When Hana enters the small bakery I have borrowed for a day, I am dividing a loaf into 1.5-centimeter slices. The loaf's tranches articulate a white fanned deck, each one the exact counterpart of its fellows. The bread is smooth and uniform, like a Bauhaus office block. There are no unneeded flourishes or swags. Each symmetrical slice shines so white it is almost blue. This is a work of modern art. My ten-year-old daughter does not pause to say hello. She rushes to the cutting board, aghast, and blurts, "Its fake!" Then she devours a piece in three bites, and asks for more.I have just spent a day re-creating the iconic loaf of 1950s-era soft white industrial bread, using easily acquired ingredients and home kitchen equipment. With the help of a 1956 government report detailing a massive, multiyear attempt to formulate the perfect loaf of white bread, achieving that re-creation proved relatively easy. Until Hana's arrival, however, I did not fully understand why I was doing it. I had sensed that extracting this industrial miracle food of yesteryear from the dustbin of kitsch might have something to teach about present-day efforts to change the food system; that it might offer perspective on our own confident belief that artisanal eating can restore health, rebuild community, and generally save the world. But, really, it was reactions like Hana's that I wanted to understand. How can a food be so fake and yet so eagerly eaten, so abhorred and so loved?
Sliced white bread as we know it today is the product of early twentieth-century streamlined design. It is the Zephyr train of food. But, in the American imagination, industrial loaves are more typically associated with the late '50s and early '60s—the Beaver Cleaver days of Baby Boomer nostalgia, the Golden Age of Wonder Bread. This is not without justification: during the late '50s and early '60s, Americans ate a lot of it. Across race, class, and generational divides, Americans consumed an average of a pound and a half of white bread per person, every week. Indeed, until the late '60s, Americans got from 25 to 30 percent of their daily calories from the stuff, more than from any other single item in their diet (and far more than any single item contributes to the American diet today—even high-fructose corn syrup).
Only a few years earlier, however, as world war morphed into cold war, the future of industrial bread looked uncertain. On the cusp of the Wonder years, Americans still ate enormous quantities of bread, but, even so, government officials and baking-industry experts worried that bread would lose its central place on the American table. In a world of rising prosperity and exciting new processed foods, the Zephyr train of food looked a bit tarnished. And so, in 1952, hoping to offset possible declines in bread consumption, the U.S. Department of Agriculture teamed up with baking-industry scientists to launch the Manhattan Project of bread.
Conceived as an intensive panoramic investigation of the country's bread-eating habits, the project had ambitious goals: First, gain a precise, scientific understanding of exactly how much and what kind of bread Americans ate, when and why they ate it, and what they thought about it. Second, use that information to engineer the perfect loaf of white bread—a model for all industrial white bread to come.
After two years of preliminary research, focus groups, failed loaves, and exploratory taste tests around the country, the project reached its culmination in Rockford, Illinois. In the early '50s, all the whiz kids of market research flocked to Rockford. An industrial center built by European immigrants, daring inventors, and strong labor unions, the city was the stuff of middle-class dreams. Although its economy was far more industrial than the national average, it suited America's self-image to think of it as the country's most "typical" city, and sociologists obliged with the label. In 1949, Life magazine declared that Rockford was "as nearly typical of the U.S. as any city can be." This was a place where prototypical Americans could be viewed in their natural habitat.
Thus, in 1954, USDA investigators journeyed from Chicago and Washington, D.C., to the shores of the Rock River to select two test groups, each comprising three hundred families "scientifically representative" of a typical American community. Over the next two years, the market researchers would deploy all the techniques of their emerging field on these six hundred families. They tracked bread purchases, devised means of weighing every ounce of bread consumed by the test population, conducted long interviews with housewives, and distributed thousands of questionnaires. Most important, they created a double-blind experiment that asked every member of every family to assess five different white-bread formulas over six weeks. Four years and almost one hundred thousand slices of bread after the project's conception, a clear portrait of America's favorite loaf emerged. It was 42.9 percent fluffier than the existing industry standard and 250 percent sweeter.
This is the bread I sought to reproduce—"USDA White Pan Loaf No. 1"—the archetype of 1950s-vintage American bread. I'm far from the American heartland, however. I'm living in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. When the industrial-bread-baking bug bit me in this hot and unfamiliar place, I despaired at first. But Mexico is not as inappropriate a place to bake Cold War-era American white bread as you might think. In the early twenty-first century, U.S. companies no longer lead the world in the production of "American" bread. Today, the world's most dynamic producer of sliced white bread is a Mexican multinational—Grupo Bimbo. Headquartered in the elite Mexico City business district of Santa Fe, Bimbo has almost ten billion dollars in global sales, one hundred thousand employees, and operations in eighteen countries, from Chile to China. Since 1996, it has also quietly acquired many of the United States' most iconic bakery brands. After its takeovers of Weston Foods in 2009 and Sara Lee in 2011, the Mexican company poised itself to become the United States' largest industrial bread baker.
How white bread took root in the land of the corn tortilla is a long story, but, like the story of USDA White Pan Loaf No. 1, it is a story of the early Cold War. After World War II, U.S. officials, Rockefeller Foundation scientists, and the Mexican government collaborated to undermine the allure of communism with cheap, plentiful, industrially produced wheat. Infusions of high-tech U.S. baking equipment and know-how then allowed Mexican companies like Bimbo to turn that wheat into cheap, abundant bread. Who knows whether U.S. food policy actually helped prevent the spread of communism south of the Rio Grande, but it did create a country with a taste for white bread—and a company with the ability to lead the world in its production.
So while there may be no better place in the world to bake American industrial bread than Mexico, living here means that I'm far from my own oven, mixer, scale, and familiar ingredients. I turn for help to Monique Duval, owner of a tiny artisanal bakery in Merida, and one of the founding members of Slow Food Yucatan. She says she appreciates my irony and agrees to let me use her space. On the way, I pick up a loaf of Bimbo for good luck.
Surprisingly, the formula for "USDA No. 1," as I begin to call it, is relatively simple. The ingredients are straightforward and easily found: enriched white-bread flour, water, nonfat milk solids, sugar, lard, salt, and yeast. And, although the instructions are written for a fully automated bakery, I'm able to adapt them for home use (a complete recipe appears at the end of this article). Only one piece of the formula gives me trouble—something cryptically referred to as "yeast food." The name is misleading. "Yeast foods" are, in fact, a class of mineral salts and enzymes that don't so much "feed" Saccharomyces microbes as help them eat faster, longer, and more effectively by breaking starches into the simpler sugars yeast consumes, by creating a more amenable dining environment, or by promoting the formation of strong gluten strands to trap the carbon-dioxide gas produced after it eats.
Since I have no idea what the USDA bakers used for yeast food in the early '50s, or how to acquire it in Mexico, I resign myself to using humanity's oldest yeast food—sugar—as a substitute. Then, walking home from the gym the day before I am to begin my experiment, I stumble upon a mom-and-pop bakery-supply store. There, amid unlabeled bags of grains and white powders, I discover mejorante para pan blanco. Let's call it "the Magic Powder."
by Aaron Bobrow-Strain, The Believer | Read more:
Photo by Russell Lee. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress and the U.S. Farm Security Administration
