VITAMIN BREAD BOOT CAMP - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 62

bought white bread once a week; 75 percent bought it more than once a week. In total, Rockfordians ate
about a pound and a half of bread per person per week, regardless of age or economic class. 41
In repeated blind tests, consumer preference was clear and overwhelming: sweeter bread was better,
but more importantly, fluffier bread was better. Comparing loaves of different densities, families almost
always chose the lightest. But, strangely, this bread was not entirely well loved. About a third of house-
wives in the study described supermarket bread as “doughy; gummy; soggy; not well baked,” about 15
percent thought the taste was terrible, and as much as 18 percent thought it too airy (despite the over-
whelming preference for airy bread in blind tests). Depending on the year, between 60 and 75 percent of
Rockford housewives registered major complaints about their staff of life. 42
In the mid-1950s, it wouldn't have been hard to find these tepid responses affirmed by a whole range
of white bread critics writing for popular magazines and newspapers. Whether you looked at Better
Homes and Gardens, Sunset , or Harper's , homemaker advice columns in small-town newspapers or the
more lofty New York Times food section, it would have been hard to find anything good said about the
taste of industrial white bread. In a steady stream of newspaper articles, letters to the editors from house-
wives, and popular magazine features, industrial white bread was described as “cottony fluff,” “cotton
batting,” “fake,” “purposeless perfection,” “inedible,” “limp,” “hot air,” “a fugitive from a test tube,”
and “a doughy mass of chemicals.” 43
Yet nationwide, Americans ate a lot of industrial white bread in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As in
Rockford, the vast majority of households in the United States ate store-bought white bread at all three
meals—totaling some 8.6 billion loaves a year in 1954 (not including home-baked bread, and store-
bought whole wheat, raisin bread, and “ethnic” breads). Most people consumed three to seven slices a
day, but an astounding 33 percent of the population finished off more than eight slices a day. And this
level of bread consumption cut across class: while the wealthiest 10 percent of the country consumed
bread in slightly smaller quantities, the remaining nine income deciles varied little in their daily intake.
Age didn't seem to matter either: adults and children ate bread at exactly the same rate. Only gender
seemed to differentiate bread eaters: women, forbidden the staff of life by many popular diets of the
time, ate the least, while men and boys, associating bread with bodybuilding strength, ate the most. 44
During World War II, bread consumption, driven by the rationing of other staples, accounted for as
much as 40 percent of all calories consumed in the country daily. After the war, Americans could have
abandoned bread, just as they traded ration topics for TV dinners. Instead, the proportion of calories
derived from bread settled in at 2530 percent and then, despite the absolute certainty with which food
economists and baking industry specialists predicted rapid declines in consumption, hovered around the
same point through the mid-1960s. Studies remarked the high percentage of daily vitamins, iron, and
protein consumers derived from the much-derided staff of life.
Why did postwar consumers continue to eat so much industrial bread, despite widespread popular
condemnation of its flavor and texture? Americans could have abandoned bread as a staple, as many
worried bakers feared they would. They didn't. Nor did they choose other kinds of bread in large quant-
ities. When, from time to time, big baking companies attempted to launch lines of whole wheat bread,
they invariably fell flat. And despite the continued survival of small specialty bakeries, especially in
cities, rye, whole wheat, and other “ethnic” loaves offered little competition, accounting for only 8-12
percent of bread consumption during the postwar period. 45
Part of the reason Americans stuck to gummy white bread lay in the way wartime enrichment cam-
paigns had cemented a sense that industrial white bread built strength for individual and national de-
fense. Despite their diverse complaints about store-bought bread, Rockfordians agreed on one thing: de-