VITAMIN BREAD BOOT CAMP - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 63

pending on the year, 96 or 100 percent of the USDA bread study's sample responded that their bread
was highly nutritious. 46
Legions of industrial white bread critics still voiced opposition during the age of Wonder bread, but
as the 1950s advanced, scientific consensus turned against them. In 1958 Consumer Reports declared
that it had reversed its long-standing objection to white bread, citing “an accumulation of evidence” and
a particularly convincing experiment carried out in the ruins of postwar Germany by the former white
bread critic R. A. McCance. In that 1946 experiment, published in 1954 and widely cited by champions
of the new consensus, McCance and his partner, E. M. Woddowson, conducted a feeding trial on 250
orphans in Duisberg and Wuppertal. The researchers had divided the orphans into five groups and fed
each group a diet consisting almost entirely of one of five different types of bread (enriched white, vari-
ous grades of high-extraction dark white flour, and whole wheat). “To the surprise of Dr. McCance and
his associates,” Consumer Reports informed readers, “no appreciable differences whatsoever showed
up in the growth of the groups of children. All grew equally well.” In another widely publicized study
of enriched bread's impacts on child health, researchers in Newfoundland claimed that fortified loaves
had given bursting energy to formerly lethargic children, increased child survival rates, and ended adult
listlessness, without any increase in total calories consumed. 47
Health experts, food writers, and ordinary bread eaters who still felt that there was just something
wrong with industrial loaves would have to find a different language other than nutrition science to ex-
press their doubts. Aesthetic and epicurean arguments, which had played a surprisingly minor role in
earlier battles over the staff of life, offered the only way forward. As white-bread critic Clarence Wood-
bury wrote begrudgingly in Reader's Digest , industrial white bread exceeded homemade whole wheat
bread in almost every arena except one—taste. “[White bread] is, undoubtedly, pure, sanitary, whole-
some, nutritious, clean, white, and beautiful—but it is utterly tasteless.” 48
This aesthetic appeal often rang hollow against the muscle-bound science of enriched white bread
advocates. Take, for example, Lee Anderson's tirade, “Busted Staff of Life,” which appeared in the At-
lantic Monthly in 1947. “Modern bread may well be more digestible than the bread our mothers and
grandmothers used to bake each week-end, more nourishing, more scientifically pure, more enriched
with those essential substances which make hair grow, eyes see better, bones get harder,” Anderson con-
ceded. “But Grandma's bread was bread … and if Grandpa had to wear 'specs' at sixty-five and lost all
his teeth at eighty because his diet was deficient in vitamins, no one ever complained that the bread was
at fault.” 49
With friends like these, critics of industrial white bread needed no enemies. Enriched bread might
taste like a “doughy mass of chemicals,” 50 but at least you kept your teeth and eyesight. Children kept
their competitive edge, and the nation as a whole was stronger. Driven by the security imperative of hot
and cold wars, synthetic vitamin enrichment was deeply entrenched in the American dietary conscious-
ness.
LOOK, MOM, IT'S LOADED!
Bakers didn't create the association between enriched white bread and fighting vigor, but during the
early Cold War, they worked hard to reinforce it. As fighting ended in the Pacific, bakers hoped to capit-
alize on the buoyant success of enrichment, but they had to wait. Famine had staked its claim on the im-
mediate postwar period. With bad winters in Europe and crop failures throughout Asia, 1946 and 1947
were desperate years of worldwide grain shortage and mass starvation. In the United States, Truman,
struggling to free up wheat for overseas relief, called on consumers to eat less bread and contemplated
rationing the staple, something the country had avoided even in the darkest days of the war. Bakers re-