UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 14

During 1910, she had personally inspected one hundred New York bakeries, and found conditions re-
volting. 37 In her testimony before the committee, Perkins repeatedly emphasized bakeries' criminal
lack of ventilation. The toll poor air quality took on the lungs of journeymen bakers was horrific. As a
public health doctor confirmed later in the hearings, nearly 100 percent of bakery workers in New York
showed signs of tuberculosis, bronchitis, and other lung infections. When dealing with other industries,
the committee showed concern for workplace safety, but when it came to bread making, it was more
interested in hearing about workers' hygiene.
With a few exceptions, committee members darted around witnesses' appeals for workplace safety
regulations, restating the bakery problem as a question of how best to control immigrant workers. Com-
missioners' questions focused on immigrant bakers' beer drinking, tobacco chewing, sleeping habits,
and spitting, their scabs, their lice, their sweat, their filthy hands, and their unwashed clothes. As the
city health commissioner, Ernst Lederle, argued, cellar bakeries themselves were not the problem, the
problem was that “the people were dirty and careless.” 38
Indeed, in both Chicago and New York, public uproar about cellar bakery conditions was hard to
separate from larger anxieties about the habits of the nation's new Jewish and Italian immigrants. Thus,
even when Perkins and other witnesses defended workers' hygiene habits, the commission voiced skep-
ticism. In one revealing exchange, state assemblyman Cyrus Phillips argued with a public health doc-
tor. “These men you have described are naturally and inherently unclean; aren't they? And they don't
know how to do anything else?” the assemblyman queried. “Why, I guess that's true,” the doctor ven-
tured cautiously, but the assemblyman pressed on with his point about the nature of immigrant bakers:
“No amount of inspection will improve them very much?” Then the doctor surprised those present in
the hearing by responding that yes, he did believe that bakers' habits could be changed. Assemblyman
Phillips replied incredulously, “[You think] that they could counteract their natural and inherent tenden-
cies?” “I certainly do,” the doctor repeated. The two officials weren't talking about bread anymore, they
were debating the nature of new immigrants. Sensationalist accounts of dangerous bread likely reflected
unease about newcomers more than any real hazards posed by eating the product of their ovens. And
this is, in the end, the grain of salt with which we must take fears of cellar bakeries—and a clue to why
bakeries like the Wards' flourished.
Whether or not bread from small bakeries was actually unsanitary, the moral panic around dirt,
germs, and immigrant habits was a gift for industrial bakers. “I want to know where my bread comes
from!” an affluent woman demanded in a national advertising campaign for Holsum bread. “I don't want
bread from some nameless basement bakery. I want my bread from a bakery that's clean as my own kit-
chen. … I've stopped baking but I still want clean bread.” Or, as an ad from Los Angeles more bluntly
put it, “Many bakeries in New York, Chicago, and other cities are being condemned by health officers as
unclean and unsanitary. How often do you inspect your bakery?” 39 Strange as it might seem to contem-
porary foodies, in the early twentieth century the language of “knowing where your food comes from”
was a public relations coup for industrial food.
Bakeries across the country overwhelmingly adopted the new language of clean bread in their ad-
vertising, but it was the Wards, once again, who set the bar. Alongside reprinted news reports on the
“shocking state of cellar bakeries,” the Wards invited New York to visit its bakeries. “You can see
every detail in the making of Ward's Tip-Top Bread. The human hand never touches bread at these, the
greatest bakeries in the world—daylight bakeries, snow-white temples of cleanliness.” Transparency,
cleanliness, and modernity displaced taste, cost, convenience, and even freshness in bread advertising.
The “bare hand” became the greatest enemy of bread. As a Ward Bakeries ad in the New York Times
stressed in italics, “Bread kneaded by hand or mixed by hand can never be made a truly clean sanitary