Bakery Bought Bread Vs Homemade Bread Research
Bakery Bought Bread Vs Homemade Bread Research
Here are some quotes from a fascinating research piece about how Bakery bought white bread became a US norm that was manipulated in the popular consciousness. In an era of the current moment where "local" is now gaining ground and "homemade" bread and "Artisan" crafted Bread is making a comeback, this article gives a lot of food for thought. This Plant Your Dream Blog is part of my research about how Ancient Wheat, namely Kamut® ancient Khorasan wheat became in my mind "The Real Dough."
"At the beginning of that 40-year period {1890-1930] bread was the country’s single most important food and 90 per cent of it was baked in homes by women. By the end of the period, bread was still the country’s number one food, but 94 per cent of it was baked outside the home by men."--from
White bread bio-politics: purity, health, and the triumph of industrial baking
Aaron Bobrow-Strain
Politics Department, Whitman College, 2008
© 2008 SAGE Publications
Date: 11/30/2014 9:20:03 PM ( 10 y ) ... viewed 994 times
Bakery Bought Bread Vs Homemade Bread Research
Louie Prager of the Prager Brothers Breads San Diego County and brother Clinton are setting a standard for Artisan Bread from a bakery that is local, baked in bakery, and yet true to homemade goodness.
PRAGER BROTHERS BREAD SAN DIEGO COUNTY FACEBOOK PAGE
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Prager-Brothers-Artisan-Breads/171441693032877
PRAGER BROTHERS WEBSITE
http://pragerbrothers.com
This is from
http://www.nicolaasmink.com/uploads/6/7/1/2/6712200/bsbread.pdf
and has many fascinating quotes including:
Re-positioning baking
The articulation between hygiene and bakery bread would have appeared somewhat outrageous at the turn of the century. Bakery bread was one of the few industrially processed foods widely associated with poverty rather than affluence.54 Early industrial bakeries were more ‘dark satanic mills’ than ‘model palaces,’ and their owners were among the first groups of businesspeople in the country to face the ire of food purity campaigners.55 Household management experts at Good Housekeeping, in turn, reinforced this negative connotation, warning readers that ‘the conflict of the [bakery] loaf with dirt and danger is not exaggerated.’56 Food crusaders accused bakeries of whitening bread with plaster of Paris, sulfate of lime, borax, bone, pipe clay, chalk, alum, and other nefarious compounds, while fierce debates raged from the pages of women’s magazines the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court over whether bleaching flour with chlorine gas constituted a criminal act. Dr Harvey Wiley, leading food purity campaigner, urged consumers to ‘Save the bread of the nation!’ from ‘further adulteration.’57
"Thus, by the 1920s, bread making was widely imagined as a techno-science."
Thus, by the 1920s, bread making was widely imagined as a techno-science. Like family health care, baking was to be a terrain of control and expert measurement rather than art and aesthetics. ‘Modern baking is scientifically done. Nothing is left to chance,’ an elementary school textbook read: ‘The baker has studied the principles of baking and understands the work- ing of the laws that govern his product. In his bakery there is a laboratory with microscopes, tubes, balances, and other instruments, the materials to be used are tested by experts ... [The modern baker] is guided by scientific laws.’4
That discursive shift mirrored phenomenal changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of bread – the culmination of a long process of scientific rationalization, cap- italist development, and cultural change. This article examines how that larger process played out between 1890 and 1930.
At the beginning of that 40-year period {1890-1930] bread was the country’s single most important food and 90 per cent of it was baked in homes by women. By the end of the period, bread was still the country’s number one food, but 94 per cent of it was baked outside the home by men.
With the exception of a few, mostly rural, households, bread production had been almost entirely displaced from the realm of women’s work and the space of the home.5 What’s more, it was displaced to increasingly large and increasingly distant bakery sites.
7:15 pm
November 30, 2014
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