HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 94

poly power, rather than innovation. A handful of companies—many the descendants of William Ward's
Bread Trust—jockeyed for market position using brute force instead of quality product. Constant invest-
igations into price fixing by dominant firms marked the period, as market concentration increased. 36
When wheat prices, and by extension bread prices, soared in the mid-1970s as a result of high oil prices
and large sales of surplus grain to the USSR, it only heightened consumers' sense that bakers were tak-
ing advantage of them.
Meanwhile, the public embrace of health foods and environmentalism exposed industrial baking
practices to more condemnation. And the locus of this opprobrium had shifted from counterculture to
mainstream, from Haight-Ashbury to Capitol Hill. In 1971, Ralph Nader launched a new round of Sen-
ate hearings on the baking industry and spurred the Federal Trade Commission to take action against
misleading health claims in Wonder bread advertising. 37
Accounts of early twentieth-century experiments feeding rats a white bread-only diet resurfaced, mi-
grating from their traditional place on the mimeographed pages of alternative weeklies to the science
sections of major newspapers. 38 Even mainstream nutrition scientists, long reluctant to question the
place of white bread in a balanced diet, joined in. As Hilda Swenerton, California state nutrition expert
for the university extension service, admitted in the Los Angeles Times , “We've been so busy pointing
out how the faddists are all wrong that we've failed to recognize some of the good faddists have done.”
39
In 1977 the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, backed by a stable of main-
stream scientists, issued its landmark Dietary Goals for the United States . The report put a government
seal on a set of recommendations not all that different from those found in Frances Moore Lappé's radic-
al 1971 Diet for a Small Planet: Americans should dramatically increase consumption of whole grains,
fruits, and vegetables, while cutting back on meat, dairy, and refined sugars. 40 Even more importantly,
mainstream nutrition science had discovered the paramount importance of fiber. Starting in 1975, scores
of books, magazine articles, and news items touted the lifesaving benefits of roughage, ushering in “the
fiber era” in American nutrition. 41
While some in the baking industry fought back against this dietary heresy, most treated it as an op-
portunity. Two companies had already shown that health bread could be mass-produced with industri-
al methods at a high profit. Both begun out of Connecticut homes decades earlier, Pepperidge Farms
and Arnold Bakers exemplified the way industrial producers could appeal to a health-obsessed nation
without sacrificing scale and efficiency. By the late 1960s, Margaret Rudkin, founder of Pepperidge
Farms, had built the company into a multimillion-dollar industry leader, but its origin was classic Amer-
ican health foodism. 42 In the 1930s, asthma crippled Rudkin's youngest son and doctors could offer
little assistance. Convinced that diet played a role in the boy's affliction, Rudkin set out to cure him with
a diet of whole wheat bread, baked from her Irish grandmother's recipe. It worked well enough to attract
interest in the community. The boy's doctor requested loaves for his other patients and demand grew
from there. Soon Rudkin had, with the help of two servants, started a small bakery in the family's home
kitchen.
The wife of a wealthy financier, Rudkin raised money to open one real bread factory, and then others.
By the late 1950s, Pepperidge Farms baked more than a million loaves a week in its cutting-edge baker-
ies. Despite its dependence on high-tech production, however, the company's advertising was self-con-
sciously old-fashioned—even by baking industry standards. The combination was unbeatable. With its
cutting-edge technology and homey image, the company soon dominated national markets for health
bread, even though its loaves sold for more than double the price of regular bread. In 1961 the Camp-