaters of “good food.”

Since then I have drunk a lot of raw milk, most of it illegal, thanks to strict government regulations slanted toward large high-tech dairies.

Uh no that shit is dangerous you incredible dumbass.

Still, when it came to protecting stomachs, the Pure Foods Movement, as it came to be called, achieved substantial reforms. Pure Foods activists forced manufacturers to change the way they handled and distributed food, boycotted unsanitary establishments out of business, forced state and local officials to take food safety more seriously, and passed what still serves as a the bedrock of all federal food safety regulation, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.

On the other hand, few Americans alive today can imagine a time when the specter of unclean bread was as scary as germ-clotted milk or tainted beef. And yet, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the menace of contaminated bread was no less a topic of public outcry than dirty meat or milk.

Early twentieth-century bread fears also confused food purity and social purity in a way that placed the blame for unsafe food on some of the food systems’ greatest victims and distracted attention from more systemic pressures, creating danger and vulnerability.

In the early twentieth century, when average Americans got 30 percent of their daily calories from bread, more than any other single food, New Yorkers ate more bread than any other group in the country. New Yorkers also purchased more of their bread than the rest of the country, and they bought a lot of it from the Ward Baking Company.

The Ward Bakery went up in Brooklyn at a moment when poor wheat harvests, commodity speculation, and the power of railroad monopolies had stressed bread supplies, causing occasional riots and widespread fear of famine.

The country was divided on how bread should be produced in the first place. As one national household advice columnist wrote in 1900, “No subject in the history of foods has been of such vital importance or aroused so much diversion of opinion as bread making.”

Unprecedented influxes of southern and eastern European immigrants, rapid urbanization, explosive technological change, and a series of grave economic downturns strained old institutions built around the dream of an Anglo-Saxon nation of self-sufficient rural communities. Thrust into an emerging system of global grain trading and financial speculation, rural America reeled.

As many groups faced with great upheavals have done throughout history, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white Americans scapegoated—placing the blame for large-scale social change on immigrants and minorities.

And yet, amidst all the exclusion and vitriol, other ways of responding to upheaval, championed by both working-class organized labor and an emerging population of middle-class professionals, produced some of the most important and inclusive social reforms in U.S. history: child labor laws, wage regulations, antitrust legislation, worker safety protections and, of course, food safety laws.