UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 15

product.” 40 Of course, even bread “untouched by human hands” still required the presence of a few
workers, and this bothered consumers bombarded by images of disease-ridden bakers. So the Wards'
advertising also trumpeted the company's meticulous inspection of workers' health and habits—even
their moral character.
Consumers around the country flocked to witness the spectacle of sanitary baking. They crowded
around the glass of smaller “window bakeries,” where all operations could be viewed from the street,
and lined up for tours of larger factories. One Ohio bakery even encouraged teachers to plan hygiene
lessons for their students around tours of its factory. A trip to Stolzenbach's scientific bakery, the com-
pany claimed, would instill pupils with “the great, lifelong value of a thorough understanding of the
inestimable advantage of perfect cleanliness.” 41
By the end of the 1900s, progressive concern with bakery conditions had spread throughout the entire
nation. In Montgomery, Alabama, for example, progressive women's groups drew up a white list of ac-
ceptable establishments and launched a boycott of offending bakeries that caused an immediate 25 per-
cent drop in sales. 42 By 1913, every major city was home to several sanitary bakeries, and small towns
were close behind. In 1915, the Ogden Standard in Utah proudly declared that the town's thirty thou-
sand people enjoyed access to no fewer than six sanitary bakeries producing “loaves of bread that our
ancestors of only a generation ago would think beyond the power of a baker.” 43
YOU AND YOUR LITTLE OVEN CAN'T COMPETE
At first, changes in bakery facilities themselves—the introduction of shining surfaces, crisp white uni-
forms, medical inspectors, and mechanical mixers—seemed like enough to assuage most anxieties about
bread. But doubts lingered, and old fears resurfaced. Consumers and their expert health advisors knew
that germs and bacteria were invisible, but not much else. They believed that bread could be dangerous,
but didn't know how . Thus, fear remained fairly amorphous and questions abounded. Did baking really
kill all germs? Editors at the influential Chautauquan didn't think so: “Dough kneaded with the hands
always runs the risk of contagion,” they wrote in a special section on preventing disease. “The germs
of cholera, typhoid, and scarlet fever, for example, might be carried in this way easier than in most
others.” 44 And what about bread mold? One Chicago civic group railed against “disease germs arising
from moldy bread,” while Ellen Richards warned housewives to stand ever vigilant against molds and
bacterial growth that infected bread with “sticky masses” and blood-colored clots. 45
Yeasts were microscopic. Were they also germs? Fascinated by the new world of microbiology, the
authors of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on baking science frequently adopted the
language of disease. The Complete Bread, Cake, and Cracker Baker , for example, casually noted that
leavening contained “numerous organisms of disease,” which produced “numerous sources of disease
action.” 46 And raw food guru Eugene Christian, known for his incendiary tract “Why Some Foods Ex-
plode in Your Stomach,” offered this memorable image of bread's living biology: “Bread rises when
infected with the yeast germ, because millions of these little worms have been born and have died, and
from their dead and decaying bodies there rises a gas just as it does from the dead body of a hog or any
other animal.” 47
Seen in that light, fermentation did seem a little scary, and this made easy fodder for food faddists.
C. H. Routh, an influential British doctor, argued that yeast-leavened loaves created “a fit nidus [nest]”
for the growth of bacteria. And he was but one voice making this connection. During the late nineteenth
century, fear of fermentation led to a small craze for chemically leavened “aerated bread” on both sides
of the Atlantic. New York City health commissioner Cyrus Edson went as far as to declare, “Bread
which is wholesome should not be raised with yeast, but with a pure baking powder.” 48