15
Store-bought bread
was
a godsend, particularly in households without servants, and as economic pressures and new opportunities moved more women into the labor force. But convenience offers only a partial explanation for the popularity of store-bought bread. Florence Farrell never took a job outside the home, and her children recalled that she loved the sense of community created on baking days. Thanks to Florenceâs unpaid labor, homemade bread would also have been less expensive than even the most efficiently produced industrial bread until well into the 1930s. For the Farrells to have switched their allegiances, modern bread must have had some other appeal. None of my relatives remember exactly what that was, so weâll have to move from family lore to the terrain of history. To understand the attractions of modern bread more fully, we need to view it in a broader social context.
Â
For bakers in the 1910s and 1920s, ever more efficient production of ever-greater quantities of bread was a decidedly ambiguous kind of progress. While consumers might buy newer, better automobiles as their prices fell thanks to industrial efficiency, they were unlikely to increase their consumption of bread, no matter how cheap and plentiful it got. Even worse, falling bread prices (or rising incomes) freed money in household budgets with which consumers could introduce more variety into their meals, displacing bread from its dominant place in the American diet. âBread must compete with other foods for its place at the table,â one industry observer wrote, capturing a widespread anxiety, but it had few advantages in that fight: lacking the movie star looks of newfangled fruits arriving by refrigerated train from California, the novelty of modern wonders like Jell-O, or the exotic appeal of tropical sweets steaming in from Central America, bread was just basic. âDeclining consumptionâ was every bakerâs nightmare, and it was assumed to be inevitable. 16
Instead, something remarkable happened during the first decades of the twentieth century: per capita bread consumption
increased
. 17 Modern factory bread wasnât just a more convenient version of the ancient stapleâit was something new. Its ingredients may have remained more or less unchanged, its basic shape may have been preserved, its familiar taste maintained (in a watered-down form), but modern bread was somehow completely transformed. It had taken on shiny new meanings, found a new place on the American table and in the countryâs lunch pails.
Bakers worked hard for that increase, advertising relentlessly, doing everything possible to distinguish more or less identical loaves from one another through branding. They joined forces to promote bread consumption, collectively touting its healthful properties, sponsoring sandwich recipe contests, and even partnering with wheat growers and electric appliance makers to give toasters away at cost. But none of that would have saved bread if bakers hadnât capitalized on a new ethos of scientific eating spreading through the country. Scientific eating had several different facets, which weâll revisit in later chapters. For now, Iâll argue that the appeal of modern bread lay in the way it resonated with a growing cultural embrace of science and industrial expertise as a buttress against rapidly escalating fears of impurity and contagion.
ANXIETY AND EXPERTISE
When Florence Farrell came of age at the turn of the century, the ability to make good bread was the mark of a good brideâher highest art. It was, in Victorian domestic ideology, âthe very foundation of a good tableâ and âthe sovereignâ of the true housewifeâs kitchen, as Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe declared at the start of one of the centuryâs best-selling books,
The American Womanâs Home
. 18 In the early twentieth century, however, ideas about family and motherhood began to
Store-bought bread
was
a godsend, particularly in households without servants, and as economic pressures and new opportunities moved more women into the labor force. But convenience offers only a partial explanation for the popularity of store-bought bread. Florence Farrell never took a job outside the home, and her children recalled that she loved the sense of community created on baking days. Thanks to Florenceâs unpaid labor, homemade bread would also have been less expensive than even the most efficiently produced industrial bread until well into the 1930s. For the Farrells to have switched their allegiances, modern bread must have had some other appeal. None of my relatives remember exactly what that was, so weâll have to move from family lore to the terrain of history. To understand the attractions of modern bread more fully, we need to view it in a broader social context.
Â
For bakers in the 1910s and 1920s, ever more efficient production of ever-greater quantities of bread was a decidedly ambiguous kind of progress. While consumers might buy newer, better automobiles as their prices fell thanks to industrial efficiency, they were unlikely to increase their consumption of bread, no matter how cheap and plentiful it got. Even worse, falling bread prices (or rising incomes) freed money in household budgets with which consumers could introduce more variety into their meals, displacing bread from its dominant place in the American diet. âBread must compete with other foods for its place at the table,â one industry observer wrote, capturing a widespread anxiety, but it had few advantages in that fight: lacking the movie star looks of newfangled fruits arriving by refrigerated train from California, the novelty of modern wonders like Jell-O, or the exotic appeal of tropical sweets steaming in from Central America, bread was just basic. âDeclining consumptionâ was every bakerâs nightmare, and it was assumed to be inevitable. 16
Instead, something remarkable happened during the first decades of the twentieth century: per capita bread consumption
increased
. 17 Modern factory bread wasnât just a more convenient version of the ancient stapleâit was something new. Its ingredients may have remained more or less unchanged, its basic shape may have been preserved, its familiar taste maintained (in a watered-down form), but modern bread was somehow completely transformed. It had taken on shiny new meanings, found a new place on the American table and in the countryâs lunch pails.
Bakers worked hard for that increase, advertising relentlessly, doing everything possible to distinguish more or less identical loaves from one another through branding. They joined forces to promote bread consumption, collectively touting its healthful properties, sponsoring sandwich recipe contests, and even partnering with wheat growers and electric appliance makers to give toasters away at cost. But none of that would have saved bread if bakers hadnât capitalized on a new ethos of scientific eating spreading through the country. Scientific eating had several different facets, which weâll revisit in later chapters. For now, Iâll argue that the appeal of modern bread lay in the way it resonated with a growing cultural embrace of science and industrial expertise as a buttress against rapidly escalating fears of impurity and contagion.
ANXIETY AND EXPERTISE
When Florence Farrell came of age at the turn of the century, the ability to make good bread was the mark of a good brideâher highest art. It was, in Victorian domestic ideology, âthe very foundation of a good tableâ and âthe sovereignâ of the true housewifeâs kitchen, as Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe declared at the start of one of the centuryâs best-selling books,
The American Womanâs Home
. 18 In the early twentieth century, however, ideas about family and motherhood began to
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