Free White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

cellar bakery conditions was hard to separate from larger anxieties about the habits of the nation’s new Jewish and Italian immigrants. Thus, even when Perkins and other witnesses defended workers’ hygiene habits, the commission voiced skepticism. In one revealing exchange, state assemblyman Cyrus Phillips argued with a public health doctor. “These men you have described are naturally and inherently unclean; aren’t they? And they don’t know how to do anything else?” the assemblyman queried. “Why, I guess that’s true,” the doctor ventured cautiously, but the assemblyman pressed on with his point about the nature of immigrant bakers: “No amount of inspection will improve them very much?” Then the doctor surprised those present in the hearing by responding that yes, he did believe that bakers’ habits
could
be changed. Assemblyman Phillips replied incredulously, “[You think] that they could counteract their natural and inherent tendencies?” “I certainly do,” the doctor repeated. The two officials weren’t talking about bread anymore, they were debating the nature of new immigrants. Sensationalist accounts of dangerous bread likely reflected unease about newcomers more than any real hazards posed by eating the product of their ovens. And this is, in the end, the grain of salt with which we must take fears of cellar bakeries—and a clue to why bakeries like the Wards’ flourished.
    Whether or not bread from small bakeries was actually unsanitary, the moral panic around dirt, germs, and immigrant habits was a gift for industrial bakers. “I want to know where my bread comes from!” an affluent woman demanded in a national advertising campaign for Holsum bread. “I don’t want bread from some nameless basement bakery. I want my bread from a bakery that’s clean as my own kitchen. … I’ve stopped baking but I still want clean bread.” Or, as an ad from Los Angeles more bluntly put it, “Many bakeries in New York, Chicago, and other cities are being condemned by health officers as unclean and unsanitary. How often do you inspect
your
bakery?” 39 Strange as it might seem to contemporary foodies, in the early twentieth century the language of “knowing where your food comes from” was a public relations coup for industrial food.
    Bakeries across the country overwhelmingly adopted the new language of clean bread in their advertising, but it was the Wards, once again, who set the bar. Alongside reprinted news reports on the “shocking state of cellar bakeries,” the Wards invited New York to visit its bakeries. “You can see every detail in the making of Ward’s Tip-Top Bread. The human hand never touches bread at these, the greatest bakeries in the world—daylight bakeries, snow-white temples of cleanliness.” Transparency, cleanliness, and modernity displaced taste, cost, convenience, and even freshness in bread advertising. The “bare hand” became the greatest enemy of bread. As a Ward Bakeries ad in the
New York Times
stressed in italics,
“Bread kneaded by hand or mixed by hand can never be made a truly clean sanitary product.”
40 Of course, even bread “untouched by human hands” still required the presence of a few workers, and this bothered consumers bombarded by images of disease-ridden bakers. So the Wards’ advertising also trumpeted the company’s meticulous inspection of workers’ health and habits—even their moral character.
    Consumers around the country flocked to witness the spectacle of sanitary baking. They crowded around the glass of smaller “window bakeries,” where all operations could be viewed from the street, and lined up for tours of larger factories. One Ohio bakery even encouraged teachers to plan hygiene lessons for their students around tours of its factory. A trip to Stolzenbach’s scientific