I’m rewatching the History Channel series The Food That Built America.
For people that haven’t watched the series. Here is a short summary.
The episode on bakeries starts with Lee Marshall and Continental Baking. Marshall over saw the purchase of the Wonder Bread bakery. Marshall also invested research into uniformiy slicing the bread. Giving Wonder Bread a large advantage in the market. (Sliced bread quickly became standard for all bread in stores)
Wonder Bread was a white bread. Refined White flour looses a lot of nutrients. Pellagra was a big problem in the population during the early 20th century. It comes from malnutrition, if untreated, pellagra can kill within four or five years.
Link Pellagra - Wikipedia
It became known that White Bread (still a relatively
new commercial product) had few nutrients. Continental Baking developed a way to add vitamins to White Bread. Wonder Bread still has Calicum Fortified Enriched printed on the bag.
This all happened just before 1940. Long, long before I was born.
Wonder Bread was a sponser on Howdy Doody. Ideal Bread sponsored The Bozo Show in my area. Bread was marketed at kids. We all grew up eating white bread. I took peanut butter & jelly sandwiches to school for lunch. Our parents thought their boomer children were eating a healthy diet.
I remember Roman Meal bread being advertised as more nutritious in the mid 1970’s. My mother bought it occasionally. Our family didn’t buy Pepperidge Farm bread because we didn’t know it’s history.
When did you begin to learn the truth behind white bread?
I was in my mid 20’s and out of college in the 80’s before learning white bread is not very nutritious. My family started buying brown bread. But they still have a lot of sugar and additives.
I read Sugar Blues around 1977, when I was 22. While weak in some places, it gave a pretty thorough description of how modern manufacturing removes many nutrients from different foods.
Yup. That’s one of the first things I learned when I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes: white bread, and pretty much all “white starches,” nearly always have high glycemic index scores, as they are simple, often highly-processed starches which can be converted to blood sugar rapidly…and, thus, aren’t great for diabetics.
I’m surprised that White bread is still the top seller in groceries. There’s 3 or 4 shelves of inexpensive bread in my Kroger and a small section for brown and multi grain breads. That section has expanded in the past 30 years. The options for whole grain bread in the early 90’s were very limited.
I’ve read that it’s still hard to know for sure if a bread is really healthy and nutritious. I buy Oroweat brand whole wheat and multi grain breads.
I believe it’s certainly more healthy compared to cheaper white bread. I haven’t bought Sunbeam, Wonder or Ideal bread in many years. But who knows if a bread labeled whole grain is really the most nutritious bread available?
Unless I’m mistaken US white bread is usually made from wheat flour.
Pellagra (nasty bloody thing) is the result of a niacin/tryptophan nutritional deficiency most commonly associated with corn based diets.
Australian bread is based on wheaten flour, normally processed to white and here pellagra is, and has always been very rare.
The OP’s inference that white bread causes pellagra and kills within 4-5 years is incorrect.
I read Sugar Blues, Fast Food Nation, and Super Size Me all around the same time, twenty-something years ago. I became a vegetarian for a while. It didn’t stick, but “white bread” in my mind became “paste”. “Soda” = “candy”. Probably other things were redefined. Then I married a man who didn’t want to eat processed food. It changed my thoughts about food permanently. I don’t eat righteously now, but I’m at least aware of it.
The documentary I watched indicated the shift from brown bread to white was a factor in malnutrition. But, of course the rest of a family’s diet was a big factor too. People were starving during America’s Great Depression.
The lack of food made it even more important that people ate food with the proper nutrients.
If a person living in poverty has a egg sandwich for dinner. That bread better be nutritious. Because people in the great depression weren’t eating well.
It’s not like today with people snacking regularly and eating 3 meals a day. A sandwich is only a small part of people’s diet today.
There’s a section of Sugar Blues that talks about pellagra. As I recall, it was once widespread in the American South, especially among the prison population, whose diet was largely based on corn meal mush.
I haven’t read the book. I remember around 1977-82 my married friends were cooking with honey. They were changing recipes from white sugar to honey.
Honey was pushed hard at the health food stores that I shopped. There were articles about health benefits of honey in magazines. I assume home bakers substituted honey in their bread.
Cooking with honey isn’t as popular anymore. I still use honey in my oatmeal and hot tea. I’ll have a hot biscuit or toast with honey for dessert instead of cake or candy.
When I was old enough to complain about my bag lunches (Probably when I was 7 in 1977 and my mother was 37) I would whine about why can’t my sandwiches be on white bread like the other kids and my mom informed my how non-nutritional the stuff was and she wasn’t going to feed that to us.
It wasn’t much fun in Australia either. Urban poverty and malnutrition was widespread.
During the period white bread was a staple and yet people here did not aquire pellagra.
Yes, in milling white flour grinds off the outer fractions of the grain. Who knew that there was so much nutrition in those dirty, oily and gritty bits?
You can google up any number of “white bread is poison” advocacy sites who are pushing their wholegrain rye sourdough etc products will tell you all the health issues and apocrypha. “no healthy fats or quality proteins. Mainly simple sugars without fiber. Wheat gluten is basically indigestible. Causes gas, eczema, shortness of breath, and heart arrhythmia. Body acidification. Blood clogging.” etc ad nauseum.
I went to the grocery just before a winter storm. The bread shelves were almost empty. I had to buy a very cheap store brand bread.
The bread had a much coarser texture and some slices had small holes. I’m not sure what ingredients were missing. It was also sliced much thinner.
I may have been better off eating the bag.
The History documentary stated that refined white flour was originally a luxury item for the wealthy and upper middle class. Refining white flour was labor intensive and expensive.
Changes in milling and mass production made white flour available to everyone.
White flour does make better tasting bread and cakes.
I wish this information was widely published during my childhood.
Link from WebMd The Truth About White Foods
Flour, water, yeast, and salt are really all you need to make bread at home. A spoonful of sugar or honey will help the yeast bloom, but it really isn’t necessary. The flour has natural sugars that feed the yeast. The dough will rise even if you don’t add yeast, since it ferments naturally in air.
I coat the dough with olive oil as I knead it to keep it from dying out before I put it in the oven.
That series on the History Channel is, BTW, one of the few bright spots on its schedule these days.
I don’t know, because we never, ever, had Wonder Bread or any white spongy stuff. I don’t think there was ever actually a loaf of white bread or fake brown bread in the house growing up, and I’ve never bought a loaf of it.
I did know at some early age, probably because of a conversation about why we didn’t get that bread.
When I was a kid in the 60’s I remember being enchanted with brands of bread that had “butter” in their names, like “Butternut” or “Butter Top.” Those were white breads so my mom never bought them. She knew they were crap. Our bread was always coarse, dark and crusty.
It was when I started sampling breads from bakeries around France that I learned that “white bread” contains ample “nutrients,” and that the premiss of this thread is false.
“Premise”. But yes, there are many kinds of “white bread”. There’s a place around here that bakes delicious French-style baguettes that I’m sure contain a lot of good nutrients.
You can tangibly see how insubstantial and flimsy ordinary sliced white bread like Wonder Bread is, but IMHO for some reason it’s magical for tuna salad sandwiches, and makes great toast for breakfast and grilled cheese sandwiches. For some reason I really hate whole-wheat or multi-grain bread. I mostly consume (white) buns, bagels, baguettes, and sometimes the variant of Wonder Bread with supposedly added fiber.
Life is too short to forego foods that you enjoy, unless they’re so blatantly unhealthy that a steady diet of them will literally kill you. The key to healthy eating, beyond understanding the basics, is variety.
