99% Invisible - 137- Good Bread

Episode Date: October 22, 2014

The first print advertisement for Wonder Bread came out before the bread itself. It stated only that “a wonder” was coming. In a lot of ways, the statement was true. Wonder Bread was the perfect loaf.  “Slow food” advocates have pronounced industrial … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. Eat one the bread. I'm Roman Mars. When I think about white bread, I usually think of wonder bread, and I can picture the loaves all lined up on the grocery store shelves in perfect uniform rows. The red, yellow, and blue circles on the wonder bread label were supposed to conjure balloons floating away, taking us somewhere, somewhere wondrous, somewhere better. The first print advertisement for Wonder Bread, which actually came out before the bread itself, stated only that a wonder was coming.

That's Wonder Boy's Sam Greenspan. And in a lot of ways in its time, Wonder Bread really was a wonder. It was the perfect loaf. But now, white bread, and not just wonder bread, but really any brand of industrially produced white bread, it's thought of by food purists as part of a problem. The problem being that we don't know where our food comes from, and we might be consuming impure and unhealthy ingredients. The funny thing is, industrial white bread, that evenly sliced, squishy, moist, perfectly

white and wondrous loaf was once the highly designed solution to that very same problem. You want to grow bigger and stronger, don't you? Go! Sure! OK, a sandwich daily in two slices of wonder bread every meal gives you eight elements you need. For much of human history, bread has been, and still is, one of the most important foods. Our human ancestors 30,000 years ago

had a crude form of bread, nearly every culture on earth has some form of bread, and the importance of bread is, shall we say, baked into language. Take, for instance, the word companion. If we take the word companion back to its Latin roots, we get calm, which is with and pan, which is bread. So a companion is someone that you sit down and you break bread with. That's our guide to all things bread, Aaron Bobro Strain. He's the author of the book,

White Bread, a social history of the store bought loaf. In his book, Aaron also talks about the word Lord. It White bread a social history of the store bought loaf in his book Aaron also talks about the word Lord. It comes from a word in Old English I'm not sure how to pronounce it exactly but on paper. It looks like Clafford H. L. A. F. O. R. D Clafford and that meant the keeper of bread or the person who gives bread And that's striking because it it tells us the very act of political rule was wrapped up in the bread supply. Plus, think of all the ways that bread comes up culturally.

Catholics believe that the communion bread transubstantiate into the body of Christ. There's the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6-11, give us today our daily bread. The Jewish holiday of Passover, centers around the preparation of bread, and on and on. In the Middle Ages, most people got something like 80% of their calories from bread. Fast forward a millennium or so, in the late 19th century, people were still getting about 30% of their calories from bread. That's so much bread, that's bread at every meal, and some meals that were only bread.

For most of our long history with bread, the bread we ate was made in our homes. Eventually, we had small bakeries that supplied bread for more people, but they weren't exactly a picture of our Tisnal purity. 100 plus years ago, bakeries were generally dirty and often underground, usually with terrible working conditions, and you never knew when the baker would cut costs by cutting the dough with sawdust or some other horrible additives. During the time we're talking about the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was a lot of foodborne illness, cholera and typhus. A lot of Americans were starting to fear their food, and for good reason, Your food could kill you.

Middle and upper class white native born Americans during that period go through this kind of freak out about the safety of their bread and you see newspaper headlines during this time screaming. Dangerous bread threatens the city germs Germs, menace your loaf. Things like that. And people who were really freaked out, you know, every city was holding major hearings on the bread question. The neighborhood bakery that we romanticized today was this specter of fear and terror.

And so people started getting really interested in where their food came from, kind of like people are doing right now. Only to them. Knowing where their food came from meant actively avoiding locally baked bread. Factory bread, the thinking went, was born not of unclean hands and an underground furnace, but in a modern, light-filled, palace of industry. These palaces of industry would supply bread to the masses, and this bread would be white.

Bread is a delicious food. Its flavor blends perfectly with other foods, adding zest and enjoyment to any meal. White flour and white bread aren't recent technological innovations in and of themselves. They've been around for millennia. Technically speaking, white flour is whole wheat flour with the brand and the germ from the wheat kernel of sifted out. Industrial bakers chose white bread as their flagship

bread because for them, white was a marker of purity and cleanliness and modernity. And if this sentiment sounds vaguely racist to you. Well, the racism was more than vague. Dr. Woods Hutchinson, who was a noted health columnist in new syndicated columnist in newspapers, argued that only white bread would fortify the white race to do the things it had to do and go out and conquer other peoples. And if that's not revolting enough?

Food reformers of the day referring to the white loaf as a chased loaf and the dark loaf as a defiled loaf. And bread was actually never a real vector for a contagion. That was mostly the meat and dairy supply, which is why Aaron Bobro strain argues that this fear over the safety of bread wasn't actually about bread. What I started to realize was that it had become impossible in in native born middle and upper class whites, minds to separate fears about bread safety from their fears about immigration, particularly the new southern and eastern European immigrants,

who was supposedly dirty and diseased hands, were touching bread in neighborhood bakeries. Basically, Aaron believes that our attraction to white bread came from real fears about food contagion that got mixed up unfairly with fears about immigrants. It was a shining, white, clean, modern marvel, untouched by human hands. That was the antithesis of that scary, supposedly dirty and diseased product of immigration. And because white bread was white, the thinking went, you knew it was free of dirt and other contaminants, which you might fear from your local bakery.

Its whiteness was thus its proof of purity. Now that logic is kind of flawed because lots of the adulterants that bakers used were white, chalk, alum. The bleach white loaf just needed one more thing before it could fully embody our need for uniformity. It needed to be sliced. Which brings us to a summer day in 1928. Let's say July 7, 1928. On that day, it was July 7, I checked.

In the town of Chilacothe, Missouri, people had gathered at first in Elm streets and they were lined up around the block. I don't know if there were lines down the block. Those weren't described, but people were certainly eager to see this. However, they were gathered. People were there to witness the advent

of packaged, pre-sliced bread. One reporter in Chilacati, Missouri spoke of housewives who were visiting this bakery to see this sliced bread, how they had this thrill of enthusiasm, and were just awestruck by this perfectly sliced bread. It was a small, edible vision of progress and the future. People like sliced bread so much. I can't overstate how much they loved it and how quickly it caught on. It was the best thing since I can't even think

of another thing that was quite as good. Industrial bakers had the hype. They had the sense of moral mission and they had the design parameters. White bread in streamlined loaves with uniform slices. But the science of industrializing and mass producing bread was still a little wacky. Bread after all is the product of microorganisms going through biological processes. Bread

is a function of time and temperature and a lot of other variables. In fact, bread was one of the last major foods to get industrialized, precisely because of how complex it is to make uniformly. The assembly process was really different than, say, making a car. Imagine if Henry Ford every time he wanted to make a car had to worry about the fact that his parts might grow or shrink depending on the temperature and humidity that day, that a gust of air coming through the factory might cause his car to deflate.

These were the kind of biological questions that early industrial bakers had to figure out. And so from the 1920s and 30s onward, industrial bakers were constantly tinkering with the design of white bread. They cut the time it took for the bread to rise by adding sugars and cranking up the temperature. They added emulsifiers to allow the dough's water and fat to mix together better. Giving white bread its height and more even grain. That also got rid soft whipped. Eventually, vitamins were added and sold to the public as a means of making hardy young men

who would be fit to fight in the war. Two slices of wonder bread every meal give you as much phosphorus for cell metabolism as this egg, as much iron for red blood as three lamb chops, as much niacin for metal health, as six sardines, as much energy as two glasses of milk. Little by little various factories created their own recipes and innovations for industrial white bread and all of that came to a head in 1952 in Rockford, Illinois.

The USDA in cooperation with key figures of the industrial baking world. Put together a multi-year project that I kind of jokingly refer to as the Manhattan Project of Bread. A multi-year panoramic investigation of bread and bread eating habits. And the ultimate goal of the project was to design the perfect loaf of white bread. It involved focus groups, market research, double blind taste tests. The end product of the so-called Manhattan Project of Bread was a white bread two and a half times as sweet as the average loaf available at the time. And 40% fluffier, too.

The fluffier the manufacturers made the bread, the more people wanted to buy it, even though the Rockford research also showed that they didn't really like it. They just couldn't resist the fluff. Consumers are choosing the fluffier bread, but not particularly liking its texture. But yet they were eating it in large quantities, about a pound and a half per person per week. Not too long after the Rockford study closes shop, White bread goes through an identity crisis. Where it was once a feel good symbol of progress,

White bread began to get used as an epithet, meaning, you know, stuffy, conservative, square, white suburban. In 1970, when Richard Pryor in a fit storms off the stage of his popular show at the Aladdin Theatre in Las Vegas saying that he is absolutely done with this white bread humor. From around that point forward, countercultural movements used white bread as an emblem of the establishment of the silent majority of Richard Nixon's

America. But then, by the 1980s, 1990s, the meaning starts to bifurcate. It also starts to take on the significance of white trash. So white bread starts to stand in for a poor white person who is making supposedly irresponsible decisions about diet and about their life. So I was fascinated by the way that white bread could mean essentially the opposite of itself. Both affluent and suburban and poor and rural. If there's one lesson from Aaron Bobro's trains research, it's that this debate over which kind of bread to eat, white or wheat, it's not new.

In fact, it goes back thousands of years. In Plato's Republic, Plato sets up this kind of debate about whether the ideal polys, the ideal society or city state, should function on a diet of whole grain, gruel associated with rural life, or kind of acidified white bread cakes. But what's most interesting about these debates in history says Aaron, is that they are often about everything except bread. So in Plato's case, even back then it was really not about the healthiness of bread so much as it was about anxieties about whether the Athens was losing moral virtue because

it was becoming less connected to the land. We see that debates about white bread and brown bread get tied up into large questions about what do people think about progress? What do people think about industrialization, class and hierarchy? The point is, is that when we're worrying about whether or not we should eat white bread or brown bread, it's usually about much larger questions. We can learn something about our own society, our own anxieties and aspirations by looking at 99% Invisible with Produce this Week by Sam Greenspan And here's Sam Lee really going to town on Wonderred With Katie Mingle, Avery Trouffleman and me Roman Mars

It is based on an interview we heard on Benjamin Walker's theory of everything a fine radiotopia program that you should already love on Benjamin's most recent episode, we tell the story of how Benjamin and I first met 14 years ago and started immediately conspiring to make something like we've made in radio toopia today a place where the most creative radio makers produce directly for the most curious and engaged listeners. You should check it out. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxin, an architecture firm in beautiful downtown Raycat country, Oakland, California.

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