THE STAFF OF DEATH - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 47

ified control over virtually all forms of disease, while revealing a degree of strength and stamina such
as would put others to shame. In short, fasting was a stunning weapon of mastery, an instrument with
which to prove one's superiority over menacing perils ranging from microbes to men.” 50
RED MEAT, WHITE BREAD, AND BLUE BLOOD
Of course, defenders of white bread could wield the exact same language of racial vigor. Dr. Woods
Hutchinson, for example, a widely read New York health writer, directed eugenics-infused vitriol at
nearly every aspect of claims that white bread destroyed the white race. Touting the “triumphant vindic-
ation of white bread” by science, he argued that “all this torrent of denunciation and prophecy of evil, to
the effect that we are undermining the constitution of the race and devitalizing our tissues by the use of
this attractive and toothsome but nutritious pale ghost of real bread, is pretty nearly moonshine.” 51
To the contrary, Hutchinson reasoned, one need only compare strapping, tall Americans with spe-
cimens from any rice- or brown bread-eating nation. In strength, valor, and intelligence, the American
surpassed them all. So eat what you want, Hutchinson intoned; “white flour, red meat, and blue blood”
are the emblems of global conquest. To not eat them would threaten America's place in the pantheon
of nations. Indeed, as one of Hutchinson's fans quoted him in the Los Angeles Times , brown bread and
vegetables were “the diet of the enslaved, stagnant and conquered races.” A cartoon advertisement for
Whitmer bakeries appearing around the same time drove this point home visually. In it an American
doughboy towers over a rice-eating Asian. “Bread eaters lead the world,” it affirmed, and among them,
“the most progressive” eat white wheat bread. 52
Thus, as memoirs and novels of Jewish life in 1920s America confirm, consuming dark rye bread
marked one as racially inferior, and eating white bread represented a key step toward “Americaniza-
tion.” 53 It wasn't just that white bread was culturally associated with white civilization—a symbol of
progress or Americanness. White bread was believed to have made white American civilization pos-
sible. Superior men required superior fuel.
This raised an important question: how could consumers be sure that white bread offered the best
foundation for racial fitness? Hutchinson willingly conceded whole wheat bread's superior endowment
of vitamins and minerals. So how could he, and so many like him, argue for the nutritional superiority of
white bread? On one level, Hutchinson simply rejected what he viewed as “food faddists' ” misreading
of nature. Flipping Graham on his head, Hutchinson argued that “the unconquerable preference of the
human stomach for white bread” was entirely natural. “Never was [there] a better or more convincing il-
lustration of the sound common sense of unregenerate humanity than the irresistible way in which wheat
bread has swept the board as the staple bread-stuff of civilized man.” 54 To shill for rough brown bread
was to rebel against human instinct.
On another level, Hutchinson helped popularize a key scientific argument against whole wheat bread.
While whole wheat bread contained more nutrients than white, many early twentieth-century scientists
believed that they could not be absorbed as well by the body. As Hutchinson explained, whole wheat
bread's nutrients came “in an utterly indigestible and unutilizable form, namely bran and husks. So
weight for weight, white bread is more nutritious than brown as well as free from the irritating effects
of the husks upon the food tube.” 55 From the vantage of early twentieth-century medicine, whole wheat
backers' logic seemed flawed. “What the faddists apparently do not see at all,” popular health author Dr.
Logan Glendening charged, “is that the two parts of their argument are self-contradictory. The roughage
is valuable because it contains vitamins, but the only reason it is valuable as roughage is because it goes
through the intestinal tract undissolved or undigested. If the bran does any good as roughage it does
no good as vitamin container.” 56 This concept did not stand the test of time—or new understandings