Free White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain Page A

bakery, the company claimed, would instill pupils with “the great, lifelong value of a thorough understanding of the inestimable advantage of perfect cleanliness.” 41
    By the end of the 1900s, progressive concern with bakery conditions had spread throughout the entire nation. In Montgomery, Alabama, for example, progressive women’s groups drew up a white list of acceptable establishments and launched a boycott of offending bakeries that caused an immediate 25 percent drop in sales. 42 By 1913, every major city was home to several sanitary bakeries, and small towns were close behind. In 1915, the
Ogden Standard
in Utah proudly declared that the town’s thirty thousand people enjoyed access to no fewer than six sanitary bakeries producing “loaves of bread that our ancestors of only a generation ago would think beyond the power of a baker.” 43
YOU AND YOUR LITTLE OVEN CAN’T COMPETE
    At first, changes in bakery facilities themselves—the introduction of shining surfaces, crisp white uniforms, medical inspectors, and mechanical mixers—seemed like enough to assuage most anxieties about bread. But doubts lingered, and old fears resurfaced. Consumers and their expert health advisors knew that germs and bacteria were invisible, but not much else. They believed that bread could be dangerous, but didn’t know
how
. Thus, fear remained fairly amorphous and questions abounded. Did baking really kill all germs? Editors at the influential
Chautauquan
didn’t think so: “Dough kneaded with the hands always runs the risk of contagion,” they wrote in a special section on preventing disease. “The germs of cholera, typhoid, and scarlet fever, for example, might be carried in this way easier than in most others.” 44 And what about bread mold? One Chicago civic group railed against “disease germs arising from moldy bread,” while Ellen Richards warned housewives to stand ever vigilant against molds and bacterial growth that infected bread with “sticky masses” and blood-colored clots. 45
    Yeasts were microscopic. Were they also germs? Fascinated by the new world of microbiology, the authors of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing on baking science frequently adopted the language of disease.
The Complete Bread, Cake, and Cracker Baker
, for example, casually noted that leavening contained “numerous organisms of disease,” which produced “numerous sources of disease action.” 46 And raw food guru Eugene Christian, known for his incendiary tract “Why Some Foods Explode in Your Stomach,” offered this memorable image of bread’s living biology: “Bread rises when infected with the yeast germ, because millions of these little worms have been born and have died, and from their dead and decaying bodies there rises a gas just as it does from the dead body of a hog or any other animal.” 47
    Seen in that light, fermentation did seem a little scary, and this made easy fodder for food faddists. C. H. Routh, an influential British doctor, argued that yeast-leavened loaves created “a fit nidus [nest]” for the growth of bacteria. And he was but one voice making this connection. During the late nineteenth century, fear of fermentation led to a small craze for chemically leavened “aerated bread” on both sides of the Atlantic. New York City health commissioner Cyrus Edson went as far as to declare, “Bread which is wholesome should not be raised with yeast, but with a pure baking powder.” 48
    Faced with associations between bread and the scary world of microbes, ordinary people tried to make sense of a paradox: how could bread baking, something people had done for millennia without apparent ill effects, be so horribly, horribly dangerous?
Undercooked
bread offered an easy way to reconcile this contradiction. Failure to cook bread properly must be what unleashed nature’s living bestiary into