UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 8

gave us a more palpable icon to remember him by: probably hoping to distance the company from the
scandalous taint of his last name, he adopted the brand name of an Indianapolis bakery he had acquired.
In 1929, a new sign went up over many of his factories: although Ward's Tip-Top bread would continue
to be made into the 1950s, the Ward Baking Company would henceforth and forever be better known as
the Wonder Bakeries, makers of Wonder bread.
GREAT-GRANDMOTHER'S BREAD
An Irish American in Robert Ward's Pittsburgh, my great-grandmother Florence Farrell made twelve to
sixteen loaves of bread a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for ten kids and assorted neighbors. Her husband,
P. T., a small-time Democratic politician and self-taught draftsman, insisted on homemade bread. The
store-bought stuff, he proclaimed, was just “sacks of hot air”—and he was not alone in this feeling. Yet,
by the 1930s, like nearly everyone in America, the Farrell family no longer ate homemade bread every
week. Even in the 1920s, the seeds of that shift were in place; as my great-aunt recalled, “It sounds like
we [kids] appreciated [our mother's] homemade bread, but the truth is we loved any bakers' bread, in
our contrary way.”
At the start of the twenty-first century, a wave of neo-traditional food writers urged Americans
to eschew anything “your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.” If your great-grandmother
wouldn't have eaten it, they argued, it wasn't real food. This rule of thumb raised a few complications:
I'm pretty sure my great-grandmother wouldn't have recognized Ethiopian doro wat or Oaxacan huit-
lacochtle as anything a human would eat, and yet they're two of my favorite foods. Neo-traditionalist's
dreams of “real” food have racial and nationalist undertones, it seems. More importantly, they ignore the
complexities and ambiguities of early twentieth-century Americans' relation to food: which version of
my great-grandmother's bread am I supposed to treasure? The laborious homemade one her husband de-
manded, or the factory-baked one she eventually came to love? Food writers selling a particular dream
of “great-grandmother's kitchen” rarely concern themselves with real people. What I want to know is
how and why my great-grandmother's generation came to desire the store-bought staff of life.
“Convenience” is an easy answer, and certainly part of the historical explanation. While American
preachers and social reformers (mostly male) had invoked “Mother's bread” as a symbol of all that was
good and pure going back to the early 1800s, actual mothers had decried the relentless tedium of daily
baking for just as long. Baking was arm-breaking work, complicated by fickle ovens and inconsistent
ingredients. It kept women bound close to the home, tethered by the slow schedule of rising dough. As
George Ward liked to brag, just one of his company's mixing machines “saved 1,600 women from tedi-
um every fifteen minutes.” Or, as a Polish immigrant put it more bluntly, bakery bread was a “godsend
to the women. It saved their strength and time for work in the mill.” 15
Store-bought bread was a godsend, particularly in households without servants, and as economic
pressures and new opportunities moved more women into the labor force. But convenience offers only a
partial explanation for the popularity of store-bought bread. Florence Farrell never took a job outside the
home, and her children recalled that she loved the sense of community created on baking days. Thanks
to Florence's unpaid labor, homemade bread would also have been less expensive than even the most
efficiently produced industrial bread until well into the 1930s. For the Farrells to have switched their al-
legiances, modern bread must have had some other appeal. None of my relatives remember exactly what
that was, so we'll have to move from family lore to the terrain of history. To understand the attractions
of modern bread more fully, we need to view it in a broader social context.