THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 33

gopoly agribusiness, the myriad ways in which the dream of industrial plenty often made life worse,
not better. Scientific household management, as Ruth Schwartz Cowan showed in her aptly named topic
More Work for Mother , placed more pressures on women, not fewer. 49 Ever-larger and more efficient
bakeries churned out ever-cheaper bread, but often at the cost of good jobs and community businesses.
Cost savings from efficiency were not always passed on to consumers. And, as we will see in a later
chapter, massive expansion of food production facilitated by technological advances sometimes created
more hunger, not less.
Most early twentieth-century food writers, domestic advisors, and consumers couldn't have imagined
these counterintuitive outcomes of their dream of industrial plenty. Nevertheless, the ambiguous nature
of industrial plenty was not completely lost on American bread eaters of the period. As industrial baking
triumphed over small shops and home ovens, the country began to disagree about the nature of this new
bread—first quietly and then, by the end of 1920s, vehemently. As the Great Depression took hold, com-
munity groups urged consumers to buy local bread from small bakeries or make it themselves. 50 They
also began to doubt the high modern aesthetic altogether. Had bread become too modern: too soft, too
white, too defiled and denatured? Would soft bread make for a soft country?
Tapping into a much older line of American religious tradition, noted food gurus of the late 1920s and
1930s worried that industrial bread might erode moral behavior. In 1929, in bold type arrayed around a
large picture of white bread, the New York Evening Graphic declared, “Criminals are made by the food
that they eat as children—Science finds that white bread develops criminals.” 51 For many household
advisors and dietary experts, as the next chapter shows, industrialization had gone too far.