UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 2

cars traveling overnight from the surrounding countryside. Until mandated pasteurization, milk was a
key vector for typhoid and other serious diseases. 1
Throughout U.S. history, anxieties about tainted milk have been matched only by concerns about
meat. Most notably, The Jungle , Upton Sinclair's 1906 topic about unsanitary conditions in Chicago's
stockyards, galvanized a nascent consumer protection movement. Muckraking journalists, campaigning
scientists, and an army of civically engaged middle- and upper-class women horrified by unsafe food
took to the streets, courts, and legislatures, demanding change. Sinclair had hoped to spark outrage over
the inhuman conditions experienced by immigrant meatpackers. Instead, the country fixated on germs
and the frightening immigrants who appeared to spread them into the nation's food. “I aimed for the
people's heart,” Sinclair is said to have reflected, “and by accident, I hit them in the stomach.” 2
Still, when it came to protecting stomachs, the Pure Foods Movement, as it came to be called,
achieved substantial reforms. Pure Foods activists forced manufacturers to change the way they handled
and distributed food, boycotted unsanitary establishments out of business, forced state and local officials
to take food safety more seriously, and passed what still serves as a the bedrock of all federal food safety
regulation, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Unfortunately, their efforts were far from perfect and were
steadily watered down over the next century. 3
At the start of the new millennium, Pure Foods crusaders' concerns still seem shockingly contempor-
ary. Serious food-borne illnesses affected millions and sent hundreds of thousands to hospitals during
the 1990s and early 2000s. E. coli in beef emerged as an almost ordinary source of tragedy, while sen-
sational outbreaks of food-borne illness in bean sprouts, strawberries, cilantro, eggs, peanut butter, and
spinach gripped the media. Food safety regulations, some with roots in 1906, appeared impotent in the
face of a far-flung global food system dominated by powerful corporations. In many cases, regulators
themselves seemed to have been “captured” by the very companies they supposedly oversaw. It felt like
the 1900s all over again.
On the other hand, few Americans alive today can imagine a time when the specter of unclean bread
was as scary as germ-clotted milk or tainted beef. And yet, during the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries, the menace of contaminated bread was no less a topic of public outcry than dirty meat or
milk. Pure Foods crusaders targeted the nation's bakeries, government hearings convened around bread
contamination, and Harvey W. Wiley, the country's most prominent Pure Foods advocate, warned con-
sumers of serious threats to America's staple food.
Accurately or not, a simple loaf of bread from a small urban bakery seemed to many consumers a
harbinger of death and disease. These fears ultimately changed the country's bread. An urgent need to
know that one's bread was pure proved instrumental in convincing Americans to embrace industrially
produced loaves. Early twentieth-century bread fears also confused food purity and social purity in a
way that placed the blame for unsafe food on some of the food systems' greatest victims and distrac-
ted attention from more systemic pressures, creating danger and vulnerability. As we think about food
safety in our own time, the story of America's bread panic suggests that visions of pure food can motiv-
ate desperately needed changes but also backfire in myriad ways.
THE MODEL PALACE OF AUTOMATIC BAKING
In 1910, the country's greatest bread bakery opened on the corner of Vanderbilt and Pacific in Brook-
lyn's Prospect Heights. Six stories tall with an alabaster white neoclassical facade, it was a shining
temple to a new way of thinking about food “untouched by human hands.” Gleaming surfaces, massive
machinery, and light-filled halls proclaimed a new creed: industrial food is pure food, and pure food is