VITAMIN BREAD BOOT CAMP - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 59

Only in the context of mobilization for total war could Williams and other nutrition scientists con-
vince the country that enrichment mattered enough to make premium pricing unethical. By the time War
Food Order Number 1 mandated across-the-board bread enrichment, many patriotic bakers and millers
had already begun to internalize the minimal costs of adding vitamins to their products.
After the expiration of War Food Order Number 1 at the end of hostilities, more than half the coun-
try's states passed laws requiring bread enrichment, but they hardly needed to act. By 1947, a year after
the repeal of mandatory wartime enrichment, industry marketing reports suggested that housewives had
come to simply expect extra vitamins in their bread at no extra cost, and would continue to expect this in
the postwar period. 24 As the war ended, Victory Gardens weeded over and Meatless Mondays morphed
into barbeque parties, but with enriched bread something had stuck. Consumers had begun to crave ex-
tra vitamins in their food.
This remarkable cultural shift began with efforts to convince home front fighters that enriched white
bread was a lynchpin of national defense, not the staff of death. In the context of wartime mobilization,
the campaign for enrichment had served as a kind of vitamin boot camp, teaching Americans to think
about nutrition.
VITAMIN BOOT CAMP
Early market research showed that bread buyers harbored deep-seated suspicions about bakers' enriched
bread claims. Before the government made mandatory enrichment the norm, many housewives confused
the word “enriched” with “richness,” assuming vitaminized bread was more fattening than regular
loaves. Some believed that enriched bread was a medicinal product best reserved for sick family mem-
bers, while others simply dismissed “enriched” as a meaningless advertising word. 25
Food manufacturers had enriched a few products since the 1930s, and home economists had lectured
about the importance of vitamins since the 1910s, but most Americans had no idea what it all meant. A
1940 Gallup Poll found that only 9 percent of Americans knew what vitamins did. In 1941, another poll
revealed that only 16 percent could distinguish between calories and vitamins. “Funny how we never
knew nothin' about vitamins or calories or dietin' when we was young … we must a-been tough ones to
live through it,” admitted Mary Anne Meehan, a cook interviewed by a Works Progress Administration
oral historian in 1939. “Now don't get me wrong. I believe in this vitamin and calory stuff alright,” she
continued—but it didn't sound that convincing. 26
If Americans were to accept the idea that individuals had a patriotic duty to eat vitamin-rich foods,
a national education campaign would have to convince them. Bread seemed like a good place to start.
As U.S. surgeon general Thomas Parran argued, bread enrichment offered “a way in which necessary
vitamins can be put into the diet of all our people, rich and poor; for all of us eat bread in some form
three times a day.” 27 Just as Selective Service applied to every fighting-aged man in the country, bread
touched virtually every civilian family. Bread would make a good boot camp in which civilians could
learn to think about how the vitamin content of foods they ate affected national defense.
In January 1941 the National Research Council for Defense announced that enriched bread would
help the country “withstand the stresses and strains of war,” and newspapers from Marysville, Ohio, to
Brainard, Minnesota, from Amarillo, Texas, to Ogden, Utah, carried the story on their front pages. The
surgeon general reinforced this message in a widely read Better Homes and Gardens article. Enrichment
wouldn't just fix the busted staff of life, he insisted, it would turn bread into a weapon of national de-
fense. “We are on the eve of a food revolution,” the Science News Letter proclaimed. “Our staff of life,
bread, will be restored to an ancient estate, making it more worthy of bearing this proud title. Vitamins