White vs. Wheat: The Food Fight of the Centuries

White or whole wheat: while today the question is most frequently asked at the sandwich counter, the debate over the correct answer goes back literally thousands of years. This episode, we dive into the world's longest-running, highest-stakes food fight. Along the way: the invention of sliced bread, the science behind Wonder Bread's curious bounce, and a light dusting of eugenics. Will either win the bread war once and for all? (encore) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  I don't like to be in the same room as white flour. And very white pastries and breads creep me out. They look too white. 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 as second graders, right, out of white flour and starch and gluten. It makes a very good paste. I don't get it.

• 0:30Nicola Twilley?

  Okay, me personally, I can't be in the same room as a delicious freshly baked white baguette and not eat it. But to be fair, I have the same problem with a good whole wheat loaf, too.

• 0:40Cynthia Graber?

  I actually do try to stay away from purely white flour bread because I feel like there's something missing in it. I, of course, am Cynthia Graber, and you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

• 0:51Nicola Twilley?

  This episode, it's white versus wheat in the bread smackdown of the century. And I'm Nicola Twilley, lover of bread in all its glorious shades.

• 1:00Cynthia Graber?

  Have we always had both whole wheat and white bread? Or is white flour some kind of newfangled technological fancy thing?

• 1:07Nicola Twilley?

  And is industrial white bread like Wonder Bread? Is that even bread? Because how does it get so squidgy and bouncy?

• 1:14Cynthia Graber?

  And does it really matter which one we eat? Or is choosing one kind of bread over the other just a kind of snobbery?

• 1:19Nicola Twilley?

  Or worse, eugenics. This is the ultimate food fight, one that has gone on for thousands of years.

• 1:26Cynthia Graber?

  White versus wheat. Let the showdown begin in this encore episode of Gastropod. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

• 1:37Speaker 03

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• 3:01Cynthia Graber?

  First, just to set up the difference, to make white flour, you have to get everything brown out. That's the bran, 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 flour might seem like something modern and industrial, but actually, people have been separating out the wheat bran and the wheat germ for a really long time.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  I mean, people have had the ability to sift and separate bran from flour 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.

• 3:38Cynthia Graber?

  This is Aaron Bobrow Strain. He's a professor of politics at Whitman College and the author of a book called White Bread: A Social 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 flour to get it fine and white. So why would rich people bother? What was so great about white flour?

• 3:58Speaker 00

  So if you look back in time, white bread, white flour was an elite product because it meant there weren't sticks and rodent droppings and dirt in it, and things like that, and sand.

• 4:08Cynthia Graber?

  Steve Jones is a wheat breeder and head of the Bread Lab at Washington State University.

• 4:12Nicola Twilley?

  Okay, so if you were rich in the past, your flour 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?

• 4:24Cynthia Graber?

  We know Steve is creeped out by white flour, but Aaron says white bread has some advantages.

• 4:29Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, some people would argue that it tastes finer. You can get a softer, lighter loaf as a result of that.

• 4:36Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  It very quickly goes from being a question of taste to being a question of how bread marks certain people as affluent or powerful.

• 4:53Cynthia Graber?

  And for as long as there's been white flour, there's also been a debate about it. Not just what it means, but also whether or not we should be eating it.

• 5:00Nicola Twilley?

  White versus wheat is one of the first recorded food fights in history. Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, had his students debate whether the ideal city should be fed on refined white bread or gritty, whole grain porridge.

• 5:15Cynthia Graber?

  But the debate wasn't really about what's for breakfast, of course. It was about whether city dwellers somehow lost something important, some essential grit, just by living in a city.

• 5:23Nicola Twilley?

  And these debates around bread have been going on so long and so intensely because the stakes are so high.

• 5:30Speaker 05

  The biblical phrase, "bread alone," is not far from the truth.

• 5:34Nicola Twilley?

  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 as a top up for your all bread diet is the Word of God. So, really, most of your calories are still coming from bread.

• 5:49Speaker 05

  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 the 1600s to well into the 20th century. In the United States, in the 19th century, early 20th centuries, about a third of calories came from bread. So, it's an incredibly significant food product. Even the English word lord, its etymology goes back to the phrase "bread giver."

• 6:18Cynthia Graber?

  In Old English, the word laff meant loaf and vord meant guardian. And together, the two words formed lafford, which eventually became lord, the one who ruled over the bread.

• 6:28Nicola Twilley?

  Even the word companion is to do with bread and social hierarchy. Companion comes from Latin, the word "com" which means together with and "panis", which means bread. So your companion is the person you're able to share bread with because you're in the same social class.

• 6:44Cynthia Graber?

  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 flour white. The very richest had the very whitest bread. And the poorer you were, the darker your loaf.

• 7:00Nicola Twilley?

  Which means that for most of history, for most people, bread has been brown. And it's been pretty damn rustic. Aaron says that was true all the way up to the mid 1800s in the US.

• 7:10Speaker 05

  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.

• 7:21Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 7:32Nicola Twilley?

  Roller mills meant that bakers could produce white flour and lots of it with minimal effort. These steel rollers were a huge leap forward compared to the old stone mills, which really couldn't get wheat very white without a lot of human effort to sift it.

• 7:46Cynthia Graber?

  Steve showed us a mini roller mill he has in a room in his bread lab.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  I can turn it on if you want.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  This is basically peeling a kernel of wheat like an apple.

• 8:02Cynthia Graber?

  And it's this type of mill that meant that white flour was no longer just an elite product. By the mid 1800s, the masses could afford it too.

• 8:09Nicola Twilley?

  And the 1850s was also the last time the majority of bread was made at home in the US.

• 8:14Cynthia Graber?

  But just like in Plato's time, people immediately started arguing about whether we all should be eating this well sifted flour. At the same time as those roller mills started coming online, a man whose name you know better attached to a samurgh started to fight against the spread of white bread.

• 8:28Speaker 05

  Sylvester Graham, you know, I guess today we'd maybe remember him because we associate his name with the Graham cracker that some followers named after him.

• 8:37Nicola Twilley?

  Crackers aside, Sylvester was a moral crusader and a food reformer who gathered a huge Huge following during the first half of the 1800s.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  He saw white flour as a denatured product that was out of harmony with creation, that then would devastate the bodies and souls of those who ate it, inflaming their joints and fibers and unhinging their moral rectitude.

• 8:59Cynthia Graber?

  Aaron calls Sylvester Graham America's first significant white bread critic, and his followers certainly bought his argument and avoided white bread.

• 9:06Nicola Twilley?

  At the time, the US was going through a major cholera epidemic, and people were desperate for anything to keep them healthy. And Graham offered exactly that, a 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.

• 9:27Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 9:39Nicola Twilley?

  Meanwhile, white flour and white bread had some big shot advocates of their own.

• 9:43Speaker 05

  So progressivism was a social and political movement of the late 19th, early 20th century. And it believed in the possibility of perfecting the nation. It was a moment when scientific expertise was rising in importance and when there's 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 is large-scale immigration happening.

• 10:14Cynthia Graber?

  The progressive movement was made up of a lot of middle-class white women. And this was at the time when everything was becoming, quote, "scientific." Babies had to be born with doctors and not midwives. Home economics was a science.

• 10:26Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 10:46Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  And so, in that moment, and the kind of the production of anxiety around bread and food in general. The shining white loaves churned out by gleaming white factories offered consumers a reassuring sense of safety.

• 11:13Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  So my great uncle's bakery in Newark, New Jersey was called the Up to Date Bakery. Years ago, I thought, well, that meant he looked in the Polish American dictionary in modern and it said up to date. The Up to Date Bakery was a franchise. What it meant, and their tagline, is that human hands did not touch the dough. Those human hands were Southern and Eastern Europeans in many cases. So my uncle was encouraged to not put his dirty, in quotes, hands into the bread.

• 11:55Nicola Twilley?

  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. One important one was packaging.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  In the past, you would either bake 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 could 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.

• 12:31Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 12:44Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 13:01Nicola Twilley?

  But as exciting as wrapping and plastic are, they're not the best thing. The best thing since then would be sliced bread.

• 13:09Cynthia Graber?

  Which actually had to be invented.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  So you're referring to July 6, 1928, in Chillicothe, Missouri, where we saw a nearly bankrupt bakery owner get together with a down on his luck inventor named Otto Rowetter. 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.

• 13:39Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 13:45Nicola Twilley?

  People obviously sliced their bread in the past, but at home as they needed it.

• 13:50Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 13:58Nicola Twilley?

  But this particular bakery owner in Missouri was basically bankrupt. He had nothing to lose, and he got together with Otto Rowetter, and together they gave sliced bread a try.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  And the first loaves of industrially sliced white bread pour out of the oven off the assembly line in Chillicothe, Missouri, and it's a spectacular hit. Newspaper reports talk about sales going up 2,000% in a matter of days. They talk about housewives' thrill 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.

• 14:51Cynthia Graber?

  Another reason people were so into sliced bread is that actually, it was really hard to slice factory bread at home.

• 14:57Nicola Twilley?

  This new scientific factory bread, it wasn't just untouched by human hands, it was also filled with modern chemicals. Dough conditioners to make sure all the slices looked the same and there were no big holes, preservatives to stop it going moldy while it was shipped, and a handful of other additives that kept it soft and squishable.

• 15:16Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  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.

• 15:42Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 15:51Cynthia Graber?

  It was also blindingly white. White had always been a color representing moral purity, but the brightness of the whiteness was a new thing in the 1920s. And that bright, white, pure, modern look infiltrated architecture and kitchen appliances and bread.

• 16:06Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 16:18Cynthia Graber?

  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 and it took up space and the flour could spoil. Instead, millers chemically bleached flour for the absolute purest white of all.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  That purity movement was in direct parallel with the whiteness movement of eugenics in this country.

• 16:43Nicola Twilley?

  We did promise a light dusting of eugenics. Today, eugenics is usually associated with Nazi Germany, but it was quite the trend in the US, too.

• 16:52Speaker 05

  Eugenics was reaching its height in the United States in popularity by the 1920s, 1930s. You know, you see eugenics displays and contests in, you know, the county fair.

• 17:04Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 17:18Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 17:26Nicola Twilley?

  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 and the like.

• 17:46Cynthia Graber?

  This 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 that all the bran 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.

• 18:02Nicola Twilley?

  But the whole wheat boosters were not to be so easily defeated. They even used the eugenics argument in favor of brown bread, too.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  And Alfred McCann, one of these crusaders, talks about the possibility of the white race collapsing because it's too taken, too enamored with this weak and inferior food. And so in his vision, it's threatening the white race.

• 18:25Nicola Twilley?

  Alfred McCann was another popular health expert with a daily radio show, and he was full of great stories about how white bread was actually poisoned.

• 18:34Cynthia Graber?

  These were tall tales, of course, but they caught on. And many dieticians 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 they're six.

• 18:46Nicola Twilley?

  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."

• 19:03Cynthia Graber?

  All this took a toll on the popularity of white bread.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  Such that by the, you know, the 1930s, white bread has taken quite a hit from critiques. You know, in the 1920s, there's a radio show in Chicago that coins the phrase, "The whiter your bread, the quicker you're 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.

• 19:35Nicola Twilley?

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• 21:12Nicola Twilley?

  During the 1930s and early 1940s, Americans got more calories from industrial white bread than from 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.

• 21:29Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 21:37Speaker 05

  I remember a magazine story that raises the question, you know, as World War II is looming on 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 fierce. But then look at France, a nation of 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."

• 22:08Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 22:30Cynthia Graber?

  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 whole wheat, We should just drop these nutrients into white bread. We'd add new fangled wafers of synthetic vitamins and minerals into the white dough at the factory.

• 22:44Nicola Twilley?

  Initially, people were suspicious of this new enriched white bread. Housewives apparently suspected it was more fattening because it was called enriched. 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.

• 23:03Cynthia Graber?

  But the US government mandated across the board bread enrichment in war food order number one.

• 23:08Speaker 05

  And there's tremendous amount of advertising effort and education effort put into teaching Americans that eating vitamin enriched bread would make them strong.

• 23:20Cynthia Graber?

  There were all sorts of fun ads telling Americans it was their patriotic duty to eat enriched white bread. Fleischmann said that vitamin deficiency was a bomb so powerful it could stun a whole city. And bread fortified with Fleischmann's enrichment products was the defense weapon the US government itself was urging the whole country to accept.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  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.

• 23:54Cynthia Graber?

  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."

• 24:02Nicola Twilley?

  And this all culminates in the glory that is...

• 24:06Speaker 09

  Eat Wonder Bread. You want to grow bigger and stronger, don't you? Golly, sure. Okay.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  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 and uniform. There aren't large holes in the crumb.

• 24:31Speaker 09

  That's why you can help yourself grow bigger and stronger eight ways with Wonder Bread.

• 24:36Cynthia Graber?

  Wonder Bread actually was invented in the 1920s, but it really had its heyday in the 50s. My mom told me that nobody she knew was eating whole wheat bread in the 50s, and everyone was eating Wonder Bread.

• 24:46Nicola Twilley?

  Wonder Bread is a very curious substance. Obviously, you can use it as bread, but you can also squidge 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 spills.

• 25:02Speaker 05

  I think a lot of people think of it as something that you can... Scrunch up into a ball and play ping pong with because it's so compressible.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 25:20Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 25:29Nicola Twilley?

  Weirdly, in the 1950s, the US government ran a big study on what the perfect loaf of bread should be.

• 25:35Speaker 05

  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.

• 25:45Nicola Twilley?

  In the government's own blind taste tests, housewives described industrial white bread as doughy, gummy, soggy, and too airy. Nearly three quarters of them didn't have anything good to say about its actual taste. But they'd been told endlessly how nutritious it was. And anyway, this was bread. This was just what it was.

• 26:06Cynthia Graber?

  But then things changed in the 60s.

• 26:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, so in the 60s, white bread came to symbolize everything that was wrong with America, right? 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.

• 26:25Nicola Twilley?

  White bread was the opposite of hip. Fashion editor Diana Riehlend, the Anna Wintour of her day, she famously said, "People who eat white bread have no dreams."

• 26:37Cynthia Graber?

  Meanwhile, the hippies saw brown bread as part of their fight against the man. Beatrice Trum Hunter, she wrote 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.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  In the 60s, whole wheat bread and home baking are seen as an act of rebellion, an 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.

• 27:04Nicola Twilley?

  Industrial bakeries naturally felt a bit left out of this flower power fun. Their profits were down. Wonder Bread was no longer this spectacular, modern marvel.

• 27:13Speaker 05

  And by the 1970s, industrial bakers

• 27:17Speaker 05

  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 Cadillacs, not just Fords. Where, you know, the old industrial white loaf was the Ford motor car and the new whole wheat bread was the Cadillac.

• 27:54Cynthia Graber?

  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 its supposedly whole wheat Fresh Horizon bread had 400% more fiber than white bread. And that fiber came from wood cellulose.

• 28:14Nicola Twilley?

  And then to get the extended shelf life without using unhip chemical preservatives, industrial bakers filled their wood pulp loaves with sweeteners like molasses, which made it really sweet and kind of moistened gummy in texture.

• 28:29Cynthia Graber?

  But it's not like the home cooked whole wheat bread at the time was so great either.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  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 in it and 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?

• 29:05Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 29:13Nicola Twilley?

  That's coming up after the break.

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• 30:47Nicola Twilley?

  Steve was a student at Chico State University in California during those heady days of 70s counterculture.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  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.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Probably 10 out of that 100 were farm kids. The other 90 were like from the Bay Area or 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 November 10th of 77. And every day from November 10th of 77 until June of 78, when I harvested it, I went and looked at it. And I just sort of became haunted with the beauty of it.

• 31:42Cynthia Graber?

  Steve became completely entranced by wheat, and so he became a professional wheat breeder.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  And then came up here to Washington in 91 and then became the winter 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 flour.

• 32:06Cynthia Graber?

  Steve had fallen in love with wheat's beauty, but beauty turned out not to be part of his job description.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  So if you're breeding commodity wheat, you have one goal in mind, and that's the maximum amount of white flour 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's been in place since 1894, no one, to this day, ever asked me to look at flavor or nutritional value.

• 32:33Cynthia Graber?

  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 flour.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  So if you're making Wonder Bread by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of loaves per day, that flour all better act the same. So that's where a commodity system comes in, is that, just that strict predictability of what, how it's going to perform.

• 32:58Cynthia Graber?

  So the bread is more uniform, which means the wheat is more uniform, and then the industry as a whole gets much more centralized.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  So about 100 years ago, at the turn of the last century, in a generation and a half, we lost 25,000 flour 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, the scale mills in this country, there's 166, and 20 of those produce, I think, 95% or so of all the flour consumed in this country. 20 buildings, not 20 individuals or groups, 20 buildings do that much flour.

• 33:37Cynthia Graber?

  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 flour today.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  We were here in, 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 had never talked about the flavors of chocolatey and spicy and things like that and wheat, and we were finding that.

• 34:14Nicola Twilley?

  The wheat that Steve's been breeding since 2008, on the one hand, it's kind of anti-commodity. He's looking for those unusual flavors and even colors, breeds of wheat that would never be suited to becoming industrial white flour to make an industrial white loaf. But Steve's also not a Luddite. He doesn't want his all to go back to growing heirloom varieties because their yield is too low, and that means farmers can't make a living. So he's still focused on that more conventional side of breeding, too. Yield, resistance to disease, and so on.

• 34:45Cynthia Graber?

  And on top of all that, Steve is looking for wheats that are particularly well-suited to a given region, like ones that grow well in cold and rainy Washington State, or ones that thrive even over New England winters. Bringing back tasty whole wheat flour to Steve also means bringing back local wheat economies we've lost.

• 35:01Nicola Twilley?

  But most importantly, Steve is breeding for grains that will become whole wheat flour.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  We developed the first variety released in the United States since the 1800s. It's never been made into white flour. So that's, and the funny thing is, all of our previous varieties have these beautiful names. This one's called 1109. So it was a cross that we made in 2011. It was a ninth cross. So 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, 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

• 35:49Speaker 00

  about dead white flour 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.

• 35:56Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 36:11Nicola Twilley?

  Which totally makes sense because the husk and the wheat germ, the parts you lose when you make white flour, they are packed with nutrients. The husk has a lot of fiber, that's bran, and you lose that. And the wheat germ is the lunchbox for the future baby wheat seeds, so it's full of vitamins and minerals, and you lose that, too.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  It's quite odd, really, that we would take something like a wheat kernel that's so nutrient dense and strip it down to where there's nothing left. It's quite barren, right? Again, it's just starch and gluten. A wheat kernel is 10% fiber on average. White flour, zero, not a little, zero.

• 36:47Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  We can solve that so easily, right? That's a bit of a frustration that these things are quite solvable. Substitute white flour for whole grain.

• 37:12Cynthia Graber?

  And something Steve is thrilled about, these varieties of wheat he's breeding make flour that tastes better, too.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:29Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 37:38Cynthia Graber?

  When you make white flour from grain, you lose 30% of it. The bran 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.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  And what that does, too, is that raises the yield of that wheat by 30%. That's massive. So 50 billion pounds of fiber discarded every year. Okay, and we talk about wanting to feed everybody, right?

• 38:03Nicola Twilley?

  So for more than a decade now, Steve has been out there at Washington State, breeding better wheat for better flour for better bread. And luckily enough, it just so happens that as he was doing this, the world of bread was changing.

• 38:16Cynthia Graber?

  The artisanal baking revolution hit.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  And then what happened too in bread was it became trendy and it became this elite cool product, right? So bakeries in San Francisco and other places do this super groovy loaf and it sells for 15 bucks and it's the it thing, right? Everyone needs that bread.

• 38:35Cynthia Graber?

  You've probably seen it or tasted it yourself. Gorgeous crusty loaves from Tartine in San Francisco, or frankly, any of hundreds of bakeries around the country. They're absolutely delicious.

• 38:45Nicola Twilley?

  Of course, a lot of these beautiful breads are still white bread.

• 38:49Speaker 05

  In the defense of 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.

• 39:10Cynthia Graber?

  So this new white bread is a lot better than the sliced stuff in the stores.

• 39:13Nicola Twilley?

  And artisanal bakers have mostly stuck to using white flour, in part because it's easier.

• 39:18Cynthia Graber?

  We already have great recipes for white flour bread. And it's what bakers were largely trained on in, say, France, when they learned to make baguettes.

• 39:24Nicola Twilley?

  Plus, there are technical challenges to replacing white with whole wheat. Whole wheat spoils more quickly and the tiny bran particles in the flour actually slice through gluten strands, making it hard to trap enough air to create a light loaf.

• 39:38Cynthia Graber?

  And that light loaf is something we've come to expect from high-end French-style breads.

• 39:42Nicola Twilley?

  For all of these reasons, artisanal bakers tend to use a 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.

• 39:53Speaker 00

  So one of the reasons that we created The Bread Lab was because we didn't want to burden bakers with the notion of, hey, shut down your lines and test out this stuff. It may not work well.

• 40:04Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 40:14Nicola Twilley?

  He also needed to figure out if the varieties he was growing would work well for millers and bakers.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  So we can look at hundreds of things easily. We bake most days, we bake many days. We look at tens of thousands of different wheats each year 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, or it, you know, it's, it's too strong or too weak or whatever. It allows us as breeders to set new targets.

• 40:42Nicola Twilley?

  And it also allows Steve and his colleagues to help bakers work with these non-standard whole grain wheats. Steve says some pastries are actually pretty straightforward. You often just need a little more water.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  If it's a pastry, if it's a cookie, a, a common mistake that bakers make is they'll go online and look up whole wheat cookie recipe. You know, it has 20 ingredients and it tastes like a walnut shell, right? By the time it's done. The key to almost any pastry, and, and there is not a pastry that cannot be made at a hundred percent whole wheat. We'll say that now, we know that as a fact, is to adjust your formula some, add more moisture and just do it. Don't get so crazy on it, right? If you want to make a hundred percent whole wheat chocolate chip cookie, take out the white flour and put in whole wheat. It's that easy.

• 41:31Nicola Twilley?

  He says it's easy, but it's not always that easy.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  One of the toughest things to make is what we did first in the lab, and that's a hundred percent whole wheat croissant. That was baked by Jeff Yankelow. He's a baker at King Arthur and a few years ago, he went to Paris, France to compete in the Coupe de Monde de Boulangerie, which is just what it sounds like. It's sort of the Olympics of bread. And we said, could we do it? And he perfected that right there.

• 41:57Nicola Twilley?

  Steve has a giant photo of Jeff Yankelow's perfect whole wheat croissant on the wall and it really is perfect.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  What makes it perfect is, uh, is certainly the layer, the honeycomb look to it, and then the glassiness of the bubbles that were in there. So you see the, the glistening within it. That's a perfect croissant.

• 42:17Nicola Twilley?

  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.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  Breads are more difficult, and with breads, you add more water. So you bring the hydration way up. It's what it takes. So it's, 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. It doesn't have to be dense.

• 42:42Cynthia Graber?

  After we spent some time gazing hungrily at the whole wheat croissant photo, we walked into the Bread Labs kitchen to see what Steve and his team had been baking that day.

• 42:50Speaker 05

  I love how today's menu is bread.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Is that a change? It's been up for a while, yeah.

• 42:56Nicola Twilley?

  Bread was on the menu and bread was what we ate. Several slices of freshly baked new whole wheat varietals that Steve and his colleagues are evaluating.

• 43:05Cynthia Graber?

  Very good. It's just really good.

• 43:08Nicola Twilley?

  It's delicious.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  And I think important point too is they don't have to taste good. So part of the breeding process is, 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 in the oven and then others are kind of flat. A lot of people come through and will have a bunch of breads that look like we don't know how to bake. It's, it's, it's more the wheat than us.

• 43:36Cynthia Graber?

  So Steve and his team are baking bread every day to try to figure out how the varietals 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.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  And we'd feel great and we were doing so well. And, 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, it doesn't look like bread. It's some rustic batard, you know, that's overfired and it's not sliced. We said, what do you need? And they're the ones that informed us upfront is it needs to be soft. It needs to be sliced. It needs to look like bread.

• 44:13Nicola Twilley?

  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 battards aren't really what they think of as bread.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  People do want soft sliced sandwich bread. I mean, it sounds like I'm, I don't know what, the anti something here, right? But they do. That's what I have every morning is toast, right? So I have 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. Okay, it is the most popular style. We're not going to change that.

• 44:55Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 45:02Speaker 05

  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.

• 45:26Cynthia Graber?

  Every year, the Bread Lab hosts a conference called the Grain Gathering. And soon after his food pantry breakthrough, Steve raised this issue of who their bread was actually for.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  We got together at the Grain Gathering a few years ago, and 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 it'll mold. Can we do that? We can.

• 45:56Cynthia Graber?

  A couple of years ago, Steve started to work on this new idea, this supermarket style whole wheat bread. First, he recruited the baker who'd created the whole wheat croissant, and then he invited a whole group of bakers to join in.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  We work with bakers that say, the last thing that I wanted to do as an artisan baker was cook in a pan, make it soft, and slice it. These people are doing this now.

• 46:17Cynthia Graber?

  The goal Steve set was clear. Make something that functions exactly like industrial white bread, but without the crappy ingredients.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  We're going to make something just like it. It's going to be light in color, it's going to be 60 to 100% whole wheat, and it's going to sell for no more than $6 a loaf.

• 46:33Cynthia Graber?

  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 seven total ingredients. Steve calls it the approachable loaf.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  The way it works is it's a, it has a little olive oil in it, and it has a little honey in it. And it's a long ferment, so it's a sourdough. 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?

• 47:12Nicola Twilley?

  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 sourdough to a squidgy square thing in a plastic bag.

• 47:27Cynthia Graber?

  So of course, we tasted it.

• 47:30Nicola Twilley?

  Okay, so this is the 100%.

• 47:31Cynthia Graber?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Nicola Twilley?

  This is 100%. Beautiful.

• 47:34Cynthia Graber?

  Yeah.

• 47:35Nicola Twilley?

  Soft. Can I throw it in a bowl at the... Is that, is that the idea?

• 47:39Cynthia Graber?

  Okay.

• 47:40Nicola Twilley?

  It has a tiny bit more tooth to it, but it's pretty sandwichy.

• 47:43Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 47:50Nicola Twilley?

  It's got the same squidgability that I get in a sandwich that I buy at the supermarket.

• 47:55Cynthia Graber?

  It is very mushy.

• 47:57Nicola Twilley?

  Yeah.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  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, your bread is lasting five days, you're not eating enough anyway. So just eat it instead. But yeah, 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.

• 48:22Cynthia Graber?

  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 wheat.

• 48:37Nicola Twilley?

  Yeah, you know, I'm spoiled because there are so many great bakeries near me in LA and I buy their delicious rustic looking bread. But this was good. And for some things, like a grilled cheese or a PB and J, it was actually better.

• 48:50Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 48:58Nicola Twilley?

  And we have the link to the recipe on our website at gastropod.com in case you want to make it at home.

• 49:04Cynthia Graber?

  But we're not going to all be able to buy approachable loaves 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 packaged loaves are meant to sit on shelves forever.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  We have one in the lab that the sell by date was June 3rd. That was June 3rd of 2018. And it's still soft and squishy and never molded.

• 49:31Cynthia Graber?

  Like Steve said, the approachable loaf can last for a while, but not that long.

• 49:35Nicola Twilley?

  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 also aren't enough mills to grind whole wheat. And frankly, there aren't enough bakers working with whole wheat yet either.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  What we're constantly working on is the affordability and the, the puzzle of scale.

• 49:56Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 50:04Speaker 05

  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.

• 50:13Nicola Twilley?

  And Steve is still pushing. Next up, 100% whole wheat hamburger and hot dog buns.

• 50:19Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 50:25Nicola Twilley?

  And yet, I'm afraid I'm gonna 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 the whole point of Aaron's book. Whenever we talk about what kind of bread people should be eating, we're talking about values, too.

• 50:45Cynthia Graber?

  In the past, eating brown bread meant you were poor, or in racist terms, you were a dirty immigrant.

• 50:50Nicola Twilley?

  And eating white bread meant you were progressive and modern and, yes, white.

• 50:55Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 51:08Nicola Twilley?

  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 and eat more delicious purple sprouting broccoli.

• 51:19Cynthia Graber?

  The white versus wheat debate still splits along class and income lines. It's just flipped.

• 51:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, the story of, of debates about white bread is really the story of. Of well-meaning reformers who are trying to improve the nation by changing what people eat. You know, in some cases, that makes some really important improvements and changes, but more often than not, it mostly ends up reinforcing and deepening forms of exclusion and existing kind of social hierarchies, right? It can exacerbate class divides, for example.

• 51:55Nicola Twilley?

  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 or lack of them for different groups.

• 52:09Speaker 05

  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 attention 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 of social difference.

• 52:43Nicola Twilley?

  I support Steve's effort, and so does Erin. It'd be great to have tastier 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.

• 53:00Nicola Twilley?

  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 beans.

• 53:08Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks to Erin Bubrow-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 Ida Hernandez: A Border Story.

• 53:18Nicola Twilley?

  You can go to gastropod.com for links to those and for the approachable loaf recipe. Let us know if you try it.

• 53:24Cynthia Graber?

  We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.

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