VITAMIN BREAD BOOT CAMP - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 66

est bread? Warren E. Siegmond, an heir to H. L. Mencken's contrarian conservatism, took aim at white
bread using just this argument. Writing in the American Mercury in 1958, he dared fathers to test the
wisdom of their wives' supermarket selection: “Make this simple test. Take a piece of white bread and
tear out the center. Now roll it into a ball until the whole thing is a doughy mass of chemicals. Bounce it
on the floor; it rivals rubber! Is this food that will see your child through an active school day?” 60
Christian Science Monitor critic Horace Reynolds made an even scarier observation about soft bread:
“Modern industrialism has ruined American bread. … It's so soft and spongy you can contract it with
your hands, mold it any shape you've a mind to. … The soft, fluffy center is like a mouthful of powder
puff. The more you eat the hungrier you get. This is what America's staff of life has come to. It's a pretty
soft staff. The Russians are leaning on something more substantial. … What America needs is bread
with crust to exercise the teeth and stick to the ribs, ribs to strengthen the heart for the tasks which lie
ahead.” 61
A few took the warnings seriously: for a period, the New York public school system replaced its
students' standard white bread with a loaf based on McCay's high-protein “Do-Good” defense bread,
and the U.S. Congress convened long hearings about the safety of bread softeners. But the war-trained
habit of associating white bread with vitamins, strength, and readiness survived those attacks. In fact, it
deepened. While bread manufacturers lured moms with advertising images of tough boys doing tough
things, a new scientific and public health consensus formed around the surprising idea that America's
pillowy soft bread measured up as sturdily, if not more sturdily, than the bread of any other land. By the
end of the 1950s, even industrial bread's most ardent critics would concede this point.
AFTERMATHS OF ENRICHMENT
Synthetic enrichment transformed the way America thought about and ate bread. Thanks to the imper-
ative of building a strong national defense, it did so in a way that was relatively egalitarian. National
health was too important to be left to the whims and fashions of elite consumers, which seem to drive
present-day food movements. And this raises interesting questions for us today. Thinking back on the
wartime campaign for enrichment, I can't help but wonder what level of urgency it would take to move
present-day America toward a future where everyone, not just elite shoppers, had access to healthy, safe,
environmentally and socially responsible food. Perhaps expanding national security to include food se-
curity is just what we need.
At the same time we should realize that during World War II, intense concern about nutrition and na-
tional defense pushed aside alternative ideas about improving America's most important food, smooth-
ing the way for the triumph of an expedient compromise dominated by mainstream nutrition scientists,
industry voices, and government agencies. In the long run, by redeeming sliced white bread in the face
of scientific criticism, the association of food and defense brought the country another step closer to the
wholesale triumph of chemically infused, Styrofoam-textured white bread. Indeed, without the wartime
campaign for enrichment and the government-backed dismissal of nonsynthetically enriched “health
breads” that accompanied it, we might not have witnessed the postwar golden age of Wonder bread. In-
dustrial bakers' ability to associate their product with vigorous defense and spirited competition saved
sliced white bread from declining consumption. Ultimately it helped lay a foundation for the postwar
triumph of processed foods.
Today, local foodies, health food advocates, and anti-obesity crusaders might consider industrial
white bread a national security threat, not an asset. But, in some important way, they owe their ability
to speak easily about diet and defense to the training Americans received in the WWII-era campaign
for synthetic bread enrichment. In this sense, they inherit a language with the power to galvanize rap-