White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain Page B

threats to the nation.
    The new disciplines of domestic expertise buttressed their authority by propagating an emergency mentality—painting vivid pictures of looming dangers and imminent disasters that would befall the nation if their advice weren’t heeded. Household cleanliness, or rather the lack thereof, topped social reformers’ lists of impending threats. By the turn of the twentieth century, the hypothesis that invisible microscopic organisms caused many illnesses had gained widespread scientific acceptance and was, thanks to the efforts of Progressive reformers, beginning to take hold in popular culture. In the 1900s, diverse groups, ranging from the Boy Scouts to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, worked to preach this “gospel of germs” to the masses. 22 School curricula impressed the “laws of scientific hygiene” on young minds, and public signage warned of the dangers of kissing and spitting. Public health had been entirely reconceived. It was no longer the solitary concern of government officials, but rather the duty of all. In this era obsessed with the dangers of contagion, “the slightest deviation from perfect cleanliness was a cause for social anxiety since the invisible passage of germs could put the health of the family, companions, and even the entire nation at risk.” 23
    The country’s diet proved just as frightening as its cleaning habits, if not more so. Poor diet was a quiet killer and a silent drain on the country’s stamina. By sapping the nation’s vitality, inefficient diet appeared to be the root cause of nearly all of the nation’s moral, physical, social, and mental problems. As health columnist W. R. C. Latson wrote in 1902, “The question of what to eat is one of the most important practical considerations of life. To know what to eat, how much and how often would go far toward solving some of life’s gravest problems—poverty, weakness, disease, crime, and ultimately death.” 24
    It’s not hard to understand the fervor with which early twentieth-century social reformers approached the question “What to eat?” Cholera, botulism, typhoid, and other food-borne diseases killed in large numbers across class and race lines. And while historians disagree whether America’s food supply actually grew more dangerous as it industrialized after the Civil War, one thing is clear: starting in the 1870s, Americans strongly
believed
that their food system was getting less safe. This sentiment opened the doors to what food historian Harvey Levenstein called “the Golden Age of Food Fads,” as individual consumers sought safety in charismatic visions of better eating. It also underpinned collective mobilization, bringing together women’s groups, consumer advocates, temperance unions, and other reformers for one of the most organized and sustained attempts to change the food system that history has known—the campaign for pure food, waged from the 1880s to the 1910s. 25
    Then, as now, the question of what to eat was always more than a culinary matter. As historian James Harvey Young noted, “The crusade for food and drug control shared with overall Progressivism a deep worry about ‘purity’: business, government at all levels, social conduct, even the bloodlines of the nation’s populace seemed threatened with pollution and required cleaning up.” 26 In the face of looming danger, social reformers’ visions of food purity cross-pollinated easily with nativist politics and ideologies of racial purity. Indeed, as Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern argue in their history of germ scares, it often became difficult to distinguish between descriptions of food-borne contagion and the terrifying prospects of racial contamination. 27
    Food-borne diseases were widely associated with eastern and southern Europeans, Mexicans, and other “dirty” groups. Those