THE STAFF OF DEATH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 37

thinking about the decidedly social dreams rolled up in debates about gluten and health. In going gluten
free, I was participating in a very old and very American dream: a deep and abiding belief in the ability
to fine-tune and maximize the moral and physical health of my body and my nation by eating the right
food—an irrepressible confidence in the power of proper diet to cure almost all physical and social ills.
This dream, in turn, has long reflected deeper concerns about the nature of industrial progress, society's
relation to nature and, of course, anxiety about status. Not surprisingly, wheat and bread have played a
major role in this history.
Indeed, for almost as long as Western culture has existed, it has been accompanied by anxieties about
wheat or its refining. Recall, for example, Plato's discussion in The Republic about the impact of refined
wheat on society's moral health, and consider the seventeenth-century celebrity diet guru Thomas Try-
on, who warned Britons that eating overly refined or poorly baked loaves upset Nature and Reason. 13
During the past two hundred years, however, as bread production has grown increasingly industrial and
increasingly distant from homes, suspicions about the staff of life's effect on life itself have grown even
more frequent.
Usually these concerns focused on the components of bread like vitamins or fiber. Typically they
cleaved between critics and backers of refined white flour, but sometimes, as in the 2000s, they
broadened to encompass any wheat. Disagreements about refined flour's relation to constipation date
back centuries, but battles over bread have spotlighted a wide range of other effects, from blood im-
purity, antibody formation, and chemical poisoning to discussions of nervous inflammation, corporeal
enervation, tissue sweetening, and acidosis. The specifics change over time: Atkins turns into gluten
free, gluten free turns into . . . ? But much remains the same, and this is where history can offer some
perspective.
In 1924, the industry magazine Baking Technology warned readers of rampant “amylophobia”
sweeping the country. 14 Literally the fear of starch, amylophobia, in the writer's usage, encompassed
an amorphous, spreading sense that modern bread—either all wheat bread or just its white, refined
form—did something bad to bodies. In 1924, the baking industry was emerging shining white out of
forty years of moral panic over bread cleanliness and contagion. Here, however, was a different kind
of concern: not fixated on external contaminants but on the nature of bread itself and its effects on
human metabolism. Something about modern bread—and critics differed about what that something
was—appeared to be making the country fat, sick, lazy, and weak.
This chapter suggests that, as strange and exaggerated as 1920s and 1930s “amylophobia” might
seem, it has a lot to teach us about the political and psychic costs of our national fixation on achieving
perfect health through dietary discipline. But before we can understand the wheat fears of the early twen-
tieth century, we'll need to appreciate the even deeper and older roots from which they arose. There's
nowhere better to begin that than with Sylvester Graham, America's first great white bread critic.
THE CRUSADE AGAINST MORAL INFLAMMATION
Today, if we remember him at all, we remember Sylvester Graham as the inventor of the graham cracker
(which he wasn't) or “the father of American vegetarianism” (which he may have been). 15 Almost two
hundred years ago, however, the man whose devoted followers later gave his name to the dull brown
cracker used for s'mores inspired scandal, controversy, and riots. Thousands of people read his essays
or squeezed into packed auditoriums to hear him speak during the 1830s and 1840s. Tens of thousands
followed his teachings religiously, and far more decried them just as dogmatically. Medical journals ran
tempestuous debates about his principles, while mob violence stalked his speaking engagements up and