On the 100th anniversary of Wonder Bread, a blog mirror post on white bread.

 

Not Wonder Bread.  19th Century Persian bakery.

Why did our ancestors prefer white bread to wholegrains?

As a note, as I added down below on the thread on May 21, 1921, I don't like Wonder Bread.  But I do like white bread and I'm truly not keen on whole grain bread.

My mother was. She'd buy really grainy breads and then slather slices of it with peanut butter.  Ick.

Anyhow, a scholarly article by a scholar packed with densely (which any bread my mother baked also was. . . i.e., dense) with information, such as this:

For most of history, after the shift to agriculture, a large proportion of the world’s population depended on grains such as wheat, rice, corn (maize), barley, oats, rye, or millet for as much as 70-90% of their calories. This would have been true of farm laborers and their wives (and that’s what most of our ancestors would have been).

Indeed, in the current craze of the Keto diet, which apparently avoids all breads like the plague, this is something worth considering.  Humans have been eating bread for a really darned long time.  In fact, in another one of those "d'oh" moments that was published the other day, it turns out that Neanderthals, i.e., Home Sapien Neanderthalensis, ate piles of carbs.

Well of course they did.  They were, after all. . . people.

My mother also made a lot of bread, fairly badly, with oatmeal, which became sort of a commercial trend in later years.  And she used lots of barley for thickeners in stuff, such as stew.  I was surprised to hear a comment on a Medieval history podcast a year ago or so that this was a Medieval practice and that modern people wouldn't know what that tastes like.

I do.

Anyhow, this article is really good on the switch from whole grain breads to white bread.  I highly recommend it.

As a slight aside, Wonder Bread is mentioned in the article but not dwelt on.  The article notes how "Wonder Bread" came, during the 1960s and 1970s, to be sort of a symbol of a bland American whiteness, ethnicity wise, during the rise of the counterculture.  That's really unfair to the product (which I'll note that I don't personally like), as bread pretty much crosses color lines and ethnicities.  Indeed, that's more symbolic I think of the odd American cultural trait of associating food and substances with everything, which is why we now hair care products that advertise what's really a food substance as being in them.

Anyhow, when looking up Wonder Bread for the May 21, 1921 post, I tried to find an advertisement dating back that far and couldn't.  But I did hit up on a lot of advertisements, and I was surprised to learn that Wonder Bread's straight arrow reputation may be a bit overdone.  At least up to the 1960s, it like to feature shapely women in its advertisements wearing swimsuits and the like.  In at least one advertisement of the 40s and 50s it plopped a mid teens teenage girl in an advertisement wearing as little as legally possible with the promise, more or less, that Wonder Bread would help turn her into a bombshell.  In the 60s it ran an entire campaign based on the promise that sandwiches made by spouse aspiring women with Wonder Bread were "boy traps" or "date traps".  Not exactly kid stuff, and more than a little weird.