THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 28

or consistency, however—not against the massed forces of assembly-line production, temperature-con-
trolled fermentation, chemical dough conditioners, standardized ingredients, and professional ovens. By
1920, William Panschar contends in his history of American baking, the superiority of industrial produc-
tion was widely accepted. “As engineers rather than craftsmen, bakers were able to produce consistently
a high quality, uniform loaf of bread. The degree of control exacted over formulas, ingredients, and pro-
duction processes were now far beyond the skills of a housewife to match.” 25
Home economists' support for professional baking, in turn, reflected an important change in the be-
liefs about women's role in the family. As a Pennsylvania journalist explained in 1914, “The modern
woman has out-grown the idea that a mother can best serve her children by slaving for them over the
hot stove. Self-improvement is the mother's first duty.” Indeed, the reporter continued, time and effort
squandered on pointless home baking was “responsible for most domestic misery.” Women should con-
cern themselves with things they could do relatively well—looking beautiful, raising healthy children,
and efficiently administering a modern household. 26
In this new vision of domesticity, a good housewife was a professional manager making smart
choices to maximize her family's health and prospects. As the chair of the University of Chicago's home
economics department predicted: in the past, women were judged by their ability to make good bread, in
the future they would be judged by their skill at buying it. “For after all, real efficiency in housekeeping
is coming to be measured rather by good administration than by simply the power to do.” 27 Respons-
ible mothers delegated their family's staple food to more appropriate experts—professional bakers—and
focused their time on policing the quality of competing bread brands. Housewives should be expert con-
sumers, not bread makers. Nevertheless, at a moment when commercial baking was taking place farther
and farther from homes as a result of industrial consolidation, a serious question remained: by what
signs should expert housewives judge store-bought bread?
WHITE IS A MORAL COLOR
By the 1930s, America's loaves were slender beauties: long, white-wrapped packages. On the inside,
however, slicing put bread's structure on display as never before. Crumb irregularities and unevenness
that were once acceptable, or easily blamed on customers' deficient skills with bread knives, were now
immediately apparent to anyone opening a package of bread. This alarmed bakers. Large uneven holes,
so esteemed by artisan bread lovers today, had no place in the modernist aesthetic. Each one was an
unacceptable reminder of bread's natural life, a tiny realm of imperfection unconquered by science. The
perfect tapered loaf, the ideal slice thickness—all that came to nothing if bread's face looked worm-
eaten. Thus, scientific bakers threw themselves into developing new dough-mixing equipment, loaf-
shaping technology and, most importantly, chemical dough conditioners to ensure that every slice re-
vealed the exact same architecture of tiny even cells. Consumers, for their part, admired the new look
of bread, and accepted uniformity as a mark of quality. 28 Indeed, only one aspect of the high modernist
reengineering of bread's appearance stirred major controversy during the first decades of the twentieth
century: flour whitening.
White bread had long stood as a symbol of wealth and status—and in America, racial purity—but
during the first decades of the twentieth century this association expressed itself in a unique way. Thanks
to the way industrial bakers positioned their product as an icon of scientific progress, the superiority of
white bread didn't appear to be a matter merely of taste or culinary preference. It was an expression of
responsible citizenship. To eat white bread was to participate in the process of building a better nation.
The very whiteness of modern bread helped confirm this dream. At least since the early medieval
period, whiteness has had a Janus-faced social and religious symbolism in the West; the color could