I get up and begin my day with a slice of toast like I do every day. I always have hearty whole wheat or oatmeal bread either store bought or home made. While I drink my tea, I pick up the NYT book review as I often do in the morning and begin to read a review of the book White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain. I learn that because it was believed that bread was often made in unsanitary conditions, they industrialized it. Something called the iron roller was developed which squeezed out the wheat germ where all the nutrition lies, and voila!, white bread was born. The reviewer goes on to say that animals and humans fed only on white bread get sick and even die because there is so little nutrition. It seems it’s another baby out with the bathwater story. Eventually, some nutrition got added back in by adding chemicals. And why is the plastic wrapped white bread so soft? They made it that way apparently so that when people squeezed it, they believed it was fresh. (Never mind the preservatives inside the bread keeping it “fresh.”)
The article still does not account for why many people want their bread to be white, at least until recently when darker bread seems to be coming back into favor. Perhaps it was a cultivated taste as the plastic wrapped bread took hold in stores across the country. But my mother was always suspicious that this love of bread whiteness wasn’t all about those bread rollers.
When I was growing up, my mother was the only mother I knew who refused to buy white bread. She didn’t make her own either. My mother never baked anything in her life except for some muffins which she stuck so much additional foodstuffs into that they were more like a collection of raisins, nuts whatever held together by some incidental bread crumbs. Once she even broke up vitamin C tablets and put them inside prior to baking, apparently unaware that heat kills vitamin C. I don’t have to describe how those muffins tasted. To this day, my brother always breaks his muffins in half and peers into them suspiciously. My mother managed to find what little wheat bread was available in those days, soft as it was and much disdained by her for its softness. She had been raised by a mother who was a superb bread maker. Why bread making didn’t rub off on her is another story.
Her theory about American’s love for the whiteness of bread had to do with racism. She thought white people who were the ones, after all, who owned the factories and gave the country its “flavor” or lack thereof, and were the ones who might be able to afford store bought bread didn’t like anything dark, even bread. Part of the dictionary definition of “white” is purity, after all. It’s an interesting theory. I wonder what African-Americans, some of whom buy a lot of white bread themselves, would think of her theory?
