On White Bread

The surprise here is how interesting the subject turns out to be:

In 1890, 90 percent of the country's bread was baked in homes. The rest was purchased from tiny neighborhood bakeries. By 1930, this trend had reversed completely: 90 percent of bread was purchased, and purchased from increasingly large, increasingly distant factories....

Legions of food reformers, social workers, public-health officials, advertising executives, and an astonishing number of diet gurus worked frantically to convince Americans that choosing the wrong bread would lead to serious problems. Some pinpointed newfangled loaves as the source of cancer, diabetes, criminal delinquency, tuberculosis, kidney failure, overstimulated nervous systems, and even "white race suicide." Others heralded modern bread as a savior, delivering the nation from drudgery, hunger, and dangerous contagions carried by unscientific bread. But they could all agree on one thing: Incorrect food choices were the root cause of nearly all of the nation's moral, physical, and social problems....

Even that sentimental icon of all that is good—"Mother's bread"—was denounced under the banner of a safe and efficient diet. Scientific American, women's magazines, and home-economics textbooks portrayed careless home baking as a threat to family health, while other observers wondered whether even the most careful housewife should bake at all. 

This is one of those things I've always wondered about, albeit only vaguely:  how did we as a nation come to give up something as wonderful as fresh bread?  It's not hard to make, and a local bakery isn't a huge extravagance.  Many other nations have managed to continue having locally-baked, fresh bread available even as they've modernized their economies.

Now I know.  There's something about these little panics by mass media that we should begin to recognize:  they always makes things worse.  Except, of course, for Big Bread, which came out gloriously well from the exercise.