THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 26

fittest,” a harsh interpretation of Darwinism popularized by Herbert Spencer and fervently embraced by
American industrialists. Still, the novel remained popular because it captured a feeling that everyone
from Andrew Carnegie to the most militant Red could agree upon: that rapidly emerging technological
progress held out the possibility of a world of social harmony built on abundance and efficiency.
In the late 1920s that utopia seemed just within grasp. Wireless radio, liquid-fueled rockets, long-
distance air flights, and talking pictures offered dramatic evidence of a world to come. High-tech foods
like streamlined sliced bread promised a future of ease, one in which the very material constraints of
biological existence that had limited humans for millennia were overcome by science. This Promethean
dream looked different from competing political perspectives: Socialists hated industrial trusts but en-
visioned a world of shared abundance made possible by industrial food production. Capitalists, on the
other hand, relished cheap industrial food as a means of placating increasingly organized and militant
workers. Either way, it was the same vision: technology would usher in good society by conquering and
taming the fickle nature of food provisioning.
This was another incarnation of the ethos of scientific eating. And, as in the previous chapter, delving
into it will help us understand one more piece of Florence Farrell's switch to store-bought bread.
NOTHING LEFT TO CHANCE
“To begin then with the very foundation of a good table— Bread: What ought it to be?” Catherine and
Harriet Beecher Stowe posed this question in their path-breaking compendium of domestic advice, The
American Woman's Home . 16 The topic, which quickly found a place as the essential primer of Victori-
an domesticity in the United States, promised modern answers to modern problems. Yet, the Beecher
sisters' thoughts on bread had a timeless air: “Bread-making can be cultivated … as a fine art,” guided
by “the divine principle of beauty,” they argued. 17
Less than fifty years later, however, the Beechers' invocation of art and aesthetics as the basis for
“what bread ought to be” had all but vanished from cookbooks and other food writing. Mary D. War-
ren, one of countless purveyors of domestic advice who followed in the Beechers' footsteps, captured
the new spirit of bread. In a 1923 Ladies' Home Journal article, “Science of Oven Management,” she
insisted, “Modern inventions have made an exact science of baking, and there is no reason whatever for
failure. … One simply cannot bake by guesswork and expect to secure results, any more than one can
ascertain with certainty a sick person's temperature by merely feeling his brow.” 18
Thus, by the 1920s, bread making was widely imagined as a techno-science. References to art, craft,
and instinct in the making of bread would remain subordinate to rules and exactitude until the late 1960s.
Like family health care, baking was to be a terrain of control and expert measurement rather than art
and aesthetics. “Modern baking is scientifically done. Nothing is left to chance,” an elementary school
textbook read. “The baker has studied the principles of baking and understands the working of the laws
that govern his product. In his bakery there is a laboratory with microscopes, tubes, balances, and other
instruments, the materials to be used are tested by experts. … [The modern baker] is guided by scientific
laws.” 19
Baking's traditional apprenticeship model gave way to formal study. The Wahl-Heinus Institute of
Fermentology, the Wahl Efficiency Institute, the Chidlow Institute, and the Siebel Institute of Techno-
logy championed the scientific study of bread chemistry, biology, and engineering. Founded in 1919 and
chaired by George Ward, the American Institute of Baking emerged as a center for research and educa-
tion. 20 Meanwhile, plenary sessions at meetings of the National Association of Master Bakers informed
bakers of the latest scientific thinking on wheat chemistry, rational cost accounting, the effects of salts