VITAMIN BREAD BOOT CAMP - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 57

cautionary tale: in 1937, hoping to increase whole wheat bread consumption, Swiss officials imposed
taxes making whole wheat bread 25 percent cheaper than white bread. It didn't work. Swiss consumers
simply paid more to eat white bread. 18 Influential home economist Helen Mitchell summed up the real-
ists' attitude for the Journal of Home Economics: “Enrichment seems a desirable compromise between
a theoretically better nutritional practice and a realistic one based on the psychology of food habits.” 19
Thus, the urgency of war settled a long-running debate about how to improve industrial bread, sweeping
aside more radical alternatives in the name of expediency.
Unlike mandated high-extraction loaves or the use of natural additives like milk solids, enrichment
was cheap and easy. It required no significant reworking of production lines, no new equipment, no need
to learn new baking techniques and, once sufficient supplies of vitamin powders could be assured, little
additional expense. Bakers couldn't believe their luck. One simple flick of a compressed nutrient wafer
into every batch of dough could put to rest decades of condemnation and restore the busted staff to its
former glory.
Millers balked at enriching flour at first but, like bakers, they eventually saw the advantages. As one
millers' association told its members, in a time when better nutrition was “needed by all Americans to
make them rugged and strong for the all-out war emergency,” enrichment offered a chance to reverse
decades of declining flour consumption. Because enriched bread and flour had “become corner stones
in the national education program for better nutrition,” they could sweep away “the scientific basis for
former criticism of [our] fine foods.” 20
With bakers and millers on board, the industrial war food machine went into motion. And once it
did, alternative health breads like McCay's Cornell loaf wouldn't merely be passed over—they could be
denounced as national security threats by industry spokespeople along with USDA and FDA officials.
Nevertheless, one important question still remained: How best to distribute enriched white bread? While
many in the baking industry hoped to build demand for enriched white bread and boost corporate profits
by selling premium-priced loaves to affluent tastemakers, nutritional realists rejected this route. True,
they argued, poorer consumers might eventually spend more on bread to emulate wealthy eaters, but in
a time of war, added nutrition was too important to leave to the whims of market forces and consumer
choice. Synthetic vitamins didn't cost producers much and could easily be added to all bread. 21
FOR THE AFFLUENT ONLY?
During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Robert R. Williams, a University of Chicago-trained chemist,
found himself at the center of the debate over whether to mandate bread enrichment for all or to sell it as
a premium-priced luxury. Born in 1893, the son of missionaries, Williams spent his childhood in south-
ern India, surrounded by hunger. As a young teacher in the Philippines, scenes of deprivation haunted
him. But it was during a stint as a low-level scientist with the colonial government in Manila that he first
came to understand the moral and political weight of malnutrition. 22
There, in 1910, spurred by the constant sight of listless, limbtwisted victims of endemic beriberi,
Williams had set out to investigate suggestions that polished rice might cause the disease. He wasn't in-
terested in colonial policy, or in the political reasons why millions of Asians might subsist on rice alone.
Williams's goal was simpler and more technical: find a physiological cause and practical cure for the
suffering he saw. After five years' work, he succeeded at the first part: beriberi was, as he had suspec-
ted, the result of malnutrition, caused by the lack of a factor he named “thiamin”—a plentiful substance
in rice husks but completely absent in polished grains. The second half of Williams's dream—finding a
cheap, politically viable cure to that problem—would take him more than twenty-five years.