White Bread (20 page)

These efforts didn't fall on deaf ears. Industry studies reported large increases in demand for enriched bread in the wake of propaganda campaigns. “Probably no other food and nutrition program has advanced so rapidly as the national movement to fortify cereal foods with vitamins and minerals,” General Mills vice president R. C. Sherwood announced in an address to the American Public Health Association.
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Through their combined efforts, government officials, the media, and private companies had built a foundation of awareness such that the significance of enrichment need no longer be explained.

Enriched bread had become “the biggest sales asset of recent times in the food field,” according to a grocery trade magazine. When, after the war, a U.S. Department of Commerce pamphlet offered career advice to demobilized GIs, it could confidently recommend commercial baking because “the war-time bread enrichment program has done much to increase consumption.” “Through vigorous advertising,” it continued, “the American public has been led to a new conception of the healthful qualities of commercially baked bread.”
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But this wasn't just about selling bread. Defense planners believed that the enrichment campaign would engender a broader consumer consciousness around nutrition and defense—and it did. As one study reported, “the flood of publicity on enrichment helped make the public ‘vitamin conscious,' ” and facilitated the efforts of other food industries working to connect their products with national defense. According to another source, white bread enrichment had “started a trend in food advertising and nutrition education that cannot fail to educate the American public to the value of truly ‘protective' foods.” As the influential nutritionist Hazel K. Stiebeling reflected after the war, bread enrichment campaigns trained Americans to take vitamins seriously. Indeed, this effort worked so well that government officials and bread advertising frequently had to remind consumers that enriched bread was not a medicine or miracle.
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The speed with which this message spread stunned even its most ardent supporters. Well before V-J Day, public health officials and war foods planners had a sense that they had achieved something remarkable and long lasting. Patting themselves on the back, they called bread enrichment “one of the most valuable and successful activities” of modern civil defense and the “beginning [of] a new era in nutrition for the American people.” Bread enrichment, Thomas C.

Desmond declared euphorically in the New York State Joint Legislative Committee on Nutrition's landmark 1944 report,
Food in War and in Peace
, had been “the key to the final solution of this Nation's nutrition problem.” Should this achievement be carried into the postwar period, he predicted, bread “will compete with milk for the title of ‘The perfect food.' ”
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Desmond was right. The habit of associating enriched bread with strength carried over into the postwar period, even as former GIs moved to the suburbs en masse. And that association breathed new life into industrial bread. Celebrating enriched bread's tenth anniversary in 1951, the
Journal of Home Economics
marveled at how completely enrichment's success had silenced skeptics and “food faddists.” A
Colliers
article written around the same time beamed, “On the tenth anniversary of enriched bread, many medical experts say that the accomplishment is one of the greatest nutritional advances in history.” The American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and scores of local newspapers published glowing commendations, praising the bread enrichment campaign for making the United States stronger and healthier. Robert R. Williams, for his part, coined the widely circulated sound bite, “Enriched white bread is bargain health insurance for millions.” A product of mobilization for world war, the association between industrial bread and security would continue into the Cold War.
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After World War II, Rockford, Illinois, an industrial center built by European immigrants, daring inventors, and strong labor unions, was the stuff of middle-class dreams. Although Rockford's economy was far more industrial than the national average, it suited America's self-image to think of it as the country's most “typical” city, and sociologists obliged with the label. In 1949,
Life
shared sociologists' discovery with the country, declaring that Rockford was “about as typical as a city can be.”
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Market researchers flocked in droves to the shores of the Rock River to observe prototypical Americans in their natural habitat. So it was here, in mid-century Rockford, that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the American Institute of Baking, and the Baking Industry Research Advisory Council collaborated on the most elaborate experimental study of bread consumption in history. The findings of the study, which ran from 1954 to 1955, spoke to a country's love affair with fluffy white bread: 95 percent of households bought white bread once a week; 75 percent bought it more than once a week. In total, Rockfordians ate about a pound and a half of bread per person per week, regardless of age or economic class.
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In repeated blind tests, consumer preference was clear and overwhelming: sweeter bread was better, but more importantly, fluffier bread was better. Comparing loaves of different densities, families almost always chose the lightest. But, strangely, this bread was not entirely well loved. About a third of housewives in the study described supermarket bread as “doughy; gummy; soggy; not well baked,” about 15 percent thought the taste was terrible, and as much as 18 percent thought it too airy (despite the overwhelming preference for airy bread in blind tests). Depending on the year, between 60 and 75 percent of Rockford housewives registered major complaints about their staff of life.
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In the mid-1950s, it wouldn't have been hard to find these tepid responses affirmed by a whole range of white bread critics writing for popular magazines and newspapers. Whether you looked at
Better Homes and Gardens, Sunset
, or
Harper's
, homemaker advice columns in small-town newspapers or the more lofty
New York Times
food section, it would have been hard to find anything
good
said about the taste of industrial white bread. In a steady stream of newspaper articles, letters to the editors from housewives, and popular magazine features, industrial white bread was described as “cottony fluff,” “cotton batting,” “fake,” “purposeless perfection,” “inedible,” “limp,” “hot air,” “a fugitive from a test tube,” and “a doughy mass of chemicals.”
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Yet nationwide, Americans ate a lot of industrial white bread in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As in Rockford, the vast majority of households in the United States ate store-bought white bread at all three meals—totaling some 8.6 billion loaves a year in 1954 (not including home-baked bread, and store-bought whole wheat, raisin bread, and “ethnic” breads). Most people consumed three to seven slices a day, but an astounding 33 percent of the population finished off more than eight slices a day. And this level of bread consumption cut across class: while the wealthiest 10 percent of the country consumed bread in slightly smaller quantities, the remaining nine income deciles varied little in their daily intake. Age didn't seem to matter either: adults and children ate bread at exactly the same rate. Only gender seemed to differentiate bread eaters: women, forbidden the staff of life by many popular diets of the time, ate the least, while men and boys, associating bread with bodybuilding strength, ate the most.
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During World War II, bread consumption, driven by the rationing of other staples, accounted for as much as 40 percent of all calories consumed in the country daily. After the war, Americans could have abandoned bread, just as they traded ration books for TV dinners. Instead, the proportion of calories derived from bread settled in at 2530 percent and then, despite the absolute certainty with which food economists and baking industry specialists predicted rapid declines in consumption, hovered around the same point through the mid-1960s. Studies remarked the high percentage of daily vitamins, iron, and protein consumers derived from the much-derided staff of life.

Why did postwar consumers continue to eat so much industrial bread, despite widespread popular condemnation of its flavor and texture? Americans could have abandoned bread as a staple, as many worried bakers feared they would. They didn't. Nor did they choose other kinds of bread in large quantities. When, from time to time, big baking companies attempted to launch lines of whole wheat bread, they invariably fell flat. And despite the continued survival of small specialty bakeries, especially in cities, rye, whole wheat, and other “ethnic” loaves offered little competition, accounting for only 8-12 percent of bread consumption during the postwar period.
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Part of the reason Americans stuck to gummy white bread lay in the way wartime enrichment campaigns had cemented a sense that industrial white bread built strength for individual and national defense. Despite their diverse complaints about store-bought bread, Rockfordians agreed on one thing: depending on the year, 96 or 100 percent of the USDA bread study's sample responded that their bread was highly nutritious.
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Legions of industrial white bread critics still voiced opposition during the age of Wonder bread, but as the 1950s advanced, scientific consensus turned against them. In 1958
Consumer Reports
declared that it had reversed its long-standing objection to white bread, citing “an accumulation of evidence” and a particularly convincing experiment carried out in the ruins of postwar Germany by the former white bread critic R. A. McCance. In that 1946 experiment, published in 1954 and widely cited by champions of the new consensus, McCance and his partner, E. M. Woddowson, conducted a feeding trial on 250 orphans in Duisberg and Wuppertal. The researchers had divided the orphans into five groups and fed each group a diet consisting almost entirely of one of five different types of bread (enriched white, various grades of high-extraction dark white flour, and whole wheat). “To the surprise of Dr. McCance and his associates,”
Consumer Reports
informed readers, “no appreciable differences whatsoever showed up in the growth of the groups of children. All grew equally well.” In another widely publicized study of enriched bread's impacts on child health, researchers in Newfoundland claimed that fortified loaves had given bursting energy to formerly lethargic children, increased child survival rates, and ended adult listlessness, without any increase in total calories consumed.
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Health experts, food writers, and ordinary bread eaters who still felt that there was just something wrong with industrial loaves would have to find a different language other than nutrition science to express their doubts. Aesthetic and epicurean arguments, which had played a surprisingly minor role in earlier battles over the staff of life, offered the only way forward. As white-bread critic Clarence Woodbury wrote begrudgingly in
Reader's Digest
, industrial white bread exceeded homemade whole wheat bread in almost every arena except one—taste. “[White bread] is, undoubtedly, pure, sanitary, wholesome, nutritious, clean, white, and beautiful—but it is utterly tasteless.”
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This aesthetic appeal often rang hollow against the muscle-bound science of enriched white bread advocates. Take, for example, Lee Anderson's tirade, “Busted Staff of Life,” which appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1947. “Modern bread may well be more digestible than the bread our mothers and grandmothers used to bake each week-end, more nourishing, more scientifically pure, more enriched with those essential substances which make hair grow, eyes see better, bones get harder,” Anderson conceded. “But Grandma's bread was bread … and if Grandpa had to wear ‘specs' at sixty-five and lost all his teeth at eighty because his diet was deficient in vitamins, no one ever complained that the bread was at fault.”
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With friends like these, critics of industrial white bread needed no enemies. Enriched bread might taste like a “doughy mass of chemicals,”
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but at least you kept your teeth and eyesight. Children kept their competitive edge, and the nation as a whole was stronger. Driven by the security imperative of hot and cold wars, synthetic vitamin enrichment was deeply entrenched in the American dietary consciousness.

Bakers didn't create the association between enriched white bread and fighting vigor, but during the early Cold War, they worked hard to reinforce it. As fighting ended in the Pacific, bakers hoped to capitalize on the buoyant success of enrichment, but they had to wait. Famine had staked its claim on the immediate postwar period. With bad winters in Europe and crop failures throughout Asia, 1946 and 1947 were desperate years of worldwide grain shortage and mass starvation. In the United States, Truman, struggling to free up wheat for overseas relief, called on consumers to eat less bread and contemplated rationing the staple, something the country had avoided even in the darkest days of the war. Bakers reluctantly postponed their plans for a massive postwar advertising blitz focused on the health-building benefits of enriched bread and aimed at consumers, medical professionals, and nutritionists.
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Then in 1948 and 1949, with the immediate global food crisis over, bakers mobilized to pick up where they had left off during the war. Advertising images of war industry workers and soldiers segued smoothly into images of children—mostly boys—engaged in competitive striving for physical and mental superiority. In these ads, boys lunged at fleeing girls, wrestled each other, triumphantly waved straight-A report cards, supported enormous weights, and grew bones, teeth, muscle, and brain cells at explosive rates. Mrs. Bohnet's Bread in San Antonio helped a skinny boy drive railroad spikes with a toy hammer while burly tracklayers looked on in amazement. Hol-sum enriched bread gave “Johnny” the energy to swing from chandeliers over his listless, non-bread-eating sister, and a Town Talk bread poster showed a tiny bruiser tackling his grandfather on the football field. Even the Schneider Baking Company's “Little Miss Sunbeam” reminded consumers that Uncle Sam wanted them to “reach for energy-packed bread.”