Free White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain Page B

innocent stomachs. As
Mother’s Magazine
warned, children’s “bread must be thoroughly cooked, for if the yeast spores escape the heat, as soon as they come into contact with the sugar in the stomach they grow and produce fermentation.” 49
    With little actual evidence that poorly baked bread made people sick, the generalized cloud of anxiety around bread production gradually converged into one (slightly) more reasonable fear: by 1913, the country’s food experts and health campaigners fixed their attention on the handling of bread
after
it left the bakery. Consumers could view bakery cleanliness with their own eyes and, at least in theory, pure food laws guaranteed the integrity of ingredients—but nothing protected the loaf itself. “While most bakeshops are now sanitary,” a speaker observed at a national convention of state health officials, “the conditions under which [bread] is handled after it leaves the place is subject to serious criticism … [even the purest bread] may be swarming with the germs of filth.” 50 Readers of
Good Housekeeping
, the country’s leading Pure Foods advocate, voted unprotected bread one of their top five food safety concerns, and the
Journal of the American Medical Association
concurred. In a 1913 statement reprinted by newspapers around the country, America’s leading medical journal warned that even bread baked in sanitary bakeries risked contamination by deadly microbes during delivery. 51
    The solution to this problem was obvious: bread must be wrapped. As the public cry for wrapped bread spread across the country between 1912 and 1914, however, bakers balked. Wrapping bread was complicated and labor intensive. Materials and machines were not yet adequate for the job, and it would probably damage flavor, they argued. It would certainly raise costs. Even some bakers who had eagerly adopted the mantle of “sanitation” blamed demands for wrapping on “zealous inspectors,” “pure foods magazines,” and fickle consumers lured by the novelty of “sealed package food preparations.” Nevertheless, backed again by women’s and consumers’ organizations, state and local governments across the country pushed aside objections from the national baking industry lobby to pass laws requiring bread wrapping, and by 1920, store-bought bread was almost universally wrapped. 52
    Not surprisingly, these new regulations favored larger, more automated bakeries that could afford wrapping machines. Those companies, in turn, fanned the flames of consumer fear. Perfection Bakeries, for example, ran a national ad campaign warning in bold type, “State health authorities condemn unwrapped bread. … They know that dust, heavily laden with the germs of tuberculosis and other diseases is easily blown onto unwrapped bread. … When you eat bread that leaves the bakery unwrapped you are eating disease and dirt.” 53 Once again, the language of cleanliness had become a club with which big bakers bludgeoned smaller competitors.
    In the end, the language of “clean” bread made big bakers appear the heroes, when they could so easily have played the villains. Thus, even while plotting to control the nation’s bread, William Ward could also, in good conscience, bask in the glow of commendations from mayors and public officials all over the country calling the Ward Bakeries champions of “civic hygiene” and the “public weal.” 54
    Small bakers simply could not compete against the massed economic and cultural power of the trusts. Thus, even as the country’s consumption of bakery bread soared in the first decades of the twentieth century, the number of bakeries fell dramatically. 55 Ironically, the language of “knowing where your food comes from” had facilitated the
distancing
of consumers from their bread production, as underground but local bakeries and home baking gave way