UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 4

some of the most important and inclusive social reforms in U.S. history: child labor laws, wage regula-
tions, antitrust legislation, worker safety protections and, of course, food safety laws. This period saw
the advent of social work and public health, expanded public education, nutrition programs, and invest-
ment in public green spaces—all explicitly aimed at relieving social tensions that might have incited
more radical social change. 7
Middle- and upper-class women, in particular, found a place for themselves in public life through
campaigns and crusades aimed at bringing progress to the needy. Careful regulation, scientific expertise,
and technological innovation, it seemed, could reknit the fractured nation and stave off class struggle.
By the 1890s, this onrush of activism and landmark social reforms had coalesced under the banner of
Progressivism. 8
Two things are important about the Progressive Era for our purposes: first, the two impulses of the
time—fear and optimism—did not cleave around opposed “good guys” and “bad guys”—they were two
faces of the same coin. In reckoning with Progressive Era reforms, we must live with ambiguity. Like
most great social movements, Progressivism challenged some elements of an unjust status quo, while
reinforcing others. Second, we must appreciate the way concern over the purity of bodies—and, by ex-
tension, the purity of the food and drink consumed by those bodies—underpinned and unified nearly all
of the diverse commitments that made up Progressivism. Temperance, the crusade against alcohol, was,
in many ways, a key incubator for all Progressive reform efforts, but food mattered almost as much. A
safe, pure, and efficient nation could not be built without safe, pure, and efficiently produced food. If
people could only be enticed to consume pure foods (and stop poisoning their bodies and minds with
alcohol), social problems would cease; the poor would find the physical and moral fortitude to lift them-
selves out of poverty; crime and violence would wane.
Legions of women heeded the advice of scientific nutrition and hygiene, changing the way their fam-
ilies ate. Legions more poured into the country's tenement zones and mountain hollers to spread what
they called “the gospel of good food” to the turbulent masses. Unfortunately, these efforts to improve
the poor typically failed, often spectacularly. Middle- and upper-class reformers' eagerness to help was
often matched only by their ignorance of what kinds of assistance the poor might actually want. Pro-
gressive advocacy for systemic change—consumer protections, public services, and accountable gov-
ernment—had a huge, and largely positive, impact on most Americans. On the other hand, eager at-
tempts to “improve” the poor by teaching them about “good food” may have made reformers feel great
about themselves but often missed the point. The emphasis on scientific diet and efficient household
management as routes out of poverty was no match for the grinding structural forces keeping people
poor: nativism, racism, political corruption, anti-worker laws, and monopoly power. 9
Through their own militant embrace of scientific eating, however, middle- and upper-class reformers
did sow the seeds of a new way of thinking about food that would have long-term repercussions. At the
very least, by the 1930s, the bread question had been decisively answered: the country had abandoned
its home-baked loaves and craft bakery bread, both scorned as dangerously impure, and embraced air-
puffed, chemically conditioned, ultra-refined marvels of modern industry.
A BREAD REVOLUTION
In 1890, 90 percent of American bread was baked at home by women. From Perry County, Missouri,
where German homesteaders made their own sourdough starters from beer mash and baked dark loaves
in communal brick ovens, to the Deep South, where black and white field hands lunched on cornbread,
to the country's Gold Coasts and Upper East Sides, where servants in starched aprons plated gleam-
ing white rolls, homemade bread, in some form, was the country's staple. Despite periodic vogues for