UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 12

tain social stability only for so long. When the Wards built their New York bakeries, the memory of
Jewish bread riots in 1903 and 1905 had not yet faded, and the experience of a widespread 1910 bakery
strike was fresh in the minds of many. So, while Ward increased his workers' hours and lowered their
pay despite record profits, he also endowed a home for the city's elderly poor and a workers' retreat in
the Hudson Valley—a bucolic wonderland where Ward bakery workers could rent subsidized summer
cabins and their children could escape the corrupting influence of tenement life for a time. In the factory
itself, on-site doctors cared for workers' health and taught them “healthy habits.” 30
This was precisely the approach that most food reformers took as well. Outside of labor and socialist-
leaning movements, the social tensions evoked by Riis and others were understood as a problem not of
exploitation but rather of a lack of education and the corrupting influences of poverty itself. The issue
wasn't that workers couldn't afford food, but that they didn't know how to use their food budget effi-
ciently, didn't understand scientific principles of good eating, or didn't have the means to cook properly.
Racial eugenicists, reaching the apex of their popularity during the 1910s and 1920s, believed that
solving these social problems could be achieved only by purging society of inferior stock. Poor diet, in
their minds, constituted clear evidence of unfitness. As Michael Williams argued in Good Housekeep-
ing , alluding ominously to forced sterilization and other coercive measures favored by American eugen-
icists at the time, immediate action must be taken to eliminate “the dregs and waifs of our population”
who simply could not “maintain true economy in nutrition.” 31
Most home economists, however, inclined toward the more optimistic euthenics movement. For
them, racial fitness didn't begin and end with genes. It could be achieved by changing physical envir-
onments and teaching new habits. Social work and education would teach modern eating habits to the
poor, while better urban planning and provision of what we today call “appropriate technology” would
overcome the physical obstacles to proper eating. In a fashion reminiscent of many community-garden
and anti-obesity campaigns designed to teach the poor about “healthy eating” today, reformers poured
into the country's urban tenements and rural hill countries. What they achieved was not an attack on
the economic root causes of poverty, but the spread of a gospel of progress through healthy habits and
hygienic eating.
These were well-meaning efforts. Even George Ward's championing of cheap whole wheat bread for
the masses can't be glossed merely as a cynical attempt to increase market share—indeed, by all ac-
counts it hurt the company. Yet, ideas about scientific eating were also metrics by which populations
could be measured for worthiness. Following expert dietary advice became not just a matter of good
practice but a requirement of competent citizenship. Even when reformers' efforts to spread the gospel
of good food failed, these failures had the effect of reinforcing social hierarchies. Rather than use these
failures as an opportunity for self-reflection (maybe the poor actually need higher wages, not our gospel
of good eating), reformers felt confirmed in their belief that poverty stemmed from the poor's ignorance
(only a fool wouldn't want to eat hygienically).
Even when reformers failed to convince others to eat correctly, they themselves had deeply internal-
ized their doctrine. Indeed, the greatest impact of this movement to shape how the masses ate was not on
the masses, but on the habits and desires of the country's professional classes. Thus, while many of the
food reformers' most ambitious projects—communal kitchens in tenement districts, for example—failed
miserably, the power of hygienic eating flourished.
With this in mind, the choice of bakery over homemade can be understood as something more than
just a question of taste or ease. Preference and convenience must be understood in relation to a whole
series of deeply inculcated desires, responsibilities, and aspirations. Centuries of European tradition had
linked bread choices with class and status, but the movement for hygienic eating added a whole new