Research on sliced bread...mention of McCann and Wiley Talks about relationship of racial attitudes and food purity. contrast with today ideas about food deserts... and biotech biopolitic ideas. and advertising ideas. NAACP endorsed no on 37.

Date:   12/18/2012 11:39:52 PM ( 12 y ago)

http://cgirs.ucsc.edu/conferences/whitefood/foodx/papers/bobrowstrain1.pdf



Since Sliced Bread:
Purity, Hygiene, and the Making of Modern Bread
Prepared for the “Science, Culture and the Making of Modern Food” Session at the 2005 Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers
Aaron Bobrow-Strain Politics Department Whitman College straina@whitman.edu

Draft—Please consult the author before citing. Feedback welcome.


Throughout the early 20th century, scores of pure foods crusaders, nutritionists, “New Nutritionists”, food faddists, and advice columnists weighed in on the health of the U.S. population, and their outlook was dismal. “In twenty-million homes in the United States to-day,” McCann (1918: 15) wrote, “there is a complacent toleration for food abuses that sap the stamina of the race.” While many food researchers questioned McCann’s prescriptions for this problem, none challenged his diagnosis, and dozens of groups launched campaigns to improve “the stamina of the race”.


Similarly, as chair of the “League for Longer Life”, pure foods campaigner Dr. Harvey Wiley (1920: 98), focused intense attention on “the body economy” promoting strict “obedience to the laws of scientific nutrition”, “to make the period of usefulness of every life longer and at the same time more intense...[to] add years of usefulness to [every] life”. Like Good Housekeeping, the American Magazine (AM) also bombarded readers with information and advice about “the conduct of the physical life”. Dr. Woods Hutchinson’s regular column, “Health and Horsepower”, aimed ‘to serve a definite purpose by giving information, suggestions and advice to enable men and women to prolong life, to enjoy better health, and to increase physical and mental efficiency (Hustchinson 1913a: 94).” Hutchison often looked askance at the work of those, like Alfred McCann and Harvey Wiley, he labeled “food faddists” (see below), but all shared a common vision of the connection between pure foods and productive populations.

P.14


It was not enough to simply mount a guard against contagion; the soul must come to be defined by this vigilance. “The slightest deviation from perfect cleanliness was a cause for social anxiety, since the invisible passage of germs could put the health of the family, companions, and even the entire nation at risk (Forty 1986: 169).”
Since homes could not be hermetically sealed, and since total public health was beyond the capacity of the state, women were also entreated to extend their surveying gaze into the street (Tomes 1998). Famously, for middle class social reformers this meant careful monitoring of the poor and their habits. In Ladies Home Journal (LHG), for example, Dr. Dwight Chapin (1922: 190) urged middle class women interested in preventing calamitous social problems to channel their “surplus of unused mother love” toward the poor by helping to provide “continuous oversight as to the diet and hygiene” of immigrant children. Critically, however, the new norm of hygiene also meant casting a web of female eyes on the external world of commerce—particularly the world of food production and distribution since few other arenas of life could be so clearly linked to the well being of the household and the nation.

P 16-17


CURIOUS

July 1925’s Scientific American a review of current scientific thinking on the question, “Which Races Are Best?” and its implications for immigration policy appeared sandwiched between articles on sanitary baking and methods for the safe handling of fruit juices. In an era when white Americans were exposed as never before to immigrants and their strange new foods, urgent questions of diet were never far from racial anxieties. As Alfred McCann (1918: vi) argued in his best selling treatises on scientific nutrition,
“our American children must be taught the meaning of depraved foods...that they must be taught the relationship of foodless food to sickness and death; that they must be taught the relationship of natural food to health and life.”
If that education effort failed, “the white race of all lands” faced “race suicide on a colossal scale (23).”

P 18

SLICED WHITE BREAD

Connection noted between

The emergence of sliced white bread cannot be separated from this new imperative scientific feeding all its attendant quandaries. During the first decades of the 20th
19

century, millions of American women—increasingly drawn out of the house into wage labor, while simultaneously pressured to oversee the scientific management of both public and private environments (Cowan 1983)—faced the question of whether to bake at home or purchase bread. In this context, bio-politics and convenience cannot be separated.

ADVERTISERS IN THE ACT?

Did store-bought or home-baked bread offer a safer, easier, and more hygienic way to feed a family?


LOSS OF SMALL BAKERS

{Reminds me of loss of small health food stores.]

Wealthier urban consumers were less likely to bake at home, but would not significantly increase their intake of bread enough to keep up with the enormous quantities of bread pouring out of the country’s “model palaces of automatic baking (BI 1952).” Predictably, individual bakers, pressed by competition to maintain their rate of profit, could not afford to pass up new technologies despite the depressing results of constantly growing production on prices.
The effects were palpable. Competition and technological advances drove small bakeries out of business at a rapid pace. As early as 1895, the editors of Baking Industry had begun to ask, “Must the baker go? Will there be a place for small bakers in the future? (quoted in BI 1952: 63).” Every new innovation sent waves of fear through the industry. After the introduction of the Lee Kneading Machine in 1902, for example, Baking Industry (quoted in BI 1952: 67) predicted that soon, “an apparatus that...take[s] flour in at one end and discharge[s] loaves of bread out the other” would spell death for half the bakers in the country.

P22


Loss of ONE OVEN BAKEIES

By 1910, it was clear that small bakers’ fears were well founded as large bakers waged a scorched earth campaign against one oven shops. One baker, William Ward, led the way. Starting from a family bakery in Buffalo, Ward combined private financial backing and strong arm tactics to buy out bakeshops from the northeast to Kansas City. Building ever larger bread factories between 1915 and 1925, Ward Bakeries and its various subsidiaries and holding companies eventually controlled more than forty plants in thirty-five cities with a total capitalization of almost four billion dollars (Alsberg 1926;



To understand the wild success of industrial, sliced, white bread, we have to understand the larger meanings of the perfect loaf; the resonances between clean bread and “competent personhood” (Rose 1999). The success of white bread cannot be explained by the logic of capital or the allure of advertising without understanding the material and symbolic form of the controlled, scientific, and uniform sliced white loaf.
Kleen-Maids and Clean Bread
The articulation between social hygiene and bakery bread would have appeared somewhat outrageous at the turn of the century. In 1899, 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 (Goodwin 1999;
24

DR. HARVEY W> WILEY CALLED A FIERCE ANI-BLEACHING AGITATOR

Tomes 1998). 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, a fierce anti-bleaching agitator, urged consumers to “Save the bread of the nation!” from “further adulteration (Wiley 1914: 119).”

p25

Bakery bread was not just seen as more expensive and of lower quality than home-baked, it was a potential biohazard. In an age when the existence of microorganisms was increasingly recognized, but poorly understood, even bread’s living origins raised fears, as this evocative and unsavory 1905 description of bread biology suggests:
“Bread rises when infected with the yeast germ, because millions of these little worms have been born and have died, and from their dead and decaying bodies there rises a gas just as it does from the dead body of a hog or any other animal (GH 1905a: 98).”
25


BREAD DISEASES

Worries circulated through society about “bread diseases”—molds and bacteria growth that infected bread with “sticky masses” and blood-colored clots (SA 1923). Bread must be made with great care, experts warned, or consumers faced the risk of “acidosis” and other physical menaces. Could bakers be trusted?
Speaking, in her words, “For one million organized housewives,” Ethel Rahbar of the National Housewives League confronted bakers with this question directly at their 1916 annual meeting in Salt Lake City.


CLEANLINESS VALUED BY STANDARDS..

“The housewife today is availing herself of the full knowledge of foods and their value in order to develop and conserve the mental and physical well- being of the individual...If we do not put the proper food values into the stomachs of our families, what do we get out of it? A condition physically and mentally that is a menace to society. Intelligent bakers understand that if they want to compete successfully with the home kitchen they must use equally good materials, and it you wish to win the housewife let your trump card be cleanliness and good materials...Enlightened housewives not only demand good bread, but they demand bread that is handled respectably; that is, in a cleanly manner (NAMB 1916: 142).”


FIRST RESISTANCE THEN ACCEPTANCE OF WRAPPING BREAD

Nevertheless, consumer pressures and food safety advocacy eventually wore away bakers’ resistance, and by 1930 commercial bread was almost universally wrapped. Indeed, once convinced of the practicality and necessity of wrapping, bakers seized on wrappers as a key vehicle for advertising—advertising that increasingly stressed the hygienic nature of the commercial product.


THE TECHNOSCIENCE OF BAKING...

I stopped here...
P29



9:39 am

MOST INTERESTING ....

By the 1930s, although still subject to constant challenge from whole wheat backers, white bread would emerge as the clear victor in this struggle. Its triumph turned in part on the superior and civilized “lightness” of the white loaf, but also, as I argue below, from its contingent connection with an emerging politics of “whiteness”.
Early 20th-century attacks on white flour built on the late 19th-century religious- inflected “food faddism” of William H. Kellogg and William Graham (Levenstein 2003a). White flour, as Alfred McCann (1918) suggested, was a product of greedy industrialists that violated, “the provisions of the Creator” and produced delinquency. America must defy these “Moneybags”, he argued, and return its eating practices to the basic laws of God. In a cascade of popular publications experts like Henry Sherman, Elmer McCollum, and Harvey Wiley joined the fray, attacking America’s “rage for whiteness” (Wiley 1913). They pointed to the threat of malnutrition and “white bread acidosis”, a lethal condition brought on by eating too much white bread. Only “undenatured or unrobbed wheat...is a true nerve, blood and bone food...rich in the life- giving principles (Cogswell and Allen 1916: 385).” Whole grains, activists argued, played a more positive role, “in the body economy” (Wiley 1913: 394), and, during WWI, the Wilson White House debated whether whole wheat’s superior laxative effect should be framed a matter of national security (Levenstein 2003a: 246).

Wiley raged against the decision warning that flour would forever more be, “as white and waxy as the face of a corpse (Wiley 1914: 832).” Anti-white flour efforts achieved some success5, but Wiley’s sepulchral vision of whiteness vied with an increasingly dominant and luminous sense of the color.

First, like food hygiene campaigns of the early 20th century, contemporary food safety activism frequently hinges on organic notions of natural and social purity. For example, popular critiques of food biotechnologies, as Boal (2001) observes, typically police strict boundaries between nature and society, Gaia and Frankenstein. This organicism has left anti-GMO activists open to crippling critique from self-styled industrial Prometheans who defend biotech by pointing out that the border between nature and society has always been blurry (e.g. DeGregori 2002). Worse, when confined to the language of natural purity, anti-GMO activism has often ignored the implications of biotechnology in the messier terrains of social justice and inequality. As early 20th-century labor activist Upton Sinclair found after publishing The Jungle, the consumer language of food purity is easily—almost inherently—divorced from larger concerns about the health and welfare of producers (cf. Schlosser 2001).

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