UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 9

For bakers in the 1910s and 1920s, ever more efficient production of ever-greater quantities of bread was
a decidedly ambiguous kind of progress. While consumers might buy newer, better automobiles as their
prices fell thanks to industrial efficiency, they were unlikely to increase their consumption of bread, no
matter how cheap and plentiful it got. Even worse, falling bread prices (or rising incomes) freed money
in household budgets with which consumers could introduce more variety into their meals, displacing
bread from its dominant place in the American diet. “Bread must compete with other foods for its place
at the table,” one industry observer wrote, capturing a widespread anxiety, but it had few advantages in
that fight: lacking the movie star looks of newfangled fruits arriving by refrigerated train from Califor-
nia, the novelty of modern wonders like Jell-O, or the exotic appeal of tropical sweets steaming in from
Central America, bread was just basic. “Declining consumption” was every baker's nightmare, and it
was assumed to be inevitable. 16
Instead, something remarkable happened during the first decades of the twentieth century: per capita
bread consumption increased . 17 Modern factory bread wasn't just a more convenient version of the an-
cient staple—it was something new. Its ingredients may have remained more or less unchanged, its ba-
sic shape may have been preserved, its familiar taste maintained (in a watered-down form), but modern
bread was somehow completely transformed. It had taken on shiny new meanings, found a new place
on the American table and in the country's lunch pails.
Bakers worked hard for that increase, advertising relentlessly, doing everything possible to distin-
guish more or less identical loaves from one another through branding. They joined forces to promote
bread consumption, collectively touting its healthful properties, sponsoring sandwich recipe contests,
and even partnering with wheat growers and electric appliance makers to give toasters away at cost.
But none of that would have saved bread if bakers hadn't capitalized on a new ethos of scientific eating
spreading through the country. Scientific eating had several different facets, which we'll revisit in later
chapters. For now, I'll argue that the appeal of modern bread lay in the way it resonated with a growing
cultural embrace of science and industrial expertise as a buttress against rapidly escalating fears of im-
purity and contagion.
ANXIETY AND EXPERTISE
When Florence Farrell came of age at the turn of the century, the ability to make good bread was the
mark of a good bride—her highest art. It was, in Victorian domestic ideology, “the very foundation of a
good table” and “the sovereign” of the true housewife's kitchen, as Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe
declared at the start of one of the century's best-selling topics, The American Woman's Home . 18 In the
early twentieth century, however, ideas about family and motherhood began to change, and this would
make possible—even imperative—the shift from homemade to store-bought bread. Industrial bakers
like the Wards had mastered baking technology and designed its cutthroat business model, but the ulti-
mate source of their product's success lay in a new way of seeing the home.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century a “culture of professionalism” had begun to grip the
country's emerging middle classes. Powerful visions of expertise and efficiency were colonizing every
corner of daily life, from how babies were born (with doctors, not midwives, in attendance) to fashion
(hemlines raised for sanitary reasons) and interior design (smooth, easily cleanable surfaces, not Victori-
an fringe and ruffle). This fervent new belief in science, social engineering, and industrial efficiency
aimed to sweep away old forms of knowledge and authority perceived as grounded in craft, intuition,