I don't like to be in the same room as white flower, and very white pastries ...
creep me out, they look too white, and it's just weird, and it's not natural, and it's odd. And it's odd if you think you're basically making paste that we made a second graders right out of white flower, starch, and gluten, it makes a very good paste. I don't get it.
Okay, me personally, I can't be in the same room as the delicious freshly baked white baguette, and not eat it. But to be fair, I have the same problem with a good whole wheat love to, actually do try to stay away from purely white flower bread, because I feel like there's something missing in it.
I of course am Cynthia Graber, and you're listening to Gasterbud, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. This episode, it's white versus wheat, in the bread, smack down of the century.
And I'm Nicola Twilly, lover of bread in all its glorious shades, have we always had
both whole wheat and white bread, or is white flower some kind of new-fangled technological fancy thing? And is industrial white bread like Wonder Bread? Is that even bread, because how does it get so squidgy and bouncy? And does it really matter which one we eat, or is choosing one kind of bread over the
other just a kind of snobbery, or worse, eugenics? This is the ultimate food fight, one that has gone on for thousands of years, white versus wheat, let the showdown begin, in this on-core episode of Gasterbud. Gasterbud is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, in partnership with Eater. Burnout at work is a tale as old as time.
But a new generation may have found the fix. We can learn so much from Gen Z, and what they are teaching us about modeling the boundaries
that would have prevented all of us from burning out in the first place, how to win the battle
against Burnout. That's this week on Explained It To Me. Find new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.
“First, just to set up the difference, to make white flower, you have to get everything brown”
out. That's the brand, or the outside part of the wheat kernel, as well as the brown inside part called the wheat germ. What's left is the stuff in between, that's white, white flower might seem like something modern and industrial.
But actually, people have been separating out the wheat brand in the wheat germ for a really long time. People have had the ability to sift and separate brand from flower for a long time, if they had the power to command the labor that it took. So there are mentions of something like shining white bread going way back in history.
This is Aaron Bob Rose-Drain. He's a professor of politics at Whitman College, and the author of a book called White Bread. The actual history of the store-bought loaf, Aaron says back in history, it took a long time and a lot of human power to manually de-hust kernels and sift flower to get it fine and
white.
“So why would rich people bother what was so great about white flower?”
So if you look back in time, white, bread, white flower was an elite product because it meant there weren't sticks and rodent droppings and dirt in it and things like that and sand. Steve Jones is a wheat breeder and head of the bread lab at Washington State University. Okay, so if you were rich in the past, your flower might be hand-cleaned while it was
being hand-sifted, so there would be nowhere for rat poo to hide in all that shining whiteness, but would it have also tasted better? We know Steve is creeped out by white flower, but Aaron says white bread has some advantages. Well, I mean, some people would argue that it tastes finer. You can get a softer, lighter loaf as a result of that.
So rich people could and did make white bread, but it wasn't just fluffier and cleaner. White bread quickly took on a bigger symbolic meaning. It very quickly goes from being a question of taste, to being a question of how bread marks certain people as affluent or powerful. And for as long as there's been white flower, there's also been a debate about it.
Not just what it means, but also whether or not we should be eating it. White versus wheat is one of the first recorded food vites in history. Plato and ancient Greek philosopher had his students debate whether the ideal city should be fed on refined white bread, or gritty, whole-green porridge. But the debate wasn't really about what's for breakfast, of course.
It was about whether a city dwellers somehow lost something important, some essential
grit, just by living in a city. And these debates around bread have been going on so long and so intensely, because the stakes are so high. The biblical phrase, "Bread Alone" is not far from the truth. Aaron is quoting from the book of Matthew here, "Man cannot live by bread alone."
“But actually, the only thing Matthew suggests that you need is a top-up for your all-bread”
diet. It is the word of God. It's a really most of your calories are still coming from bread. In Europe, for example, it would vary by time and place, but you know, people in Europe
Got between, say, 40 to 60% of calories from bread, from, you know, at least ...
to well into the 20th century.
In the United States, in the 19th century, early 20th century is about a third of calories
came from bread. It's an incredibly significant food product. Even the English word, "Lord," its etymology goes back to the phrase "Bread Giver." In Old English, the word "lof" meant "lof" and "vord" meant "Guardian," and together the two words formed "lof" word, which eventually became "Lord," the one who ruled over
the bread. Even the word "compagnon" is to do with bread and social hierarchy. Compagnon comes from Latin, the word "com," which means together with, and Panes, which means "Bread," so your "compagnon" is the person you're able to share bread with because you're in the same social class.
“So bread has been incredibly important for thousands of years, and throughout that time,”
the color of the bread signified your social standing. If you were rich, you could afford the labor to make that flower white. The very richest had the very widest bread, and the poor you are, the darker your loaf, which means that, for most of history, for most people, bread has been brown. And it's been pretty damn rustic.
It's as that was true all the way up to the mid-1800s in the U.S. And at that point, about 90% of the bread in the United States was baked at home by women, and maybe 10% was baked small, mostly urban bakeries. Throughout the 1700s and early 1800s, the world was industrializing, but bread pretty much stayed the same until some enterprising engineers invented mechanical rollers in the early 1800s.
Roller mills meant that bakers could produce white flour and lots of it, with minimal effort. These steel rollers were a hugely forward compared to the old stone mills, which really couldn't get wheat very white without a lot of human effort to sift it. Steve showed us a mini roller mill, he hasn't a room in his bread lab. I can turn it on if you want.
This is basically peeling the kernel of wheat like an apple.
And it's this type of mill that meant that white flour was no longer just an elite product, but the mid-1800s, the masses, could afford it too. And the 1850s was also the last time the majority of bread was made at home in the U.S., but just like in Plato's time, people immediately started arguing about whether we all should be eating this well-sippeded flour.
And at the same time as those roller mills started coming online, Amanda's name you know better attached to a some more, started to fight against the spread of white bread.
“"Survester Graham," I guess today we may be remember him because we associate his name with”
the Graham cracker that some followers named after him. "Crickets aside, Sylvester was a moral crusader and a food reformer who gathered a huge following during the first half of the 1800s." "He saw a white flour as a de-natured product that was out of harmony with creation. But then would devastate the bodies and souls of those who ate it, and flaming their
joints and fibers and unhinging their moral rectitude."
Aaron Kalsil Vester Graham, America's first significant white bread critic, and his followers
certainly bought his argument and avoided white bread. "At the time the U.S. was going through a major cholera epidemic, and people were desperate for anything to keep them healthy. Graham offered exactly that path to health based on what you individually ate and didn't eat."
Something you could control as opposed to the public health approach of shared investment
“in prevention and sanitary water systems.”
The cholera epidemic eventually ended, not because people ate brown bread, of course. And while Graham's followers might have continued to eat whole wheat bread, the rest of the country, the majority, were into this newly inexpensive white flour. Meanwhile, white flour and white bread had some big shot advocates of their own. So progressivism was a social and political movement of the late 19th or late 20th century,
and it believed in the possibility of perfecting the nation. It was a moment when scientific expertise was rising and importance, and when there's you know, great concern about the upheaval of the nation that's produced by massive urbanization, the United States going from being a largely rural country to being a largely urban country at the same time that there's large-scale immigration happening.
The progressive movement was made up of a lot of middle-class white women. And this was the time when everything was becoming, quote, "scientific." Baby said to be born with doctors and not midwives, whom economics was a science. But not all of America's newest citizens knew about these modern scientific ideas for domestic hygiene.
That surge in immigration that Aaron mentioned, those people were coming from Eastern and Southern Europe, and there was a widespread fear in the middle classes that these poor people would bring their traditional ways of baking and running their households with them. The progressive reformers thought that new mechanized white flour and newly mechanized bakeries making white bread were pure and safe, and a huge step up from unclean immigrants
Who were baking most of the nation's bread at the time.
And so, in that moment, and the kind of the production of anxiety around bread and food
“in general, the shining white loaves turned out and by gleaning white factories offered”
consumers a reassuring sense of safety. Steve Jones, the wheat breeder who's so creeped out by any form of white bread that he doesn't like to be in the same room as it, his own immigrant, great uncle ran one of these gleaming white bread factories back in the 20s. So my great uncle's bakery in Newark, New Jersey was called the up-to-date bakery.
Years ago, I thought, well, that man, he looked in the Polish American dictionary and modern, and it said up-to-date, the up-to-date bakery was a franchise. What it meant in their tagline is that human hands did not touch the dough. Those human hands were southern in Eastern Europeans, in many cases, so my uncle was encouraged to not put his dirty, in quotes, hands into the bread.
We will get back to those racist overtones, but the technological innovations kept coming to help make those gleaming super-clean hygienic bakeries even more sanitary. What an important one was packaging. In the past, you would either break the bread at home, and you would see the conditions under which it was made, or you'd buy it from a nearby bakery, and you couldn't, you know,
perhaps see it coming out of the oven. But now you're getting it transported over a longer distance, and so there's concern about what happens to that bread in between this fabulous palace of modern baking, and when it gets to my store.
So the kind of innovations around bread wrapping are essential to this moment.
In 1908, cellophane was invented, and along with it, machinery capable of stuffing fresh white loaves into beautiful, clean, cellophane bags, even more untouched by human hands. Now, most bakers didn't want to use packaging, because it was expensive and complicated. But the national baking industry lobbied, they were the people who ran the massive industrial bakeries.
And eventually there were laws that required bread to be wrapped, which, of course, favored larger industrial bakers that could afford new wrapping machines. That is exciting as
“wrapping and plastic are, they're not the best thing. The best things since them would”
be sliced bread, which actually had to be invented. So you're referring to July 6th, 1928, in Chilikothi, Missouri, where we saw a nearly bankrupt bakery owner, get together with a down on his luck inventor named Otto Rowe Wedder, and they achieved something that most of the baking industry had thought impossible at the time, which was slicing a bread as it emerged onto the assembly line. And people
thought this was absolutely crazy. The blueprints for how to make such a machine had been around for at least a decade at that time, but it just seemed too wild, too impossible. People obviously sliced their bread in the past, but at home as they needed it. Bakers thought slicing bread in the factory might destroy the structure of the bread, or maybe the flavor, or maybe bread would get stale
faster. But this particular bakery owner in Missouri was basically bankrupt. They had nothing to lose, and he got together with Otto Rowe Wedder, and together they gave sliced bread a try. And the first loaves of industrially sliced white bread pour out of the oven off the assembly
line in Chilikothi, Missouri, and it's a spectacular hit. Newspaper reports talk about
sales going up 2,000 percent in a matter of days. They talk about housewives, the real
of pleasure at seeing this fantastically modern new product. And still skeptical bakery journals compare this to other jazz age fads like dance marathons and barnstorming. They don't believe it's going to last. But of course it does. Within a year, industrial sliced bread had spread to nearly every major city in the country. Another reason people were so into sliced bread is that actually it was really hard to slice
factory bread at home. This news, scientific factory bread, it wasn't just untouched by human hands. It was also filled with modern chemicals. Do conditioners to make sure all the slices look the same, and there were no big holes, preservatives to stop at going moldy while it was shipped. And a handful of other additives that kept it soft and squidgable, which
“made it hard to slice. And the softness was actually key. In the past, people made their”
bread at home, or got it nearby, and they could tell if it was fresh. They knew when it was baked. Now you don't. And so, squeezability becomes the proxy for freshness. And so brilliant bakery engineers begin to redesign and engineer bread for softness, for squeezability, because they know the more squeezable the bread is, the more fresh it will seem. So basically, compared to the rustic home-baked loaves that the majority of Americans
were eating just 100 years earlier, bread has had a complete makeover. It was also blindingly
white. White had always been a color representing moral purity, but the brightness of
The whiteness was the new thing in the 1920s.
architecture and kitchen appliances and bread. Like we said, white bread had been the norm since
“the invention of the roller mills back in the mid-1800s, but it was a creamy white, not”
the blinding white that symbolized modernity and purity and all things futuristic. And so, enterprising scientists invented a bleaching process for bread. Until the 1900s, millers actually let flour age for a few months, because as flour reacts with oxygen, it turns whiter. But that was slow when it took up space and the flour could spoil. Instead, millers chemically bleached flour for the absolute purest white of all.
That purity movement was in direct parallel with the whiteness movement of eugenics in this country. We did promise the light dusting of eugenics. Today, eugenics is usually associated
with Nazi Germany, but it was quite the trend in the US too.
Eugenics was reaching its height in the United States in popularity by the 1920s, 1930s. You know, you see eugenics displays and contests in the county fair. We actually have an episode on the forgotten story of how the eugenics movement met the
“dairy industry in 1920s America to quadruple the nation's milk production. You should”
listen to it if you haven't, it's called no scrubs. It seems like the eugenics movement should support white bread, because it's, well, white. And some eugenicists did. It was all about racial purity and whiteness. There was a doctor and health writer called Woods Hutchinson, who was popular at the time. Woods was a big fan of eugenics, and he
regularly wrote columns explaining that white bread was one of the reasons Americans were so
strapping, tall, intelligent, and brave, compared to rye bread eating eastern European Jews in the like. The same doctor though, he even admitted that whole wheat had more nutrients. But many nutritionists at the time thought that fiber was actually bad for you, and bet all the brand and husk just passed through us, and we couldn't absorb what was in it anyway. So white was best, at least for white people. But the whole wheat boosters were not to be so easily defeated.
They even used the eugenics argument in favor of brown bread, too. And Alfred McCann, one of these crusaders, talks about the possibility of the white race collapsing, because it's to to take into enamored with this weak and inferior food. And so in his vision, it's threatening the white race. Alfred McCann was another popular health expert with the daily radio show, and he was full of great stories about how white bread was actually poisoned. These were tall
tales, of course, but they caught on. And many dietitians and activists warned against white bread. One woman from the League of Women Voters said giving too much white bread to your children would cause blindness before their six. In his book, Aaron quotes an editorial from the Chicago Journal of Commerce, which described the quote, "wide open, expressionless eyes, pinched nose and contracted jaws that were typical for women who'd been, quote, "disfigured by the use of white flour."
All this took a toll on the popularity of white bread. Such that by the, you know, the 1930s, white bread is taken quite a hit from critiques. You know, in the 1920s, there's a radio show that in Chicago that coins the phrase, "the whiter, your bread, the quicker your dead." The depression hits, which then causes something of a resurgence of home baking and the use of cheaper, less white grains. So, in that moment, it's really World War II that saves white bread.
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So, with credit, we just want to do that.
of Augsmoney.com? Augsmoney, good-eat, nine-fuff, online. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature
issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice rates and deep-resistant protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents, and many others. You will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So, what do most Americans think about deportation
“and border security? Period. I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of”
violent displays that we've seen in the street from ice. When it comes to the question of deportation,
the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't
like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Americans got more calories from industrial white bread than for any other food. They were also in really bad shape, which was a problem because when war broke
out, the military needed to expand its ranks. And lots of young men didn't make the cut. Experts have calculated that malnutrition was the reason for at least a third of the rejections
“from the army. The youth were malnourished and people blamed white bread. I remember a magazine”
story that raises the question, you know, as World War II is looming in the horizon. It says, you know, paraphrasing here, but it says, you know, look at the Russians with their dark bread and their resilient defense of their homeland, the Germans with their rye bread and their fears. But then look at France, a nation of a fluffy white bread eaters and they folded to the Germans. What will become of us the United States? Because we're also a nation of fluffy white bread eaters.
Other countries where white bread was popular were dealing with similar anxieties over the health of their populations. And they decided to tackle it by making their bread browner. In the UK, millers were legally required to keep in more of the wheat germ to create something called war bread. Which Aaron says wasn't widely loved, but did do wonders for the country's nutrition. But we didn't do that here in the US. We decided that instead of just keeping in vitamins and
minerals that are already in-hole-it, we should just drop these nutrients into white bread. We'd add newfangled wafers of synthetic vitamins and minerals into the white dough at the factory. Initially people were suspicious of this new enriched white bread. Housewives apparently suspected it was more fatening because it was cold and rich. Some people thought it must be a medical product meant for the sick and elderly. Others thought enriched was just a meaningless advertising
word and they didn't trust bread labeled that way. But the US government mandated across the board bread enrichment in war food order number one. And there's tremendous amount of advertising effort and education effort put into teaching Americans that eating vitamin enriched bread would make them strong. There were all sorts of fun ads telling Americans it was their patriotic duty to eat
enriched white bread. Fleshmen said that vitamin deficiency was a bomb so powerful it could
stun a whole city. And bread fortified with fleshmen's enrichment products was the defense weapon the US government itself was urging the whole country to accept. And you see this then flowing into the Cold War in the 1950s where you see popular culture and advertising that poses America's enriched bread as something that makes it powerful in the face of possible Soviet aggression. And that led to even more amazing war ads for enriched white bread like the one for Jane Parker's
loaf reach mom it's loaded. And this all culminates in the glory that is eat one the bread. You want to grow bigger and stronger don't you? Go eat sure. Okay. So Wonder Bread is one of the iconic loaves if not the iconic loaf of industrial sliced white bread and it's a loaf of bread that is you know if you fan out its slices each slice
“is perfect in uniform there aren't large holes in the crumb. That's why you can help yourself”
grow bigger and stronger eight ways with one bread. Wonder Bread actually was invented in the 1920s but it really had its heyday in the 50s. I'm told me that nobody she knew was eating whole wheat bread in the 50s and everyone was eating Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread is a very curious substance. Obviously you can use it as bread but you can also squid it up and use it to pick up little splinters of broken glass or clean your computer keyboard it's even pretty good at absorbing
Motor oil spells.
and play a ping pong with because it's so compressible. I grew up on Wonder Bread we'd roll it up
“and throw it against the wall and we used it as a ball. Everyone jokes about it but they still eat it.”
Okay so that's a little odd. So everyone's both joking about and eating white bread. Americans were eating a full three to seven slices a day of industrial white bread in the 50s so they must have liked it. Weirdly in the 1950s the US government ran a big study on what the perfect loaf of bread should be. And one of the things they did find was that people universally purchased the softest bread possible but they did not necessarily like the softest bread. In the government's
own blind taste tests housewives described industrial white bread as dolly gummi, soggy and too airy.
Nearly three quarters of them didn't have anything good to say about its actual taste. But they
had been told endlessly how nutritious it was and anyway this was bread. This was just what it was but then things changed in the 60s. Yeah I mean so in the 60s white bread came to symbolize everything that was wrong with America. It was bland, it was chemical, it was corporate, it was the man incarnate. It was the man in food form and you know the slogan don't eat white eat right was popular. White bread was the opposite of hip. Fashion editor Diana Reland,
the Anna Winter of her day, she famously said people who eat white bread have no dreams. Meanwhile the hippies saw brown bread as part of their fight against the man. Beatrice Trump Hunter, she read the natural foods cookbook, she said bread baking constituted a revolt against plastic food in a plastic culture. It was a revolt against the mechanization of life. In the 60s whole wheat bread and home baking are seen as an act of rebellion and act of revolt.
And you know to bake and eat non-white bread was to be part of something bigger, a kind of collective social change. Industrial bakeries naturally felt a bit left out of this flower power fund. Their profits were down. Wonder bread was no longer this spectacular modern marvel. And by the 1970s industrial bakers who at that moment are kind of in the dumps and they realize that they can capitalize on this aura of youthful health and rebellion around
whole wheat and turn whole wheat and other kinds of artisanal type baking into a highly dynamic
“profitable sector. I remember one of the baking journals of the time is very excited about”
whole wheat bread and the possibility of industrializing whole wheat bread. And they say now we can sell catalax not just fords where you know the old industrial white loaf was the the Ford Motor car and the new whole wheat bread was the catalac. But the industrialized whole wheat wasn't great. The companies added caramel color to make it look healthier. They added cheap wood pulp to pump up the fiber. They even promoted it as if it was something to brag about. Wonder bread's parent
company advertised that it supposedly whole wheat fresh horizon bread had 400 percent more fiber
than white bread and that fiber came from wood solos. And then to get the extended shelf life without using unhyp, chemical preservatives, industrial bakers filled their wood pulp loaves with sweeteners like molasses which made it really sweet and kind of moist and gummy in texture. But it's not like the home cooked whole wheat bread at the time was so great either. So when I was in college as an undergrad we were making some really bad whole wheat bread.
It was dry. It was crumbly. It didn't hold together. It was yeasted. It was you know there's probably milk and in all kinds of weird stuff. So the reputation of whole wheat. First of all I say
“if you don't think whole wheat is going to taste good you should try again. But also if you have a”
bread book from the 70s, 80s or even 90s I'd put it on a shelf where you can't reach it. Right? That bad rep of whole wheat bread is just what Steve's trying to change. Steve's made it his mission to once again turn everyone on to whole wheat. That's coming up after the break. Steve was a student at Chico State University in California during those heady days of 70s counterculture. So at Chico in the 70s they had a program where they
taught city kids how to farm. So it was the end of that wave of the back to the land movement. So there were 100 undergrads of us. Probably 10 out of that 100 were farm kids. The other 90 were like from the Bay Area LA and we were just kind of being groovy you know. So we wanted to grow stuff. So you could lease five acres of land from the farm and grow a crop and I had the opportunity to grow wheat and I did. I planted it in November 10th of 77 and every day from November 10th of 77
Until June of 78.
with the beauty of it. Steve became completely entranced by wheat and so he became a professional
“wheat breeder. And then came up here to Washington in 91 and then became the winner wheat breeder”
for the state in 94.95 and then in 2008. I was a commodity breeder up until then and I sort of fell out of love with the whole notion of what a commodity is and I really fell out of love with white flower. Steve had fallen in love with wheat's beauty but beauty turned out not to be part of his job description. So if you're breeding commodity wheat you have one goal in mind and that's the maximum amount of white flower per acre. There's no room for novelty or nuance or flavor or nutrition or
something like that. So if my program is my program has been in place since 1894, no one to this day ever asked me to look at flavor and nutritional value.
The problem is since Wonder Bread had to be exactly the same slice after slice,
it meant that all the wheat that was being grown had to be exactly the same and optimized for white flower. So if you're making Wonder Bread by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of loaves per day, that flower all better act the same. So that's where a commodity system comes in is that just that strict predictability of what it how it's going to perform. So the bread is more uniform which means the wheat is more uniform and then the industry as a whole gets much more centralized.
So about a hundred years ago at the turn of the last century in a generation and a half we lost 25,000 flower mills about in this country. So 25,000 communities lost jobs, they lost the input, they lost a place for market, they lost all of those things. Today the scale mills in this country,
“there's 166 and 20 of those produce, I think 95% or so of all the flower consumed in this country.”
20 buildings, 20 individuals or groups, 20 buildings do that much flower. Steve might have fallen out of love with commodity wheat but he didn't give up on the plant altogether. Instead he found high yielding varieties of wheat that had been grown in the Pacific Northwest in the past and he bred them to try to find a variety that would make great whole wheat flower today. We were here in 2008, we grew our first crop in 2009, we harvested it, we milled it here,
we had it baked and it was some of the best tasting wheat we'd ever seen and that opened up the
whole world for us that that I never, I'd been working with wheat since '77 and this was 2009,
I'd never talked about the flavors of chocolatey and spicy and things like that and wheat and we're finding that. The wheat that Steve's been breeding since 2008, on the one hand, it's kind of
“anti-comodity. He's looking for those unusual flavors and even colors, breeds of wheat that would”
never be suited to becoming industrial white flower to make an industrial white loaf. But Steve's also not a lardite. He doesn't want to go back to growing heirloom varieties because their yield is too low and that means farmers can't make a living. So he still focused on that more conventional side of breeding too, yield resistance to disease and so on. And on top of all that, Steve is looking for wheat that are particularly well suited to a given region, like ones that grow well and cold
and rainy Washington state, or ones that thrive even over New England winters. Bringing back tasty whole wheat flower to Steve also means bringing back local wheat economies we've lost. But most importantly, Steve is breeding for grains that will become whole wheat flower.
We developed the first variety released in the United States since the 1800s. It's never been made
into white flower. So that's, and the funny thing is, all of our previous varieties have these beautiful names. This one's called 1109. So, it's just, it was across that we made in 2011, it was a ninth cross. So we, we re-selected it and we're going to name it Doris after Doris grant. She was a food person in the UK during the war. She made the, the World War II made the grant loaf, which is 100% whole wheat loaf that you can do in an hour and a half. And she was an
uncredentialed food scientist and her whole career. She just received tremendous grief from the food industry because she talked about dead white flower and the living of whole wheat and things like that. She's a, she's a major hero for us. So we're going to rename it Doris. As we said during World War II, white bread eating countries were stressed that their soldiers weren't healthy. And the response of most countries, not the US, but most of the others, was to go back to whole grains to
help keep their people healthy. Like Doris did with war bread in the UK, which totally makes sense because the husk and the wheat germ, the parts you lose when you make white flower, they are packed with nutrients. The husk has a lot of fiber, that's brand, and you lose that. And the wheat germ is the lunchbox for the future baby wheat seed. So it's full of vitamins and minerals and you lose that too. It's quite odd, really, that we would take something like a wheat kernel that's so nutrient dense
Strip it down to where there's nothing left.
starch and gluten. A wheat kernel is 10% fiber on average, white flower zero, not a little zero.
According to the global burden of disease study, which is the authoritative study on what is actually causing people to die, lack of whole grains is a bigger killer than lack of fruits or vegetables. In fact, the study concludes it's pretty much the leading cause of diet related premature deaths in the world. We can solve that so easily, right? That's a bit of a frustration of these things are quite solvable. Substitute white flower for whole grain. And something Steve has thrilled about,
these varieties of wheat he's breeding make flower that tastes better too. The beauty then is within that variation. We can find these things like nutritional value, iron and zinc and things like that. Those add to the flavor, which is beautiful. But wait, there's more. Steve says eating
“whole wheat isn't just the key to making bread taste better and saving our lives. It's also going”
to help feed the world. When you make white flower from grain, you lose 30% of it. The brand and the germ make up 30% of a kernel of wheat. With whole wheat, when you put a pound of grain in and mill it, you get a pound out. And what that does, too, is that raises the yield of that wheat
by 30%. That's masa. So 50 billion pounds of fiber discarded every year. Okay, we talk about
wanting to feed everybody, right? So for more than a decade now, Steve has been out there at Washington State, breeding better wheat for better flower for better bread. And luckily enough, it just so happens that as he was doing this, the world of bread was changing. The artisanal baking revolution hit. And then what happened to and bread was it became trendy and it became this elite cool product, right? So bakeries and San Francisco and other places do this super-groovy
loaf and it sells for 15 bucks. And it's, it's the, it thing, right? Everyone needs that bread.
“You've probably seen it or tasted it yourself, or just crusty loaves from Tartine and San Francisco,”
or frankly any of hundreds of bakeries around the country. They're absolutely delicious. Of course, a lot of these beautiful breads are still white bread. In the defensive artisan bread, what you do get is a bread, typically that has been fermented for a much longer period of time, where flavor can be developed slowly without the need for all the kind of extra flavoring and additives to bring out flavor that had been eviscerated by the industrialization process.
So this new white bread is a lot better than the sliced stuff in the stores. And artisanal bakers have mostly stuck to using white flour in part because it's easier. We already have great recipes for white flour bread, and it's what bakers were largely trained on in safe friends when they learned to make baguettes. Plus, there are technical challenges to replacing white with whole wheat. Whole wheat spoils more quickly, and the tiny brand particles in the
flour actually slice through gluten strands, making it hard to trap enough air to create a light loaf. And that light loaf is something we've come to expect from high-end French style breads. For all of these reasons, artisanal bakers tend to use the blend of white and whole wheat even in their whole wheat loaves. It's not easy to reinvent how you bake to go 100% whole wheat. So one of the reasons that we created the bread lab was because we didn't want to burden
bakers with a notion of, "Hey, shut down your lines and test out this stuff. It may not work well." The bread lab is Steve's solution to the challenges of transitioning to whole wheat. It wasn't enough to breed new varieties of wheat that would have great yield for farmers and produce grain better suited to whole wheat flour. He also needed to figure out if the varieties he was growing would work well for millers and bakers. So we can look at hundreds of things.
Easily, we bake most days or bake many days. We look at tens of thousands of different wheat seeds here. In the field, we grow tens of thousands of different types. And then we'll bake and it helps us then see, well, it absorbs too much water not enough. For it, it's too strong or too weak or whatever. It allows us as breeders to set new targets. And it also allows Steve and his colleagues to help bakers work with these non-standard
whole grain wheat. Steve says some pastries are actually pretty straightforward. You often just need a little more water. If it's a pastry, if it's a cookie, a common mistake that bakers make is they'll go online and look up whole wheat cookie recipe. It has 20 ingredients. It tastes like a
“walnut shell. The key to almost any pastry and there is not a pastry that cannot be made at”
100% whole wheat. We'll say that now. We know that as a fact is to adjust your formula sum and more moisture and just do it. Don't get so crazy on it. If you want to make a 100% whole wheat chocolate chip cookie, take out the white flour and put in whole wheat. It's that easy.
He says it's easy but it's not always that easy. One of the toughest things to make is what we did
First in the lab and that's 100% whole wheat croissant.
baker at King Arthur and a few years ago he went to Paris, France to compete in the Coupe de Mont
de Boulangerie, which is just what it sounds like. It's sort of the Olympics abroad and we said could we do it and he perfected that right there. Steve has a giant photo of Jeff Yankello's perfect whole wheat croissant on the wall and it really is perfect. What makes a perfect is certainly the layer, the honeycomb look to it and then the glassiness of the bubbles that were in there. So you see the glistening within it. That's a perfect croissant. But still a year to develop the
perfect whole wheat croissant. You can see why many bakers might just stick with white flour and whole wheat bread is a whole other set of challenges. Bread's are more difficult and with bread to you add more water. So you bring the hydration way up. So what it takes. So it's possible, right?
“You have to adjust how you do it and you do it. The key is it doesn't have to be crumbly. It doesn't”
have to be dry and doesn't have to be tense. After we spend some time gazing hungryly at the
whole wheat croissant photo, we walked into the bread lab's kitchen to see what Steve and his team had been baking that day. I love how today's menu is bread. I've been up for a while. Yeah. Bread was on the menu and bread was what we ate. Several slices of freshly baked new whole wheat varieties that Steve and his colleagues are evaluating. Very good. It's just really good. It's delicious. I think the important point too is they don't have to taste good. So part of the
breeding process is some of these may taste delicious. Some may not. Some you'll see the volume of these. Some had tremendous strength and just blew up beautifully. They had a lot of spring and the oven and then others are kind of flat. But people come through and will have a bunch of breads that
“look like we don't know how to bake. It's more the wheat than us. So Steve and his team are baking bread”
every day to try to figure out how the varieties are doing. Obviously they can't quite keep up with eating it all. So they take the leftovers of these big round crusty loaves that we tried to the food bank. And we'd feel great and we were doing so well and then one day they said, "You know, no one's taking your bread." I said, "Oh my God." And they said, "Two reasons. One doesn't look like bread." It says, "It's some rustic, butard, you know, that's overfired." And it's not sliced.
We said, "What do you need?" And they're the ones that informed us up front is it needs to be soft. It needs to be sliced and needs to look like bread. Because this is the problem with the artisanal bread movement. This bread is not for everyone. I mean, part of it is a lot of people don't have a good enough knife to slice up these gorgeous crusty loaves. But the other part is that for a lot of people, these rustic betards aren't really what they think of as bread. People do want soft slice
sandwich bread. I mean, it sounds like I don't know what, the anti-sumptine here, right? But they do.
“That's what I have every morning is toast, right? So I've that with peanut butter on it.”
This is the most popular style of bread in this country. It's the most popular style of bread in the UK and in much of Europe in France. It is the most popular style. We're not going to change that. And there's also an economic aspect to this, too. All those gorgeous crusty loaves that people swoon over at artisanal bakeries, they're expensive. Now we're in a moment where we have industrial white bread for people who are extremely cost-conscious and then whole wheat bread
and artisanal bread are more elite niche market items. So it's an interesting moment where a lot of people are eating healthier bread and better bread, but it's happening in a way that both mirrors and is also reinforcing the growing inequality in our society. Every year, the bread lab
hosts a conference called The Green Gathering. And soon after his food pantry breakthrough,
Steve raised this issue of who their bread was actually for. We got together at The Green Gathering a few years ago. We said that we're pricing people out. So where is the big need and the big need is in bread as people recognize it. Soft in a plastic wrapper and sliced and it's going to last for a week. Let's say, before the mold, can we do that weekend? A couple of years ago, Steve started to work on this new idea, the supermarket style whole wheat bread. First, he recruited the baker who
created the whole wheat quassau and then he invited a whole group of bakers to join in. We work with bakers that say the last thing that I wanted to do as an artisan baker was cooking a pan, make it soft and slice it. These people are doing this now. The goal Steve's that was clear. Make something that functions exactly like industrial white bread, but without the crappy ingredients. We're going to make something just like it. It's going to be light and color. It's going to be
60 to 100% whole wheat and it's going to sell for no more than $6 a loaf. And they've done it. It's rectangular and puffy and a little sweet and it's sliced and it's 100% whole wheat with no
More than 7 total ingredients.
olive oil in it and it has a little honey in it and it's a long ferment, so it's a sour dough. Some bakers spike it with a touch of yeast at the end to kind of puff it up and there's a
there's a skill to it. It's amazing what you can do if you kind of don't say no. Right? You know,
so you want soft bread that's going to last a week and doesn't have 20 extra ingredients in it.
“Why is that impossible? Steve says it's not impossible, but honestly I wasn't convinced”
that Steve's approachable loaf was really going to be like an industrial white sandwich loaf. It's just too big of a leap from delicious crusty sour dough to a squidgy square thing in a plastic bag. So of course we tasted it. Okay, so this is a little 100%. Yeah, this is 100% beautiful. Yeah, soft. Can I throw it in a bowl at the wall? That is the idea. Okay. It has a tiny bit more tooth to it, but it's pretty sandwichy. Yeah, has a little more going on,
but it's not like, oh my gosh, this isn't recognizable as what? I would usually be. It's got the same switchability that I get in a sandwich that I buy the supermarkets. It is very mushy. Yeah. So you bring that home, that'll last on the counter easily five days and retain its softness after that throw it in the freezer. And if your bread is lasting five days,
“you're not eating enough anyway, so just eat it instead. But the classic approachable loaf”
would stay soft for about five days and it can go. It depends up to 10 days to 12 or 14 without molding at all. The approachable loaf was genuinely delicious and kind of surprising. I brought some back to my brothers in Seattle and my niece first wouldn't try it and then went back for seconds. I brought some home too and my partner Tim, who is a fantastic home baker. He could barely believe it was 100% whole week. Yeah, you know, I'm spoiled because there are
so many great bakeries near me and L.A. And I buy their delicious, rustic looking bread. But this was good. And for some things like a grilled cheese or a PB&J, that was actually better. I imagine some of you listeners will want to try it and there are a few bakeries and supermarkets around the country that are already making and selling the approachable loaf. And we have the link to the recipe on our website at gastropod.com in case you want to make it at home, but we're not going
to all be able to buy approachable loafs anytime soon. The wheat being grown commercially, mostly isn't the right kind to make whole wheat flour. The system we have today is based on storing flour for a really long time and whole wheat flour goes bad faster. Today's industrial package loaves are meant to sit on shelves forever. We have one in the lab that the cell by date
was June 3rd. That was June 3rd of 2018. And it still soft and squishy and never molded.
Like Steve said, the approachable loaf can less for a while, but not that long. Still the approachable loaf is a solution to part of the problem, but only part of it. For one, there isn't enough of the right wheat being grown. There are also aren't enough mills to grind whole wheat and frankly, there aren't enough bakeries working with whole wheat yet either. What we're constantly working on is the affordability and the puzzle of scale. Things are changing. Scientists and doctors
have made it clear that whole wheat flour is a healthier choice than white and people who can afford it
“have been buying more of it. Yeah, I think it was in 2009 is when the total value of”
whole wheat sales are greater than white bread sales for the first time. And Steve is still pushing next up 100% whole wheat hamburger and hot dog buns. All this sounds great. As Steve said, white flour has all the good stuff taken out. So if everyone can switch to whole wheat bread, so much the better. And yet I'm afraid I'm going to have to do a yes, but because of course, yes,
but at the same time this white versus wheat debate, it's never been just about bread. That's
a whole point of Aaron's book. Whenever we talk about what kind of bread people should be eating, we're talking about values too. In the past, eating brown bread meant you were poor or in racist terms, you were a dirty immigrant. And eating white bread meant you were progressive and modern and yes, white. Today, calling something white bread can mean it's boring and bland and also most of the people who eat industrial white bread today tend to be poor. Aaron says in popular culture now,
white bread often signifies quote, white trash. And the brown bread eaters, the stereotype is they're the foodie elite who are constantly trying to get poor people to put down the Doritos in eat more delicious purple sprouting broccoli. The white versus wheat debate still splits along class and income lines. It's just flipped. Yeah, I mean the story of debates about white bread is really the story of well-meaning reformers who are trying to improve the nation by changing
what people eat. In some cases that makes them really important improvements and changes,
More often than not, it mostly ends up reinforcing and deepening forms of exc...
existing kind of social hierarchies, right? It can exacerbate class divides, for example.
“And the economic inequalities underlying those class divisions are obviously”
not actually about bread and who buys which kind. They're about how our society is structured
and the opportunities are lack of them for different groups. I'm always wanting to say, you know,
“we need to focus a little bit less on what other people are eating and a little bit more on the”
underlying dynamics of inequality and social power, corporate concentration in the baking industry,
for example, that make our food system the way it is, rather than focusing so much intention
“on changing the way individuals eat because that has such a long and fraught history of”
ending up targeting people as irresponsible and worsening forms of social difference. I support Steve's effort and so does Aaron. It'd be great to have taste your whole wheat flour, more local mills and better whole wheat bread that people want to buy and can afford to buy. But neither of them want the discussion to spill over into a critique of who people are based on what bread they eat. Thanks this episode to Steve Jones and his team at the bread lab for
hosting us and feeding us such delicious bread and cookies and also bean. Thanks to Aaron Bobbro Strain, his book is called White Bread, a social history of the store bought loaf. He also has a new book out called The Death and Life of Idaho Hernandez, a border story. He can go to gastropod.com for links to those and for the approachable loaf recipe that is no if you try it. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode, 'til then.
