HOW WHITE BREAD BECAME WHITE TRASH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 95

bell's Soup Company bought Pepperidge Farms, and Rudkin died in 1967, but the company kept pace
with the country's emerging interest in counterculture food.
So did Arnold Bakers, a second multimillion-dollar company built on dark, dense loaves. 43 Paul
Dean Arnold had founded that company in 1940 out of his garage after quitting work at a Nabisco plant.
Touting products like “Bran-Nola Bread,” the company had grown to more than $200 million in annual
sales by the time of Arnold's death in 1985. The Arnold “Health Loaf Natural,” a highly sweetened light
brown mixture of stone ground whole wheat and unbleached white flour, was, in many ways, the iconic
health bread of its time.
Through the 1970s, ingredients that seemed drawn straight from a commune kitchen—sprouted
wheat, unsulfured molasses, raisin juice, and wheat germ—gave Pepperidge Farms and Arnold loaves
exotic appeal. They were Woodstock in cellophane. Other companies quickly followed suit, and soon
health breads were the fastest-growing segment of the entire baking industry. Between 1967 and 1982,
white bread consumption plummeted 30 percent—but overall bread consumption, led by high-fiber
brown loaves, actually increased. 44
The advent of industrial health bread was not without hiccups. Few of the country's major bread con-
glomerates shared Rudkin's and Arnold's attachment to the spirit of health food doctrines. Theirs was a
purely instrumental embrace. If loaves could be made to look like brown health loaves by adding cara-
mel color, it was fine. And why not rack up impressive amounts of fiber at a low cost by adding cheap
wood pulp to industrial loaves? Wonder bread's parent company, ITT Continental, advertised that its
Fresh Horizons loaf, filled with “powdered cellulous” (aka wood pulp), had 400 percent more fiber than
white bread, but “the same great taste.” Consumers didn't buy it. Fresh Horizons and other wood pulp
fiber breads earned a spot on the New York Times's list of the worst foods of 1976—just under Tube-
A-Goo, syringes filled with brightly colored syrup that looked and smelled “exactly like hair waving
lotion.” 45
In the end, consumer outrage and concerted action by government regulators reined in the early ex-
cesses of industrial health bread. Unfortunately, that didn't stop many of the new mass-market health
breads from tasting a bit like Tube-A-Goo. In order to achieve extended shelf life without the use of
chemical preservatives, bakers jammed health loaves full of moisture-retaining natural sweeteners. The
result, as New York Times food writer Mimi Sheraton noted, was sometimes less than pleasant: “cloying
sweetness” and “a limp, wet texture.” 46
Still, the baking industry pressed on. By the late 1970s, health breads weren't just a lucrative niche
market—they were the essential element of the industry's battle against resurgent home baking.
REVOLT IN THE KITCHEN AND THE RISE OF YUPPIE BREAD
Thanks to the counterculture, conservative nostalgia, and spreading concern about wellness, home bak-
ing was more popular than at any time in the previous century. Guided by Laurel's Kitchen, The Tassa-
jara Bread Book , and James Beard's Beard on Bread , millions of Americans were experimenting with
their own doughs for the first time. And these were definitely experiments. Uncertain how to parse com-
peting ideas about which new grain was the purest and most salubrious, 1970s home bakers crammed
every grain they could get into their bread. The age of the whole-wheat-spelt-oat-amaranth-brown rice-
millet-buckwheat-barley loaf was born. For good measure, 1970s bakers also threw in zucchini, olives,
carrots, bananas, sunflower seeds, soya, whey, carob, and dates. Meanwhile, large doses of honey and
molasses eased the unfamiliar taste and texture of whole grains onto the American palate.
Between 1973 and 1979, nearly every major newspaper, home magazine, and cooking monthly ran
stories noting the boom in home baking and offering tips to first timers. John Hess, writing in the New