UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 13

level of consequence: individual decisions about bread didn't just mark class differences, they placed
eaters' behavior in relation to the larger health of the nation and proclaimed, for all to see, whether one
was fit and responsible—or in need of help. The problem was that it was far from clear what kind of
bread was most hygienic.
HOW OFTEN DO YOU INSPECT YOUR BAKERY?
To any late nineteenth-century observer, the answer to the question of what bread was most hygienic
would have been obvious: home -baked bread was better. Bakery bread was one of the few processed
foodstuffs widely associated with poverty rather than affluence, and bakeries themselves suffered under
a cloud of suspicion. Except for a few “sanitary bakeries,” the vast majority of the country's bakeries
were more dark satanic mills than shining palaces. 32 Poorly capitalized and facing cutthroat compet-
ition, the country's small bakeries slashed any cost possible. They stretched and whitened cheap flour
with plaster of Paris, borax, ground bones, pipe clay, chalk, alum, and other nefarious compounds. They
invariably sold underweight loaves, and they worked laborers as hard as they could. As the lyrics of an
1884 union anthem from St. Helens, Oregon, asked, “Full eighteen hours under the ground, / Toiling
and making bread! / Shut off from air and light and sound, / Are we alive or dead?” 33
Beginning in the 1870s, labor organizations were able to bring these abuses to light and raise public
outcry about “Slavery in the Baker Shops”—but not the outcry they hoped for. 34 Rather than rousing
sympathy for exploited workers, unions and their allies succeeded in focusing the country's outrage on
dirty bread and the dirty hands that made it. Reports of “disease-breeding bread” had circulated since
the 1880s, but with the attention called to Chicago's meatpacking industry by Upton Sinclair's muckrak-
ing journalism, concern about bread exploded in the mid-1900s. Months after The Jungle hit bookstores
in February 1906, the city's chief sanitary inspector declared that bakery “conditions rival those dis-
covered in the worst of the packing houses.” 35 Sensationalist descriptions of unventilated and pestilent
cellar bakeries filled local newspapers and echoed through the city's lecture halls. Sanitary inspectors
painted pictures of dark, vermin-infested caves with raw sewage dripping from pipes into dough-mixing
troughs, street dust and horse manure blown onto dough, bread cooling on dirt floors, and whole famil-
ies sleeping on rag piles in bakeries, alongside their chickens. In the worst cases, bakers worked ankle
deep in water and sewage when storms backed up city drains.
As pressure for a federal pure food law mounted, Chicago civic organizations, women's groups, and
self-styled sanitary activists conducted surprise bakery inspections and drew up “white lists” of accept-
able establishments. Under pressure from these groups and driven from within by crusading health of-
ficials, the city government stepped up regulation. A 1907 ordinance established guidelines for bakery
construction, outlawed sleeping in bakeries, and mandated regular inspections. Later, a second ordin-
ance banned cellar bakeries outright.
These were the first such ordinances in a major city, and Pure Food activists around the country took
Chicago as a model. There was still much work to be done, though: in 1908 only thirty of one thousand
bakeries inspected under Chicago's new ordinance passed without citation. 36 At least they had been in-
spected. In New York, thousands of cellar bakeries went virtually unregulated. By 1910, however, with
sensational accounts of filthy bakeries filling newspapers and stories of progressive action flooding in
from Chicago and elsewhere, pressure mounted. Blue-ribbon commissions were appointed and “profes-
sional sanitarians” deployed.
In November 1911, the New York State Factory Investigating Committee convened days of hearings
on the city's bakeries. Consumer protection advocate Frances Perkins, who would later become FDR's
secretary of labor and the country's first female cabinet member, lent the proceedings celebrity status.