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January 29 - January 30, 2021
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
A 1907 ordinance established guidelines for bakery construction, outlawed sleeping in bakeries, and mandated regular inspections. Later, a second ordinance banned cellar bakeries outright.
in 1908 only thirty of one thousand bakeries inspected under Chicago’s new ordinance passed without citation.36 At least they had been inspected. In New York, thousands of cellar bakeries went virtually unregulated.
In her testimony before the committee, Perkins repeatedly emphasized bakeries’ criminal lack of ventilation. The toll poor air quality took on the lungs of journeymen bakers was horrific. As a public health doctor confirmed later in the hearings, nearly 100 percent of bakery workers in New York showed signs of tuberculosis, bronchitis, and other lung infections.
With a few exceptions, committee members darted around witnesses’ appeals for workplace safety regulations, restating the bakery problem as a question of how best to control immigrant workers.
Indeed, in both Chicago and New York, public uproar about cellar bakery conditions was hard to separate from larger anxieties about the habits of the nation’s new Jewish and Italian immigrants.
Sensationalist accounts of dangerous bread likely reflected unease about newcomers more than any real hazards posed by eating the product of their ovens. And this is, in the end, the grain of salt with which we must take fears of cellar bakeries—and a clue to why bakeries like the Wards’ flourished.
Strange as it might seem to contemporary foodies, in the early twentieth century the language of “knowing where your food comes from” was a public relations coup for industrial food.
Consumers around the country flocked to witness the spectacle of sanitary baking. They crowded around the glass of smaller “window bakeries,” where all operations could be viewed from the street, and lined up for tours of larger factories.
By 1913, every major city was home to several sanitary bakeries, and small towns were close behind. In 1915, the Ogden Standard in Utah proudly declared that the town’s thirty thousand people enjoyed access to no fewer than six sanitary bakeries producing “loaves of bread that our ancestors of only a generation ago would think beyond the power of a baker.”
Fascinated by the new world of microbiology, the authors of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on baking science frequently adopted the language of disease. The Complete Bread, Cake, and Cracker Baker, for example, casually noted that leavening contained “numerous organisms of disease,” which produced “numerous sources of disease action.”
raw food guru Eugene Christian, known for his incendiary tract “Why Some Foods Explode in Your Stomach,”
During the late nineteenth century, fear of fermentation led to a small craze for chemically leavened “aerated bread” on both sides of the Atlantic. New York City health commissioner Cyrus Edson went as far as to declare, “Bread which is wholesome should not be raised with yeast, but with a pure baking powder.”
As Mother’s Magazine warned, children’s “bread must be thoroughly cooked, for if the yeast spores escape the heat, as soon as they come into contact with the sugar in the stomach they grow and produce fermentation.”
Oh ffs
With little actual evidence that poorly baked bread made people sick, the generalized cloud of anxiety around bread production gradually converged into one (slightly) more reasonable fear: by 1913, the country’s food experts and health campaigners fixed their attention on the handling of bread after it left the bakery.
As the public cry for wrapped bread spread across the country between 1912 and 1914, however, bakers balked. Wrapping bread was complicated and labor intensive. Materials and machines were not yet adequate for the job, and it would probably damage flavor, they argued. It would certainly raise costs.
Small bakers simply could not compete against the massed economic and cultural power of the trusts. Thus, even as the country’s consumption of bakery bread soared in the first decades of the twentieth century, the number of bakeries fell dramatically.
She urged housewives to follow strict sanitary procedures and educate themselves by conducting yeast gas experiments in test tubes and Petri dishes.
Really? I'm a nerd and I don't do that crap.
The destruction of craft baking, the replacement of skilled labor with machines, and the concentration of baking into ever larger and more distant factories were not solely the product of insatiable greed or capitalist competition. They arose out of often well-meaning and earnest concern for food safety.
It’s easy, from our vantage, to discount the wondrous appeal of industrial purity and hygiene, but this attitude does disservice to a time when food-borne illnesses were the leading causes of death, when disruptions in the provision of a single staple could unleash fears of famine and rebellion.
early twentieth-century bread choices were not just about class and distinction in general, but rather about a specific form of social difference constructed around the very lines of life and death, health and disease.
Even some food safety advocates conceded that widely cited estimates of the prevalence of food-borne illness might be exaggerated. Still, fears continued, sometimes escalating into panic.
resurgent anxiety about food safety also reflects other, more social dynamics. History suggests that anxiety about food contamination generally intensifies during periods of perceived upheaval: in moments of expanding globalization, rapid demographic changes, immigrant influxes, and swiftly evolving technology.
They trusted our milk, and I’ve never fully understood why. In part, our friends trusted Kate and me, and that sufficed. More importantly, they trusted the experienced older couple teaching us. But, in a lot of ways, our friends were also placing their faith in a dream of good food.
“People around here like farmers’ markets,” the past director of my local farmers’ market told a public gathering, “because you never know what those Third World people are putting in imported food.” Less xenophobically, my food politics students trust the meat from Walla Walla’s organic grass-fed beef producer, not because they’ve checked the ranch’s paperwork, but because they’ve gotten to know the owner and toured the operation.
worker safety concerns are food safety concerns and vice versa.
When we seek out “where our food comes from,” we want to see a smiling farm-owning family, not a poor immigrant labor force.
In the worst cases, however, food safety concerns react with racism and xenophobia to enflame hatred. As in the case of my local farmers’ market director, it is sometimes hard to separate food safety concerns from fear of strangers.
Noted raw milk advocate Dr. William Campbell Douglass, for example, issued a widely cited statement in 2008 arguing that dirty illegal immigrant food chain workers were making Americans sick, infecting the country’s sustenance with diseases ranging from tuberculosis to leprosy to STDs. That these diseases are not typically spread through food didn’t matter.
What becomes clear from the story of bread, however, is that fears of threat to the social body don’t remain neatly moored in purely alimentary realms.
And for several years, until Walla Walla hatched a good European-style bakery of its own, Brasserie Four—this shrine to the local and artisanal—served baguettes made by Japanese robots twelve hundred miles away.
Brasserie Four’s baguettes, produced by La Brea Bakeries in Los Angeles and shipped frozen to groceries and restaurants around the world, were clearly the product of care, slow fermentation, and simple ingredients, not a chemically pumped speed dough like most ersatz “French bread” in town.
On the outside, La Brea’s global production facility was a beige shell in a bland industrial park. Nothing immediately screamed “bakery.” Inside, with its massive stainless steel tanks, circulatory system of tubes and pipes, cool, clean air, and humming conveyor belts, the place might as well have been a large milk bottler or apple-processing plant. But then I saw the baguettes.
When the 80 percent-baked baguettes finally descend to earth, it is through the machine that makes La Brea’s far-flung distribution possible: a massive blast freezer that inserts fresh, preservative-free bread into the global food system. Human hands touch the loaves at exactly two points: each loaf is hand straightened and hand slashed before baking.
The slicing machine’s inventor, Otto Rohwedder, unappreciated and down on his luck, had achieved something nearly every member of the industrial baking establishment thought impossible. Retail bakers had used machines to slice loaves at the point of sale for years, but few people in the industry believed that bread could be automatically sliced as it came off the assembly line. Bread was too unruly.
Otto Rohwedder’s initial design for a five-foot-long “power driven multi-bladed bread slicer” dated back to 1917, but he found no takers for the idea and had almost given up hope.
Sliced bread took off first in Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois, then spread throughout the Midwest by late summer 1928. By fall 1928 mechanical slicing hit the West Coast, and appeared in New York and New Jersey by October. Slicing got easier too, as bakers realized that the wooden pins Rohwedder and Bench had used to hold sliced loaves together were not necessary; the wrapper sufficed.
