VITAMIN BREAD BOOT CAMP - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 56

Thiamin topped everyone's list of concerns. Dubbed “the morale vitamin” because of its perceived
effect on mental stamina and physical resilience, thiamin (vitamin B1) was deemed essential to readiness
early in the war effort. Nutrition studies published in popular science magazines painted a dark picture
of a thiamin-deficient nation. Subjects deprived of the vitamin displayed inability to concentrate, uncer-
tain memory, awkwardness, self-consciousness, progressive feelings of inferiority, irritability, depres-
sion, and anxiety. Pointing out the obvious, but with great authority, the editor of the Journal of the
American Medical Association observed that these traits were among the “least desirable in a population
facing invasion.” Unfortunately, industrial processing had mercilessly stripped the country's single most
important food of thiamin. Eating refined white bread, a popular science writer suggested, did Hitler's
work for him. 12
Later, Cornell nutrition scientist Clive McCay would reflect back on the moment: bread's role in war
had been clear to anyone who looked abroad, he argued. The secret of Germany's “husky soldiers” was
its “excellent dark loaf”; the great resilience of Russia was its stubborn rye bread. France, on the other
hand, a nation of puffy white bread eaters, had folded. What would become of the United States, where
people simply would not eat whole wheat? Despite hopeful slogans like “America's Bread Front Has
Never Failed,” wartime food officials were worried. 13 Something had to be done, but what?
A NUTRITIONAL WEAPON DELIVERY SYSTEM
By 1943, this question had been decisively answered—at least as far as bakers and policy makers were
concerned. The country would repair its broken staff with synthetic enrichment, the universally man-
dated addition of thiamin, niacin, iron, and later riboflavin to flour and bread. For war planners, public
health officials, and baking industry executives, synthetic enrichment was the only “realistic” way to
improve the nation's health in a hurry. Even prominent nutrition scientists long skeptical of white bread
joined the consensus in the name of wartime expedience. Synthetic enrichment was, they conceded, the
quickest way to rush vitamins to almost every American, almost every day—without needing to change
the country's tastes or upset its milling and baking industries. 14
This doesn't mean that synthetic enrichment offered the only or inevitable option for policy makers.
As war loomed, the United States could have looked to a number of strategies for fixing its broken fight-
ing staff. Other countries changed the extraction rate—the proportion of the whole wheat berry retained
in flour after the milling process—of their bread. Britain, for example, had ordered millers to produce
high-extraction flour for its “War Bread,” creating a tough loaf despised by consumers, but probably
responsible for saving the island from crippling malnutrition. 15 Canada went even further: not only did
the government mandate high-extraction “Canadian Bread,” starting in 1941, it declared that the addi-
tion of synthetic vitamins to bread constituted criminal food adulteration. 16 Homegrown options existed
as well. Most famously, Clive McCay's “Cornell Bread,” developed for the New York State Emergency
Food Commission, counted on substantial backing from agribusiness lobbies and health food advocates.
Drawing its nutritional boost from soy flour and milk solids rather than whole wheat, this bread could
fuel home front fighters and satisfy their craving for soft, white loaves. Cornell Bread instantly won loy-
al adherents among both health food advocates and New York government officials. But while Cornell
Bread has enjoyed repeated spates of popularity from the 1950s to the present, it consistently lost out to
synthetic enrichment in high-level food policy debates—despite backing from powerful dairy and soy-
bean lobbies. 17
Self-styled nutritional realists countered that none of these foreign or domestic alternatives would
work in the United States. Even government intervention couldn't change consumers' taste for pure
industrial white bread, the realists argued. Look at Switzerland, they warned, deploying their favorite