Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (38 page)

The new technology was greeted as a boon to
humankind, and so at first it seemed. Bread became whiter and airier and cheaper than
ever. Commercial yeast performed particularly well with the new flour, vastly speeding
and simplifying the work of baking. The shelf life of flour, now that the unstable
embryo had been eliminated, became indefinite, allowing the milling industry to
consolidate. Thousands of local stone mills closed, since big industrial operations
could now supply whole nations. Cheap, stable, transportable white flour made it
possible to export flour around the world and to feed swelling urban populations during
the industrial revolution. According to one history of bread,
^*
the advantages
of white bread were something on
which both workers and employers
could agree: Brown breads high in fiber “meant that workers had to leave their
machines frequently to go to the lavatory, and this disrupted production.”

Indeed, in many ways, white flour not only
gratified human desires but also meshed especially well with the logic of industrial
capitalism. No longer a living, perishable thing, flour now became a stable,
predictable, and flexible commodity, making not only the production of bread faster and
more efficient, but also its consumption. In effect, roller mills “sped up”
wheat as a food, making it possible for the human body to absorb its energy much more
readily than before. Flour, and bread in turn, became more like fuel and, at least
calorically, more efficient. In the jargon of modern nutrition science, bread became
more “energy dense,” which, along with extended shelf life, is one of the
most common outcomes of modern food processing. Not surprisingly, white flour proved
enormously popular with a species hardwired by natural selection to favor sweet foods.
The taste of sweetness, which signals a particularly rich source of energy, had always
been rare and hard to find in nature (ripe fruit, honey), but with the industrial
refining of certain cultivated grasses (wheat, cane, corn), it now became cheap and
ubiquitous, with what would turn out to be unfortunate consequences for human
health.

More than just a new food product, white
flour helped usher in a new food system, one that would extend all the way from the
field to the loaf of presliced and fortified white bread, which now could be
manufactured on an assembly line in three or four hours without ever being touched by
human hands. The wheat plant changed, too. The new roller mills worked best with
hard-kerneled red wheat; the big, tough bran coat on this type of wheat could be sheared
cleanly and completely from the endosperm, whereas softer white wheat left infinitesimal
specks of bran in the flour. So, over time, breeding changed the plant to better suit
the new machine. But because hard
wheat has tougher, bitterer bran, it
made whole-grain flour even coarser and bitterer than it had been before—one of several
ways that the triumph of white flour made whole wheat less good. Even today, breeders
continue to select for ever-harder wheats with ever-whiter—and therefore less
nutritious—endosperms. As Steve Jones, the former wheat breeder for the State of
Washington, told me, “Wheat breeders are selecting against health.”

Ah yes, health. Here was the fly in the
ointment. The compelling industrial logic of white flour meshed beautifully with
everything except human biology. Not long after roller mills became widespread in the
1880s, alarming rates of nutritional deficiency and chronic disease began cropping up in
populations that relied on the new white flour. Around the turn of the century, a group
of French and British doctors and medical experts began searching for the causes of what
they dubbed “the Western diseases” (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and
several disorders of the digestive tract, including cancer), so called because they were
virtually unheard of in places where people hadn’t switched to modern diets
containing large amounts of refined sugar and white flour. These medical men, many of
them posted to Britain’s colonies in Asia and Africa, had observed that, soon
after white flour and sugar arrived in places where previously what one of them (Robert
McCarrison) called “the unsophisticated foods of Nature” had been the norm,
the Western diseases would predictably appear. Some of these doctors blamed the lack of
fiber in the Western diet, others the surfeit of refined carbohydrates, and still others
the lack of vitamins. But whatever the culprit nutrient or the precise mechanism by
which it operated, these men were convinced of a link between processed white flour and
sugar and the panoply of new chronic diseases. A large body of contemporary research
suggests they were right.

What to do? Certainly not return to the
“unsophisticated foods of Nature”—no one wanted to do that! And yet, by the
end of the
nineteenth century, several voices were raised in support
of just such a course, including a return to whole-grain flour. “The true staff of
life is wholemeal bread,” declared Thomas Allinson, a prominent English physician,
and one of the first to link refined carbohydrates to disease. To counter the scourge of
white flour, in 1892 he bought a stone grinding mill and began baking and selling
whole-grain bread under the slogan “health without medicine.” (He was also
involved in a group called the Bread and Food Reform League.) Earlier in the century,
the American minister and nutritional reformer Sylvester Graham, eponym of the
whole-grain cracker, had published an influential
Treatise on Bread and
Bread-Making
that blamed white flour for many, if not quite all, of the ills of
modern life, including constipation (a nineteenth-century scourge), and fervently
extolled the virtues of coarse dark breads high in fiber. To remove the precious
health-giving fraction of bran from wheat was to “put asunder what God had joined
together”—a fall from dietary grace for which modern man was paying with his
troubled, sluggish digestion.

By the early decades of the twentieth
century, public health authorities in England and the United States could no longer
ignore the links between refined white flour and widespread nutritional deficiencies,
including beriberi, as well as increases in the rates of both heart disease and
diabetes. (It was noted that during both world wars, when the British government had
mandated a higher fiber content in flour as part of food rationing, people’s
health improved and rates of type 2 diabetes declined.) But by now the White Flour
Industrial Complex was so well entrenched that a shift back to whole-grain flour was
never seriously contemplated.

Instead, the milling industry and government
came up with a clever technological fix: A handful of the vitamins that modern milling
had removed from bread would now be put back in. So in the early 1940s, in what was
called “the quiet miracle,” the U.S.
government worked
with baking companies—including the Continental Baking Company, makers of Wonder
Bread—to develop and promote a white bread fortified with a handful of B vitamins. Here
was a classic capitalist “solution.” Rather than go back to address a
problem at its source—the processing of key nutrients out of wheat—the industry set
about processing the product even
more
. This was sheer brilliance: The milling
industry could now sell the problem
and
the solution in one neat package.

But fortifying white flour with the missing
vitamins represents only a partial, reductionist solution to what turns out to be a much
more complex problem. By now the nutritional superiority of whole grains over even
fortified white flour is universally acknowledged—yet still only imperfectly understood.
People who eat lots of whole-grain foods significantly reduce their risk of all chronic
diseases; they also weigh less and live longer than people who don’t. This much we
know from the epidemiology.
^*
But why, exactly? Is it, as
Sylvester Graham believed, the benefits of dietary fiber? And if so, is it the fiber
itself, or the various phytochemicals that typically accompany fiber? Or maybe
it’s the vitamins, not all of which are put back when flour is fortified. It could
also be the minerals in the bran. Or the omega-3 fatty acids in the germ. Or it could be
the antioxidants found in the “aleurone layer,” the innermost layer of the
bran. Scientists still can’t say for sure.

But here is the most curious fact: People
whose diets contain adequate amounts of all these good nutrients from sources other than
whole grains (from supplements, say, or other foods) aren’t
nearly as healthy as people who simply eat lots of whole grains. According to a 2003
study by David Jacobs and Lyn Steffen,
^*
epidemiologists at the
University of Minnesota, the health benefits of whole grains cannot be completely
explained in terms of the nutrients we know those grains contain: the dietary fiber,
vitamin E, folic acid, phytic acid, iron, zinc, manganese, and magnesium. Either there
are synergies at work among these nutrients, or there is some X-factor in whole grains
that scientists have yet to identify. We are talking, after all, about a seed: a package
that contains everything needed to create a new life. Such a recipe still exceeds
science’s powers of comprehension and technology’s powers of creation.

The fact that a whole food might actually be
more than the sum of its nutrient parts, such that those parts are probably best not
“put asunder,” poses a stiff challenge to food processors. They have always
assumed they understood biology well enough to improve on the “unsophisticated
foods of Nature,” by taking them apart and then putting them back together again.
The industry would be more than happy to sell us bread fortified with any one (or twelve
or one hundred) of these nutrients if science could just tell it which ones to focus on.
But, so far at least, science can’t reduce this complexity to a simple answer.

This has been good news for the food itself:
Whole-grain bread has been enjoying something of a renaissance. Actually, that
renaissance got a first, false start during the 1960s, when the counterculture, steeped
in romantic ideas about “natural food,” seized on white bread as a symbol of
all that was wrong with modern civilization. Brown bread, being less processed than
white, was clearly what
nature intended us to eat. They probably
should have stopped there, but did not, alas. Baking and eating brown bread also became
a political act: a way to express one’s solidarity with the world’s brown
peoples (seriously), and to protest the “white bread” values of one’s
parents, who likely served Wonder Bread at home. These ideals resulted in the production
of some uncompromising and notably bricklike loaves of dark, seedy bread, which probably
set back the revival of whole-grain baking a generation. “That hippie
texture” is a cross that whole-grain bakers still bear today, along with the
widespread belief that whole-grain bread promises rather more nutritional and
ideological rigor than eating pleasure.

But whole-grain bread seems to be recovering
from its sixties revival and is currently enjoying a reversal of fortune, or at least
prestige, with white bread, in a sort of carnival of traditional bread values. Now it is
the well-to-do who want brown bread, while white bread is becoming déclassé. The public
has gotten the news about the health benefits of whole grain. The government’s
latest nutritional guidelines recommend that at least half of one’s daily calories
from grain come in the form of whole grains. When you consider that even today only 5
percent of wheat is milled into whole-grain flour, this becomes a challenging
recommendation to follow.

America’s expanding tribe of artisanal
bakers, who started out in the 1990s as Francophiles devoted to the white-flour
baguette, has begun to take a strong interest in baking with whole grains. Chad
Robertson’s next book will take up whole-grain baking, and much of his energies
are now devoted to research and development of whole-grain recipes. Craig Ponsford, the
former chairman of the board of directors for the Bread Bakers Guild of America and the
first American ever to win a first prize in the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie baking
competition in France, now bakes exclusively with whole-grain flours, and is outspoken
about their benefits. (He told me he
could never have promoted whole
grains at the Guild without offending its milling- and yeast-industry sponsors, so after
his conversion he chose to step down.) The supermarket shelves are stuffed with breads
and other products making whole-grain claims, some of them more meaningful than
others.
^*

Even Hostess, the company that, until its
recent bankruptcy, manufactured Wonder Bread, has responded to the public’s demand
for more wholesome and nutritious bread. It developed exotic new formulations that
contained not just added vitamins and minerals and fiber, but quantities of the actual
foodstuff itself: whole-grain flour. Well, actually, in most cases they were offering
something more like the aura of whole grain, which is not quite the same thing. For
example, they sold a “Smart White” bread offering “
the fiber
of
100% whole wheat,” said fiber derived not from wheat or any other
cereal grain but from cottonseed, cellulose (aka trees), and soybeans. (The wheat itself
was actually white flour.) Then they offered a “Whole Grain White” that you
had to get really close to to read the small-print prefix “made with”; it
turned out the first ingredient here was still white flour. These products strike me as
borderline fraudulent. But Wonder Bread did then come up with one real whole-wheat bread
that sounds like a breakthrough in modern food science: “Soft 100% Whole
Wheat.”