UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 11

The country's diet proved just as frightening as its cleaning habits, if not more so. Poor diet was a
quiet killer and a silent drain on the country's stamina. By sapping the nation's vitality, inefficient diet
appeared to be the root cause of nearly all of the nation's moral, physical, social, and mental problems.
As health columnist W. R. C. Latson wrote in 1902, “The question of what to eat is one of the most
important practical considerations of life. To know what to eat, how much and how often would go
far toward solving some of life's gravest problems—poverty, weakness, disease, crime, and ultimately
death.” 24
It's not hard to understand the fervor with which early twentieth-century social reformers approached
the question “What to eat?” Cholera, botulism, typhoid, and other food-borne diseases killed in large
numbers across class and race lines. And while historians disagree whether America's food supply ac-
tually grew more dangerous as it industrialized after the Civil War, one thing is clear: starting in the
1870s, Americans strongly believed that their food system was getting less safe. This sentiment opened
the doors to what food historian Harvey Levenstein called “the Golden Age of Food Fads,” as indi-
vidual consumers sought safety in charismatic visions of better eating. It also underpinned collective
mobilization, bringing together women's groups, consumer advocates, temperance unions, and other re-
formers for one of the most organized and sustained attempts to change the food system that history has
known—the campaign for pure food, waged from the 1880s to the 1910s. 25
Then, as now, the question of what to eat was always more than a culinary matter. As historian James
Harvey Young noted, “The crusade for food and drug control shared with overall Progressivism a deep
worry about 'purity': business, government at all levels, social conduct, even the bloodlines of the na-
tion's populace seemed threatened with pollution and required cleaning up.” 26 In the face of looming
danger, social reformers' visions of food purity cross-pollinated easily with nativist politics and ideo-
logies of racial purity. Indeed, as Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern argue in their history of
germ scares, it often became difficult to distinguish between descriptions of food-borne contagion and
the terrifying prospects of racial contamination. 27
Food-borne diseases were widely associated with eastern and southern Europeans, Mexicans, and
other “dirty” groups. Those groups' hunger was just as commonly, and perhaps more rightly, associated
with political instability. Jacob Riis's widely read 1890 exposé, How the Other Half Lives , gave most
comfortable Americans their first glimpse of this looming danger. The topic took readers on a tour of
New York's tenement slums filled with the babble of foreign tongues, ragged children, tubercular par-
ents, and “queer [dietary] staples found nowhere [else] on American ground.” It offered a vision of a
world where the masses clawed and fought for sustenance, where “the cry for bread” filled the air. Amer-
ica need not care about its poor for altruistic reasons, Riis argued. It was a question of self-preservation:
“In my mind there is a closer connection between the wages of the tenement and the vices and improvid-
ence of those who dwell in them,” he warned. “Weak tea with a dry crust [of bread] is not a diet to nurse
moral strength.” In the topic's much-discussed final pages, Riis graphically drove this point home with
an account of a ragged father driven to violence against wealthy Fifth Avenue shoppers by his children's
desperate need for a crust of bread. 28
This was no idle threat. Most major cities had, at some point, experienced riots sparked by interrup-
tions in bread supply or rising prices. The connection between good, plentiful bread and social peace
was intuitively understood. Indeed, New York's first large bakery, the New York Baking Company, was
formed by a group of wealthy citizens hoping to prevent future eruptions of unrest like the one experi-
enced during the citywide bakery strike of 1801. 29
During the first decades of the twentieth century, industrialists like William Ward would not raise
wages or bow to union pressures, but they were smart enough to know that thugs and guns could main-