UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 5

store-bought “French bread,” the only people consistently purchasing the staff of life in the decades
following the Civil War were affluent urbanites or recent immigrants living in tenement districts. The
country's few commercial bakeries were nearly all tiny one-oven shops with five or fewer employees.
Bread was—as it had been for millennia—the product of unstandardized ingredients, artisan labor, and
unreliable technology.
Forty years later, this had changed completely. By 1930, 90 percent of the country's most important
staple food was baked outside the home by men in increasingly distant factories. The few small bakeries
left were rapidly disappearing, and bread had begun to take on the form in which we know it today: a
standardized, homogeneous product of food science and assembly-line manufacture.
The industrialization of bread began haltingly after the Civil War, picking up speed as the century
ended. By 1900, the country's largest bakeshops could produce fifteen thousand loaves a day. By 1910,
large bakeries regularly churned out one hundred thousand loaves a day, and Ward's Brooklyn and
Bronx factories together produced five hundred thousand. A model bakery set up by the American
Bakers Association at its 1925 meetings in Buffalo was said to have topped 1 million loaves in twenty-
four hours. Across the country, “model palaces of automatic baking” captured the public's imagination,
each one a spectacle of scientific “system and order.” 10
Bread baking had been slow to industrialize compared to other sectors of the food system that saw
major upheavals after the Civil War. There were cultural reasons for this, but it was also technically
and economically difficult. Unlike most food industries, which deployed science to freeze food's living
processes into an ideal state called “freshness,” bakers had to work with bread's biological life. 11 Or-
ganic fermentation was essential to the magical alchemy that turned pasty globs of flour and water into
light, sweet, aromatic loaves. This introduced a whole series of obstacles into the bakery assembly line:
imagine how crazy it would have made Henry Ford if his Model T parts shrank or grew with slight
variations in temperature, collapsed in air drafts, deflated after minor production delays, and depended
on fickle microbes for energy. Before bakeries could become mass-production assembly lines, bread's
living nature would have to be tamed.
With advances in microbiology, cereal chemistry, climate control, and industrial design during the
first three decades of the twentieth century, bakers overcame these challenges. The Wards were early
adopters of nearly every important technological development that drove this revolution. Perhaps more
importantly, they pioneered the economic model of mergers and oligopoly that would define the industry
for the rest of the century, as well as the cultural model of selling bread through the language of purity
and hygiene that would convince Americans to eat the product of those powerful companies.
UP FROM BROOME STREET
During the Ward Baking Company's heyday in the 1910s and 1920s, Hugh Ward's well-heeled heirs
loved to tell his story. Or at least their publicists did. Prominently displayed in newspaper ads and
paraded out for interviews, the rags-to-riches tale of the company's founder gave an attractive aura of
hard work and street cred to the Robber Barons of Bread. 12 As the story went, Hugh Ward and his fath-
er, James, landed in New York in 1849, fleeing Belfast and the Irish potato famine. Their first home was
the Lower East Side, somewhere near Five Points, then a violent and squalid Irish and black quarter. At
that time, opening a small bakery was still a relatively inexpensive affair—a seat-of-the-pants venture
just within the reach of ambitious immigrant entrepreneurs with small stashes of cash and a penchant
for long nights of hard work. Hugh Ward was one of them. A few months after landing in New York, he
opened a small one-oven bakery in a brick building on Broome Street.