Quest for Purity

A NYTBR review of White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf highlights the “Pharisaical” motives behind the push for white bread: “At the turn of the 20th century, urbanization outpaced civic infrastructure. Most bread was baked at home, but in dank city bakeries, bakers worked around the clock in squalor, making loaves for a growing labor class. Months after the 1906 release of Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle , Chicago’s lead health inspector proclaimed sanitary conditions in its bakeries to be like those in ‘the worst of the packing houses.’ A frightened public fixated — with encouragement from city officials and shrewd advertisers — not on labor law or social services, but on cleaner bread. It would be produced by machines, with tired, diseased hands kept away. The hygienic Ward Bakery, the country’s largest, opened in Brooklyn in 1910. And instead of social reform, we got bread that did not rely on society.”