VITAMIN BREAD BOOT CAMP - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 55

however, it was quickly evident that the country had a problem. After a decade of lean economic times,
men aged twenty-one to thirty-five were dangerously unfit to fight.
In Chicago's tough Eleventh Ward—cradle of the city's Democratic machine, home to the stockyards
and hard-working Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, German, and Irish men—draft boards found seven out of
ten conscripts physically unfit to serve. In New York State, 30 percent failed their medical exams. In
West Waterloo, Iowa, 124 out of 224 farm boys didn't pass muster. Nationwide, General Lewis B. Her-
shey reported gravely in 1941, draft board doctors and dentists had rejected five hundred thousand out
of the first million men screened. 7
The Depression had taken a brutal toll on the nation's health. Easily preventable problems with teeth
and eyes topped the list of reasons for rejection, and a silent enemy lurked in the ranks of the un- and un-
deremployed. Experts calculated that malnutrition, directly or indirectly, caused at least a third of all re-
jections. 8 While a spate of topics written during the economic crisis of 2008 celebrated 1930s-era cooks
for their thrifty use of authentic ingredients to make “real” American food, the reality of Depression-era
diet was often more grim. Yes, the country was beginning to bake its own bread from scratch again,
but it also suffered from a deep “hollow hunger.” This wasn't outright starvation, but rather, as home
economist Margaret Reid reported, a “hidden hunger … that threatens to lower the zest for living and
to sap the productive capacity of workers and the stamina of the armed forces.” A government com-
mission convened after the Selective Service debacle of 1941 found that 75 percent of low-income high
school students suffered from vitamin B2 deficiencies and 65 percent of Works Progress Administra-
tion workers suffered from scurvy or near-scurvy. Another study revealed that 54 percent of a sample of
low-income whites and blacks suffered from night blindness characteristic of vitamin A deficiency—a
statistic that terrified war planners looking ahead to combat conditions. “Nearly all” low-income stu-
dents tested in another study experienced at least one vitamin deficiency, and time-series research at
a community health center in New York City revealed that malnutrition rates there had risen steadily
through the 1930s, hitting 37 percent in 1938. Pellagra—the vitamin deficiency disease most closely, if
incorrectly, associated with bread-eating habits—killed twenty thousand Americans and debilitated well
over one hundred thousand between 1933 and 1938. 9
In the face of this crisis, the run-up to World War II saw intense focus on nutrition research. This was
a time of great innovation in dietary surveillance, experimental nutrition, population surveys, and chem-
ical analysis. New techniques for rapid blood sampling were developed and schoolchildren, prisoners,
soldiers, and factory workers rolled up their sleeves to give planners the information needed to define a
national standardized war diet. At the same time, government planners and nutritionists recognized that,
no matter how efficient it was, this standard war diet could not be imposed by the state. It had to arise
from the population's souls and desires.
This presented a serious problem: during the 1930s and 1940s, Americans got more calories from
industrial white bread than from any other food, and in case after case, they refused to accept major
changes in that staple. Even when industry leaders like the Ward Baking Company threw their marketing
weight behind whole wheat bread, as they occasionally did, sales did not rise for long. 10 Efforts to pro-
mote alternatives to white bread as a form of patriotic wheat conservation had seen some success dur-
ing WWI, but mostly they failed. And they certainly hadn't lasted. As one magazine writer observed in
1941, “Last time we had the slogan 'food will win the war' but precious few of the lessons which might
have been learned from the wartime self-denial of 1918 carried over into peacetime dietetics. We went
on cramming our tummies with bread so white it was almost blue.” All this white bread, the author con-
cluded, made the country fat, neurotic, and unprepared for battle. 11