THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 32

ably unintended side effect, the Do-Maker Process produced loaves with incredibly fine and uniform
cell structure. 46 Bakers immediately latched onto the marketing potential of this innovation, calling the
product of continuous-mix baking “batter-whipped bread,” and hailing the fact that science had finally
banished all holes from the country's bread. Wonder bread advertising called batter-whipped bread “re-
volutionary,” and most consumers seemed to agree. The white shirts of the nation were finally safe from
drips of jam leaked through unruly holes. No longer would haphazard gas bubbles remind eaters of
bread's natural origins.
INDUSTRIAL ABUNDANCE CONSIDERED
At the head of the La Brea Bakery production line in Van Nuys, towering steel vats hold liquid sour-
dough culture, the microbial progeny of Nancy Silverton's original starter. Piquant and frothy, it is a
liquid ferment like the Do-Maker's broth, but once it's mixed into batches of dough, all resemblance to
continuous-mix baking ends. La Brea dough undergoes long, slow fermentation at cool temperatures in
stainless steel troughs. Sumptuous amounts of time allow the dough's flavors to fully develop. High-
tech machinery handles the risen dough, but in exactly the opposite way as on most industrial production
lines: tiny wire filigrees, steel fingers, and ingenious paddles divide and shape each piece without press-
ing out gas bubbles formed during fermentation. Jon Davis tells me that it took years of collaboration
with a Japanese high-tech manufacturer to develop equipment that would encourage the natural holes
that automatic dough handling typically sets out to destroy.
With its different approach to time and nature, the La Brea Bakery appears to channel a new industrial
food aesthetic in which slowness and tradition are as important as speed and progress. Hominess and
high modernism mix quite well at La Brea. This, in turn, seems to answer a question that a number of
skeptical bakers and food writers posed during the 1920s and 1930s: Must we sacrifice quality ingredi-
ents and flavor in the name of industrial efficiency? Can't we have both? 47 La Brea, with its carefully
made loaves and simple ingredients, suggests that maybe we can.
At the same time, much of the old aesthetic persists at La Brea. An industrial, scientific spectacle of
perfectly controlled irregularity simply stands in for the old love of perfectly controlled regularity. Both
aesthetics of control evince an equally strong confidence in modern technology's ability to usher in a
utopia of abundant good food. At the start of the twenty-first century, the idea that high-tech food holds
the key to a better world has been tarnished by decades of experience with the health, social, and envir-
onmental consequences of industrial agriculture and food processing. But it still casts its spell. While La
Brea's dream of abundant good bread is harmless enough, the larger confidence in industrial food pro-
duction has real consequences. At the very least, it narrows Americans' sense of what kinds of changes
in the food system are practical or possible.
Steeped in the dream of industrial plenty, for example, many skeptical observers of the alternative
food movement voice doubts about the ability of small farmers and artisan producers to feed a rapidly
growing world. Food historian James McWilliams captured this attitude in his topic Just Food: Where
Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly . Although he admitted to sharing the
culinary pleasures of slow, organic eating, McWilliams berated members of the alternative food move-
ment for believing that it could amount to anything more than an elitist trend. Heirloom farmers' market
tomatoes and handmade pain au levain were wonderful, but tackling world hunger required industry,
efficiency, and scale. 48
McWilliams was correct in one sense. Many expressions of the alternative food movement appear
precious and far removed from the daily grind of poverty. But while defenders of industrial food pro-
duction can make easy sport of rich locavores, they conveniently ignore the far greater elitism of oli-