THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 30

Bleaching may have been practical and efficient, but even the science-obsessed American public
didn't like hearing words like “chlorine gas” in conjunction with their bread. Accustomed to outcry
against pre-industrial bakers' use of chalk, borax, and alum to whiten dark flour, many consumers and
consumer advocates quickly decided that chemical bleaching constituted yet another form of bread adul-
teration. Influential progressive leaders and publications took up the anti-bleaching cause, and Harvey
Wiley entreated his broad following to stand against those who “fool with flour.” “Save the bread of the
nation!” he urged. 33
The controversy came to a head in 1910 with a case that would last into the 1920s and influence food
safety legislation into the twenty-first century. On April 9, 1910, looking for an opportunity to challenge
flour bleaching in court, Harvey Wiley, then chief of the U.S. Bureau of Chemistry, precursor to the
FDA, ordered the seizure of 625 sacks of bleached flour sold by the Lexington Mill & Elevator Com-
pany of Lexington, Nebraska. The flour had been shipped across state lines into Missouri, placing the
case in federal jurisdiction. This allowed the Bureau of Chemistry to charge Lexington Mill & Elev-
ator with selling “adulterated, misbranded flour containing poisonous and deleterious ingredients.” 34
The bureau hoped to establish two things with the case: that bleaching allowed millers to sell, or “mis-
brand,” inferior flour as white, and that nitrate residues from the bleaching process constituted a danger-
ous ingredient. 35
A Missouri jury quickly agreed with the government on both counts, but from there, the case wound
its way through a drawn-out process of appeal. A federal court of appeals eventually reversed the jury's
decision, and in 1914, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the reversal. 36
The Supreme Court's decision hinged on the meaning of the word “may” in a line of the 1906 Pure
Food and Drug Act. The act had clearly empowered the government to condemn food that contains
“any added poisonous or other added deleterious ingredient which may render such article injurious to
health,” and the Bureau of Chemistry argued that nitrates of the type found in flour subjected to the
Alsop process were clearly injurious to health. The Supreme Court, however, sided with Lexington Mill
& Elevator's argument that, although nitrates may harm health in large quantities, the government must
prove that they do so in the specific amounts present. In a ruling that still guides government actions
in arenas from genetically modified organism (GMO) labeling to herbal supplement regulation, the Su-
preme Court declared that it was incumbent on the Bureau of Chemistry to show that an ingredient may
be harmful in the quantity typically present in a normal serving or dose. 37
Forced to retry the case, the government brought a new set of charges against the mill, cleansed of
references to health dangers. This time the government accused Lexington Mill & Elevator only of mis-
branding inferior flour, and, when the case finally came to trial, the bureau won. In a 1920 ruling that
stood unchallenged, a lower court agreed that the mill had used bleaching to make a brownish flour look
finer. The bureau won that battle, but had already lost the war. 38
Wiley, long since forced out of government by a general shift away from aggressive consumer protec-
tion, was heartbroken. After the 1914 Supreme Court ruling, he had written in Good Housekeeping that
the country's flour would forever be “as white and waxy as the face of a corpse.” 39 By the early 1920s,
it was clear to him that nothing could hold back bleaching. The Supreme Court ruling and lower court
victory took away the government's ability to ban bleaching outright, forcing it to bring adulteration
charges on a case-by-case basis. Even Wiley conceded that this was impossible given the vast quantity
of flour shipped in the country. 40
A few Americans retained enough of a Progressive Era skepticism about the practices of food pro-
cessors to ensure a sizable niche market for unbleached flour. Gold Medal and other flour millers with
roots in the Pure Foods Movement could still tout the health benefits of unbleached flour and seek out