THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 29

equally stand for life or death, purity or pallor. In the early twentieth century, however, the meaning of
white was increasingly stabilized around notions of purity and control. At a time when white America's
collective sense of the ambiguous shades of racial whiteness was more unstable and fractious than at any
other time in its history, the simple color white provided a safe and reassuring haven—an uncontamin-
ated field. Whiteness, as never before, had become synonymous with control over threatening disorder,
and this association manifested itself in multiple arenas, including food production. Whether in clothing,
kitchens, appliances, or water closets, the color of scientific control was white. 29
Dr. Woods Hutchinson, a leading national pundit on matters related to health, for example, wrote in
praise of the color white in an American Magazine article: the color white—particularly from whitewash
and white paint—represented an important means of forcing immigrants to adopt higher standards of
cleanliness. “Anything in the way of dirt or garbage which showed up against this shiny [white] back-
ground was so conspicuous,” Hutchinson argued, “that shame alone compelled the Polacks and Hun-
garians in the district to get rid of it in some way.” If, as early twentieth-century experts loved to repeat,
“dirt was matter out of place,” white had been normalized as the defining measure of whether something
was in or out of place. “Whitewash,” Le Corbusier, one of the most influential modern designers of the
early twentieth century, proclaimed, “is extremely moral.” 30
Even Alfred W. McCann—one of the country's fiercest anti-white bread crusaders—understood the
visual discipline of the white loaf. McCann ardently promoted whole grain bread, but attacked corrupt
bakers who took advantage of the “dusky color” of their darker loaves to conceal impurities. If this
didn't happen, he argued, “The white bread maker would not then point to his immaculate loaf, free from
the faintest tint of color. He would not contrast the 'chastity' of that white loaf with the 'defilement' of
the dark one.” 31 In a time when bread production was increasingly taking place outside the home and
out of consumers' sight, the whiteness of loaves increasingly substituted for the direct ability to monitor
the baking process and reassured consumers of bread's compatibility with modern conceptions of purity,
control, and progress.
Luckily, white bread was widely available. The invention of efficient porcelain and then steel roller
mills in the mid-1800s had made highly refined flour inexpensive and available to the masses for the
first time in human history. From the 1840s on, white wheat bread was no longer only for elites. Refined
flour became standard fare for most consumers, and even the poorest Americans would have enjoyed
an occasional white loaf. Still, these loaves were not particularly white by twentieth-century standards.
Contemporary accounts described them in shades of creamy yellow—hardly the stuff of a modernist
palette. This is where the trouble began.
SHINING WHITE OR WAXY AS A CORPSE
Making the creamy white of white flour match the bright titanium shade favored in other objects of
scientific housekeeping, from appliances to cooks' aprons to kitchen tiles, required more than efficient
milling and sifting. Until the early 1900s, it required something more precious: time. All wheat flour
whitens naturally through oxidation as it ages, and millers had traditionally matured their best product
for one to two months. But natural aging took up valuable space, slowed inventory turnover, and inevit-
ably led to losses from spoilage. Chemical bleaching, achieved by exposing flour to chlorine or nitrogen
peroxide gas, on the other hand, produced oxidation instantly. As Scientific American proclaimed, with
the 1904 invention of the Alsop bleaching process, “The uncontrollable and time-consuming aging and
maturing of flour by nature … has been superseded by a safe, rapid, and far more effective process based
on scientific principles.” 32