UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 17

skilled jobs like so much flour dust. Lung-stricken journeymen in New York's cellar bakeries had long
held out against misery in the hopes of one day opening their own shops. Now they—and their former
bosses—could only hope for a place on the unskilled assembly line of a bread factory. There they would
enjoy better working conditions, perhaps, but no hope of starting their own bakery.
Even that stalwart icon of all that was good—“Mother”—came in for harsh criticism under the banner
of hygienic diet. Scientific American , women's magazines, and home economics textbooks portrayed
careless home baking as a threat to family health, while other observers wondered whether even the most
careful housewife could produce safe bread. “The modern bakers' oven has a germ-killing power that is
far beyond that of a household oven,” the Atlanta Constitution warned, and a New Castle, Pennsylvania,
reporter confirmed that baking factories' “great white ovens … properly kill the yeast germs.” “You and
your little oven cannot compete. … It is scientifically proven that home baking is a mistake from every
standpoint.” 56
Ellen Richards compared home-baked loaves with “laboratory bread” and found the former lacking.
For Richards, tradition and lack of control meant that home-baked bread was not just inferior but also
potentially dangerous. “The custom of some housewives of wrapping the hot loaf in thick cloth that the
steam may soften the crust is entirely wrong from a bacteriological standpoint,” she argued, and extra
care was needed for coarse breads, which contained particularly resistant bacteria. She urged house-
wives to follow strict sanitary procedures and educate themselves by conducting yeast gas experiments
in test tubes and Petri dishes. To drive home the weight of her warning she stressed, “Every case of
typhoid fever is due to somebody's criminal carelessness.” 57 Faced with these risks, why experiment or
chance the criminal carelessness of homemade bread when the scientific bakery was near?
Backed by the urgent language of food purity and public health, dramatic changes in the way the
country got its bread seemed reasonable, even necessary. The destruction of craft baking, the replace-
ment of skilled labor with machines, and the concentration of baking into ever larger and more distant
factories were not solely the product of insatiable greed or capitalist competition. They arose out of of-
ten well-meaning and earnest concern for food safety.
THE TRIUMPH OF INDUSTRIAL BAKING
In 2010, the only trace of the Ward Baking Company's sparkling palace of automatic baking was a faint
white gleam shining off the concrete rubble in a chain-linked vacant lot. In an age of resurgent artisan
baking, Ward's Brooklyn bread factory was demolished to make way for high-end real estate develop-
ment. Looking around Prospect Heights, though, with its retro-chic bars, vintage stores, and yoga studi-
os, it was clear that it wasn't just the bakery building that was gone. In an age marked by nostalgia for
old ways and artisanal authenticity—when consumers living in expensive condos associate purity with
small scale and the touch of human hands, not the reverse—the very utopian dreams of scientific eating
embodied in the Ward Bakery seemed preposterous.
It's easy, from our vantage, to discount the wondrous appeal of industrial purity and hygiene, but this
attitude does disservice to a time when food-borne illnesses were the leading causes of death, when dis-
ruptions in the provision of a single staple could unleash fears of famine and rebellion. We should think
twice before dismissing consumers who flocked to sanitary factory bread as mere dupes of corporate
propaganda. Nostalgia for Great-grandma's bread and neighborhood bakeries omits a few details.
Yet, for all that it made food safer or brought more air and light to bakery workers, the great wave
of efficiency and hygiene sweeping through the United States during the early twentieth century did not
address the root causes of food insecurity. Thanks to the combined efforts of social reformers and food
scientists, the country's loaves would no longer carry typhus (if they ever really had), but they would