Part 15 (1/2)
Perhaps this helps explain the keen pleasure we seem to take in all kinds of aerated foods and beverages: the sparkling wines and sodas, the souffles and whipped cream, the lofted breads and ethereal croissants and weightless meringues, and the laminated pastries with their 128 layers of air. Bakers and chefs labor mightily to work sweet nothings into their creations, striving to deliver the most flavorful airs deep into our mouths. The palate of taste is limited to the five or six primary colors that the tongue can recognize; olfaction, by comparison, is seemingly limitless in the shadings and combinations it can register and archive-and retronasal olfaction can perceive aromas to which even the nose is blind.
Symbolically, too, air is not nothing. Air elevates our food, in every sense, raises it from the earthbound subsistence of gruel to something so fundamentally transformed as to hint at human and even divine transcendence. Air lifts food up out of the mud and so lifts us, dignifying both the food and its eaters. Surely it is no accident that Christ turned to bread to demonstrate his divinity; bread is partially inspired already, an everyday proof of the possibility of transcendence.*
What other food could do all this symbolic work and yet still reliably fill human bellies? No wonder long stretches of European history can be told as the story of bread, or, rather, its two stories: a fight for access to bread on the part of Europe's peasantry and working cla.s.s, and a fight over the meaning of bread on the part of its elite. For what was the Reformation if not an extended, centuries-long argument over the proper interpretation of bread? Was it merely the symbol of Christ or his actual body?
Around the time I felt like I could reliably bake a voluminous white loaf, I hatched the idea of preparing an entire dinner on the theme of air, and one Sat.u.r.day Samin and I got together at my house to cook it. In addition to a couple of nicely lofted loaves of Tartinian bread that I'd baked, we made two souffles, a savory green-garlic one to serve with dinner, and a rose-and-ginger one for dessert. For the main course we served (what else?) a bird, albeit a flightless one: chicken. I broke out a bottle of vintage champagne. And Samin made honeycomb candy, a hard yet weirdly effervescent brittle made by stirring a spoonful of baking soda into a bubbling pot of caramelizing sugar.
The evening was a spree of retronasal olfaction, but what made the most lasting impression was the ginger-and-rose souffle. There was actually not a speck of ginger or rose in it, just a few drops of essential oil, one distilled from ginger root and the other from the petals of roses. The recipe came from an eccentric cookbook t.i.tled, simply, Aroma, the collaboration of a chef, Daniel Patterson, and a perfumer, Mandy Aftel. It called for a tremendous number of egg whites whipped to an airy froth. The alb.u.men proteins in the whites of eggs can hold air much like gluten does, allowing the cells of gas whipped into it to expand dramatically when heated. For the base, instead of calling for an equivalent number of yolks to carry the flavor, or cream, the recipe called for yogurt, which made for a souffle (the word of course means ”blown”) even more dematerialized than usual. Its flavor was powerful yet largely illusory, the result of the way the essential oils played on the human brain's difficulty in distinguis.h.i.+ng between information obtained by the sense of taste and that provided by the sense of smell. Each weightless bite amounted to a little poem of synesthesia-a confusion of the senses that delighted. It made for a fitting end to an effervescent evening.
By now you will not be surprised to learn that Gaston Bachelard had a few things to say about the element of air. In a book called Air and Dreams, he points out that we categorize many of our emotions by their relative weight; they make us feel heavier or lighter. Perhaps because uprightness is the human quality, we imagine human emotions arranged on a vertical scale from ground to sky. So sadness is weighed down and earthbound, joy is aerial, and the sensation of freedom defies the bonds of gravity. ”Air,” Bachelard writes, ”is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.”
Elation, effervescence, elevation, levity, inspiration: air words all, alveolated with vowels, leavening the dough of everyday life.
II.
Thinking Like a Seed
Not that I want to puncture my own balloon now that it is finally aloft, but I'm afraid I have no choice. As mentioned, the loaf that I mastered, or nearly so, is a loaf of white bread, and white bread is ... well, problematic. I came to see that I had been bewitched by the aesthetics of bread, completely losing sight of certain other desirable qualities in a food, such as nutrition. (Oh, that!) Eating white bread is a little better than eating pure starch, which is itself a little better than eating pure sugar, but not by much. I have been dwelling here on the wonders of gluten, but of course those proteins represent only a fraction of the calories in white flour-at most maybe 15 percent. The rest, I'm afraid, is starch, which, beginning on the tongue, our enzymes swiftly translate into glucose-sugar. Americans obtain a fifth of their calories from wheat-and 95 percent of that is in the form of nutritionally nearly worthless white flour. I say ”nearly” because, ever since the nutritional vacuousness of white flour became impossible to ignore, early in the twentieth century, governments have required that millers add back in a handful of the nutrients (B vitamins, mainly) that they have gone to such great lengths to take out.
Stand back far enough, and the absurdity of this enterprise makes you wonder about the sanity of our species. But consider: When millers mill wheat, they scrupulously sheer off the most nutritious parts of the seed-the coat of bran and the embryo, or germ, that it protects-and sell that off, retaining the least nouris.h.i.+ng part to feed us. In effect, they're throwing away the best 25 percent of the seed: The vitamins and antioxidants, most of the minerals, and the healthy oils all go to factory farms to feed animals, or to the pharmaceutical industry, which recovers some of the vitamins from the germ and then sells them back to us-to help remedy nutritional deficiencies created at least in part by white flour. A terrific business model, perhaps, but terrible biology.
Surely this qualifies as maladaptive behavior on our part, and yet humankind has been intent on whitening wheat flour almost as long as we have been eating bread. But we didn't get really good at it till the nineteenth century, with the advent of roller mills that could cleanly scalp all the germ and bran from the seed, and the subsequent discovery that, by exposing milled flour to gusts of chlorine gas, we could whiten it still further by expunging the last remaining nutrient from it: the beta-carotene that tinted flour just slightly yellow. What a triumph!
Before these dubious achievements, the best millers could do to whiten flour was to sift, or ”bolt,” wheat that had first been crushed on a stone wheel. But the millstone usually smushed the germ into the endosperm, so people couldn't avoid eating those nutrients, and bolting could only catch and remove the biggest, chunkiest bits of the bran, leaving behind a fair amount of fiber. The result was an off-white flour that was nouris.h.i.+ng enough to keep alive all those people for whom wheat made up the bulk of their diet-which until the last century or so was most of the population of Europe. Though it looks white, the bread ”with the old soul” in the painting by emile Friant that inspired Chad Robertson was almost certainly made with this kind of flour.
The quest for an ever-whiter shade of bread, which goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, is a parable about the folly of human ingenuity-about how our species can sometimes be too smart for its own good. After figuring out an ingenious system for transforming an all but nutritionally worthless gra.s.s into a wholesome food, humanity pushed on intrepidly until it had figured out a way to make that food all but nutritionally worthless yet again!
Here in miniature, I realized, is the whole checkered history of ”food processing.” Our species' discovery and development of cooking (in the broadest sense of the word) gave us a handful of ingenious technologies for rendering plants and animals more nutritious and unlocking calories unavailable to other creatures. But there eventually came a moment when, propelled by the logic of human desire and technological progress, we began to overprocess certain foods in such a way as to actually render them detrimental to our health and well-being. What had been a highly adaptive set of techniques that contributed substantially to our success as a species turned into a maladaptive one-contributing to disease and general ill health and now actually threatening to shorten human lives. When and where did we pa.s.s over, from processing food to make it healthier to making it less so? To what might be thought of as ”overcooking”? There are a couple of places we could reasonably draw that line. The refining of pure sugar from cane or beets would certainly be one. But perhaps the sharpest and clearest line would be the advent of pure white flour (and the bread made from it) in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The prestige of white flour is ancient and has several sources, some practical, others sentimental. Whiteness has always symbolized cleanness, and especially at times when disease has been rife and food frequently contaminated, the whiteness of flour symbolized its purity. I say ”symbolized” because for most of history it was no guarantee: Unscrupulous millers routinely whitened their flour by adulterating it with everything from alum and chalk to pulverized bone. (For centuries both millers and bakers have been regarded with suspicion, often with good reason. It has always been hard to determine what exactly is in a bag of flour or a loaf of bread, and easy to pa.s.s off ingredients that are cheaper and less wholesome than wheat flour. This is why, during periods of hunger and political ferment, millers and bakers were frequent targets of popular wrath, occasionally put in the stocks and pelted with bad bread.)
Adulterated or not, however, white (or whitish) flour was generally regarded as healthier than whole grain well into the nineteenth century. ”Coa.r.s.e flour”-wheat that had simply been ground on a stone and never sifted-was coa.r.s.e indeed, and gradually ground down the teeth of the people who had no choice but to eat the dark bread made from it. Sifted flour was also thought to be easier and swifter to digest, and certainly for people struggling to obtain enough calories, white bread was a superior source of quick energy. It was also easier to chew, no small thing before modern dentistry.
So the rich demanded the whitest possible flour, and the poor were left to eat ”kaka,” as the French sometimes called brown bread. Going back to ancient Rome, the shade of the bread you could afford precisely indicated your social standing; to know one's place, Juvenal wrote, is ”to know the color of one's bread.” Some historians and anthropologists have suggested that the prestige of white flour might also have had a racist tint to it. Maybe. And yet white rice has enjoyed a similar prestige in Asia, among nonwhites, so maybe not.
Whitish flour, which before roller mills could only be obtained by sifting flour through progressively finer meshes of cloth, had a lot to recommend it. Bran tends to be bitter, so the whiter the flour the sweeter the bread. White flour also made for a much airier loaf; even the microscopic shards of milled bran are sharp, and, like millions of tiny knives, they can pierce the strands of gluten in dough, impairing its ability to hold air and rise. (On the same principle, some gardeners kill slugs by spreading wheat bran in their path.) Those tiny bran knives are relatively heavy, too, making it more difficult to leaven a whole-grain loaf. Even at its best, it will never achieve the exaltation of a loaf made with white flour.
As a solution to these problems, sifting coa.r.s.e flour was less than ideal. The multistep process was time consuming and expensive. It also failed to address what is perhaps the most serious rap against whole-grain flours: their relatively short shelf life. Whole-grain flour tends to go ”off” within several weeks of being milled, releasing an unmistakable odor of rancidity. Part of what makes the germ so nutritious-its unsaturated omega-3 fats-also makes it unstable, and p.r.o.ne to oxidization. Sifting might whiten stone-ground flour, but it could not remove the perishable germ, which meant that flour had to be milled frequently and locally. This is why every town used to have its own mill.
The advent of roller milling in the middle of the nineteenth century made white flour cheap, stable, and whiter than it had ever been. For a revolutionary technology, roller milling seems almost obvious, and benign. The new mills replaced the old millstones with a sequence of steel or porcelain drums arranged in pairs, each subsequent pair calibrated to have a narrower s.p.a.ce between them than the previous set, in order to grind the flour ever more finely. To begin, the seed is dropped between a pair of corrugated drums rotating in opposite directions. During the ”first break,” the bran and germ are sheared from the endosperm. Those parts are sifted out before the now naked endosperm moves on to the next pair of slightly more closely s.p.a.ced rollers, and so on, until the starch (or ”farina”) has been pulverized to the desired degree of fineness.
The new technology was greeted as a boon to humankind, and so at first it seemed. Bread became whiter and airier and cheaper than ever. Commercial yeast performed particularly well with the new flour, vastly speeding and simplifying the work of baking. The shelf life of flour, now that the unstable embryo had been eliminated, became indefinite, allowing the milling industry to consolidate. Thousands of local stone mills closed, since big industrial operations could now supply whole nations. Cheap, stable, transportable white flour made it possible to export flour around the world and to feed swelling urban populations during the industrial revolution. According to one history of bread,* the advantages of white bread were something on which both workers and employers could agree: Brown breads high in fiber ”meant that workers had to leave their machines frequently to go to the lavatory, and this disrupted production.”
Indeed, in many ways, white flour not only gratified human desires but also meshed especially well with the logic of industrial capitalism. No longer a living, perishable thing, flour now became a stable, predictable, and flexible commodity, making not only the production of bread faster and more efficient, but also its consumption. In effect, roller mills ”sped up” wheat as a food, making it possible for the human body to absorb its energy much more readily than before. Flour, and bread in turn, became more like fuel and, at least calorically, more efficient. In the jargon of modern nutrition science, bread became more ”energy dense,” which, along with extended shelf life, is one of the most common outcomes of modern food processing. Not surprisingly, white flour proved enormously popular with a species hardwired by natural selection to favor sweet foods. The taste of sweetness, which signals a particularly rich source of energy, had always been rare and hard to find in nature (ripe fruit, honey), but with the industrial refining of certain cultivated gra.s.ses (wheat, cane, corn), it now became cheap and ubiquitous, with what would turn out to be unfortunate consequences for human health.
More than just a new food product, white flour helped usher in a new food system, one that would extend all the way from the field to the loaf of presliced and fortified white bread, which now could be manufactured on an a.s.sembly line in three or four hours without ever being touched by human hands. The wheat plant changed, too. The new roller mills worked best with hard-kerneled red wheat; the big, tough bran coat on this type of wheat could be sheared cleanly and completely from the endosperm, whereas softer white wheat left infinitesimal specks of bran in the flour. So, over time, breeding changed the plant to better suit the new machine. But because hard wheat has tougher, bitterer bran, it made whole-grain flour even coa.r.s.er and bitterer than it had been before-one of several ways that the triumph of white flour made whole wheat less good. Even today, breeders continue to select for ever-harder wheats with ever-whiter-and therefore less nutritious-endosperms. As Steve Jones, the former wheat breeder for the State of Was.h.i.+ngton, told me, ”Wheat breeders are selecting against health.”
Ah yes, health. Here was the fly in the ointment. The compelling industrial logic of white flour meshed beautifully with everything except human biology. Not long after roller mills became widespread in the 1880s, alarming rates of nutritional deficiency and chronic disease began cropping up in populations that relied on the new white flour. Around the turn of the century, a group of French and British doctors and medical experts began searching for the causes of what they dubbed ”the Western diseases” (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and several disorders of the digestive tract, including cancer), so called because they were virtually unheard of in places where people hadn't switched to modern diets containing large amounts of refined sugar and white flour. These medical men, many of them posted to Britain's colonies in Asia and Africa, had observed that, soon after white flour and sugar arrived in places where previously what one of them (Robert McCarrison) called ”the unsophisticated foods of Nature” had been the norm, the Western diseases would predictably appear. Some of these doctors blamed the lack of fiber in the Western diet, others the surfeit of refined carbohydrates, and still others the lack of vitamins. But whatever the culprit nutrient or the precise mechanism by which it operated, these men were convinced of a link between processed white flour and sugar and the panoply of new chronic diseases. A large body of contemporary research suggests they were right.