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

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

The Arnot Baking Company in Jacksonville, Florida, learned this the hard way. For two long years it tried to hold out against the new technology, even as it hemorrhaged customers to bakers offering sliced bread. Arnot reduced prices and increased the richness of its doughs, but still the company’s unsliced loaves lost market share. Finally, in 1931, Arnot installed a slicer and reported an immediate 600 percent increase in sales.

By 1930, half a dozen companies manufactured commercial bread slicers, and by 1936, 90 percent of the country’s commercial bread was sliced.

How much extra work is it really to slice your own bread? Quite a bit, as it turned out. And the reason for this difficulty lay in the very processes of industrialization bread had undergone in the preceding decades.

Softness had become customers’ proxy for freshness, and savvy bakery scientists turned their minds to engineering even more squeezable loaves.

As a result of the drive toward softer bread, industry observers noted that modern loaves had become almost impossible to slice neatly at home. Without exaggeration and with only a little bit of whimsy, we can speak of a messy collision between the preternaturally soft loaves of machine-age baking and the dull cutlery of turn-of-the-century kitchens.

Industrial bread exudes a modernist aesthetic, and it didn’t get that way by accident.

Streamlined design channeled a love of industrial efficiency into the nooks and crannies of Victorian frill and Craftsman style. It began with vehicles—smoothing, tapering, and lengthening their lines to help them slip efficiently through air. It was a seductive look, all speed and glamour, and it spread quickly to objects with no need to foil drag. Irons, pencil sharpeners, and kitchen mixers got lean and smooth.

Even vegetables got remade in the image of rocket ships. As historian Christina Cogdell notes, “Carrots were being transformed [by plant breeders] from ‘short chubby roots’ into ‘far’ more ‘attractive’ ‘long slim beauties.’ ”12

In advertising images of bread from the 1920s and 1930s, loaves look for all the world like Bauhaus office blocks or Le Corbusier chairs.13 This was more than just a visual style. It was a political statement about the future.

the ethos of scientific eating definitely helped bakers. And they certainly nurtured it. During the first decades of the twentieth century, displays of scientific expertise would provide a key weapon in professional bakers’ all-out war against home bread making.

Home bakers had tremendous sanitary advantage over distant factories. You didn’t have to take a tour to see how your bread was baked, or guess at the health and habits of your baker. People had baked bread at home for millennia without disaster. As a result, industrial bakers and their allies in home economics could get only so far depicting homemade bread as a biohazard.

Bakers’ smug paternalism might have infuriated the ranks of middle-class women championing food reforms and social improvement—except that they were just as ensorcelled as bakers.

Home economists’ support for professional baking, in turn, reflected an important change in the beliefs about women’s role in the family. As a Pennsylvania journalist explained in 1914, “The modern woman has out-grown the idea that a mother can best serve her children by slaving for them over the hot stove. Self-improvement is the mother’s first duty.”

In this new vision of domesticity, a good housewife was a professional manager making smart choices to maximize her family’s health and prospects. As the chair of the University of Chicago’s home economics department predicted: in the past, women were judged by their ability to make good bread, in the future they would be judged by their skill at buying it.

slicing put bread’s structure on display as never before. Crumb irregularities and unevenness that were once acceptable, or easily blamed on customers’ deficient skills with bread knives, were now immediately apparent to anyone opening a package of bread.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Scientific household management, as Ruth Schwartz Cowan showed in her aptly named book More Work for Mother, placed more pressures on women, not fewer.

Cost savings from efficiency were not always passed on to consumers.

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?

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.”

Whether through rigorous dieting, intense exercise, or almost religious attention to the latest missives of nutrition science, rituals of control over one’s body are a key marker of elite status and responsible personhood.

As a student of food history, I knew that diet gurus often operate like this: introducing small grains of doubt into the comfortable confidence of mainstream science. These small grains of doubt are always just within the realm of the plausible, and they always gain traction by playing on already existing anxieties.

proponents might be right about structural problems in the U.S. food system, I concluded, but their individualistic “Not in my body” solution was all wrong.

I realized that, as a consumer, I could weigh evidence on either side of the scientific debate all day without getting anywhere, but as a student of history, I could offer another way of looking at the problem: regardless of whether I believed that widespread gluten intolerance was “real” or not, I knew that we could learn a lot by thinking about the decidedly social dreams rolled up in debates about gluten and health.

In going gluten free, I was participating in a very old and very American dream: a deep and abiding belief in the ability to fine-tune and maximize the moral and physical health of my body and my nation by eating the right food—an irrepressible confidence in the power of proper diet to cure almost all physical and social ills.

Indeed, for almost as long as Western culture has existed, it has been accompanied by anxieties about wheat or its refining. Recall, for example, Plato’s discussion in The Republic about the impact of refined wheat on society’s moral health, and consider the seventeenth-century celebrity diet guru Thomas Tryon, who warned Britons that eating overly refined or poorly baked loaves upset Nature and Reason.

In 1924, the industry magazine Baking Technology warned readers of rampant “amylophobia” sweeping the country.14 Literally the fear of starch, amylophobia, in the writer’s usage, encompassed an amorphous, spreading sense that modern bread—either all wheat bread or just its white, refined form—did something bad to bodies.

This chapter suggests that, as strange and exaggerated as 1920s and 1930s “amylophobia” might seem, it has a lot to teach us about the political and psychic costs of our national fixation on achieving perfect health through dietary discipline.

Today, if we remember him at all, we remember Sylvester Graham as the inventor of the graham cracker (which he wasn’t) or “the father of American vegetarianism” (which he may have been).

Medical journals ran tempestuous debates about his principles, while mob violence stalked his speaking engagements up and down the East Coast. Even after his death in 1850, controversy raged about what an autopsy revealed about the condition of his intestines.

Before all that, though, Sylvester Graham was the seventeenth son of an elderly father and an insane mother, born sickly and not expected to thrive.