Part 15 (2/2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whole-wheat Wonder Bread! This has all the makings of a happy ending, in which the human quest for softer, sweeter, whiter, and airier bread is married to the nutritional benefits of whole grain. But things are seldom that simple in the food industry. The White Flour Industrial Complex is not about to go quietly into the dark-bread night. How could it, when its mills have been expressly designed to produce the whitest possible flour, splitting off the germ and embryo at the first break? When milling white flour and selling off the nutrients is more profitable than selling flour whole? To leave the germ in the flour would literally gum up the works, I was told by an experienced miller by the name of Joe Vanderliet. This is why it is always removed at the beginning of the milling process, even when making ”whole” wheat flour.

”The engineering and the nutrition are pulling in opposite directions,” Vanderliet explained. Most commercial whole-wheat flour is actually white flour to which the bran and germ have been added back in. Whether such reconst.i.tuted flour is as good, or good for you, as flour from wheat milled whole on a stone is questionable, but the industry can't do it any other way.

Adapting the reductive logic of industrial bread baking to the complexities of whole grain can't be easy. What do you do about the volatility of the germ? Vanderliet claims that many large mills, including ones he used to work for, simply leave the germ out of their ”whole-grain” flour ”because it's just too much trouble”-a serious charge, but a difficult one to prove. (So here we are again, not quite certain what is really in a sack of flour.) And what to do about the bitterness of the bran in modern wheat varieties? (Most commercial whole-grain breads cover it up with sweeteners.) Or the difficulty of leavening whole-grain dough with commercial yeast? This last problem was (literally) the downfall of a great many hippie loaves; without a sourdough culture to promote gluten development, 100-percent whole-grain breads tend to rise lethargically and crumble in the toaster. Yet it is hard to imagine the bakers at Hostess taking on the care and feeding of a temperamental culture of unidentified wild bacteria and yeast.

By now I was curious to find out exactly how Wonder Bread solved the riddle of baking a whole-wheat white bread. Was it actually possible to modify the logic of an industrial system based on white flour to produce a genuine and appealing whole-grain loaf? So before the company went belly-up I put in a call to the Texas headquarters of Hostess Brands, managed to get through to the public-affairs office, and asked the young man who answered the phone if I might visit one of their factories to learn how whole-wheat Wonder Bread was made. It was his first day on the job, but he promised to get back to me. I was pleasantly surprised when, a week later, I received an e-mail informing me that a visit to the Hostess bakery in Sacramento had been approved. When I studied the map, I saw that the Hostess plant was only an hour or so south of Dave Miller's bakery-the artisa.n.a.l whole-grain baker for whom Chad Robertson had worked-so I decided I would pay a visit to his bakery after my tour at the Hostess plant. Dave Miller mills his own grain and bakes 400, 100 percent whole-grain loaves a week for sale at the farmers' market. The Hostess plant produced up to 155,000 loaves a day for sale at supermarkets across the western United States. It promised to be a day of extremes.

The Hostess plant occupies a sprawling, one-story industrial building on the outskirts of Sacramento. The smell of bread hits you in the parking lot, pleasant at first, but soon oddly cloying. Before the plant manager escorted me onto the factory floor, he handed me earplugs to m.u.f.fle the din. A single waist-high production line snakes through the dim, cavernous s.p.a.ce, vaguely reminiscent of a wildly ambitious model train set, with loaves of bread in metal pans taking the place of train cars. The line traveled all the way from the silos that store flour out back to the mixing drums, through the dough cutters and shapers, into the proofing chamber, beneath the scoring machine (where a thin jet of water neatly scores each loaf), into the tunnel-like oven, then onto the slicing and bagging machine, and finally the twist-tie-er, which puts exactly four twists into every tie. The same line can produce Cla.s.sic Wonder Bread, or Made with Whole Grain White or Soft 100% Whole Wheat as well as Nature's Pride, a new line of ”all-natural”-i.e., no chemical additives-whole-grain and -grainish breads, in roughly the same amount of time: four hours, from flour dump to cooled, sliced, packaged, and twist-tied loaf.

The genius of the food scientists at Hostess has been to alter the ingredient formulas (type of flour, amount of yeast, source of fiber) without otherwise disturbing a mechanized system designed to bake white bread quickly. From the point of view of the bakers running the line, bread is pretty much bread, whether white, whole grain, whole grainish, no-high-fructose-corn-syrup, ton-o'-fiber, or whatever the currently compelling health claim dictates. Though the bakers did complain, cheerfully, about the challenge of getting air into breads that had to contain so much added fiber and minerals-”raising all that garbage,” one called it. Many of the company's ”healthier” brands are fortified with calcium, a mineral not ordinarily a.s.sociated with wheat, but these days a compelling health claim.

”You're basically breaking up rock and throwing it in your dough,” the head baker explained. He was talking about the challenge of adding prodigious amounts of calcium to bread, and his candor was disarming. ”It takes a h.e.l.luva lot of yeast to lift all that rock.” That's when it clicked that the cloying odor-now upgraded to slightly nauseating-was the smell of yeast, lots and lots of it.

Having by now spent time in bakeries, and done a fair amount of baking at home, I was struck by how similar and yet at once how very different the industrial version of bread baking is. I watched flour and water being mixed into the familiar cement-colored slurry-and yet what are all those other ingredients getting added to the mix? The fifty-pound bags labeled simply ”dough conditioner”? The ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides? The four types of sugar (high-fructose corn syrup, mola.s.ses, barley-malt extract, and corn syrup solids)? The wheat gluten and ammonium chloride and calcium propionate and sodium stearoyl lactylate and ”yeast nutrients”? And why would yeasts living in such sweet dough need more nutrients, anyway? To balance their sugary diet?

The bakers in charge couldn't tell me the function of the thirty-one ingredients listed on a package of Soft 100% Whole Wheat; they suggested I ask the food scientists at headquarters. But HQ wouldn't let me to talk to their food scientists, ostensibly for fear they would inadvertently disclose proprietary baking secrets. Eventually I was able to ascertain from other food scientists the specific functions of the thirty-one ingredients, most of which fell into one or more of these categories: to back up a health claim; to ”condition” the dough so it doesn't stick to and thereby slow the machines; to get as much air into the dough as rapidly as possible; to give the bread the cottony texture and moist cakey crumb consumers expect from the Wonder brand; to protect the bread from staling or molding; and, last but far from least, to sweeten the bread and thereby cover up the bitterness of bran and, even more important, the chemical taste of all the other additives.

Once upon a time not so long ago, most of those chemical additives would have been deemed ”adulterants” by the Food and Drug Administration. But after an all-out campaign of lobbying by the baking industry in the 1950s, the FDA liberalized its ”standard of ident.i.ty” for bread, permitting bakeries to add dozens of new additives to what had previously been a simple two- or three-ingredient food. Earlier in the twentieth century, a group of experts convened by the International Congress for the Suppression of Fraud (quaint idea!) proposed a legal definition of bread that the loaves I was watching being baked would not have met. ”The word bread, without any qualifier, is exclusively reserved for the product resulting from cooking dough made with a mixture of wheat flour, sourdough culture or yeast (made from beer or grain), drinking water, and salt.” How far this thing called bread has come!

And yet even after all these novel ingredients have been mixed into the dough, the process still sort of resembles the baking of bread. At one point early in the tour I stepped into the sponge room, where big hoppers filled with wet dough are bubbling and rising like sofa cus.h.i.+ons as they undergo bulk fermentation. The only difference from a bulk fermentation in my kitchen or at Tartine is how quickly it happens here. By putting vast quant.i.ties of yeast to work-as much as 10 percent by weight-Hostess can get the great big belch of CO2 needed to raise a whole-grain or super-high-fiber dough in just an hour or two.

Indeed, much of the innovation in industrial baking has gone into speeding up what has traditionally and perhaps necessarily been a slow process. But time is money. So the dough is inoculated with legions of fast-acting yeast to speed its rise; it then gets one set of conditioners so it can withstand rapid handling by machines, and another to speed up (or replace) gluten development, and then it is heavily sweetened, so that even a 100 percent whole-grain loaf will deliver that quick hit of sugar on the tongue the consumer has come to expect from white bread. In the end, what has been removed from industrial bread by the addition of so many chemical additives is the ingredient of time.

Yet there are problems with speeding up whole-grain bread, and they begin with the flour. Many if not most of the new whole-grain white breads on the market are made with a new variety of hard white wheat developed by ConAgra. This is why the bread doesn't look like whole wheat: the specks of bran are white, or whitish. They are also microscopic: The wheat is milled by ConAgra using a patented process called Ultrafine that attains a degree of fineness never before achieved in a whole-grain flour. This resulting flour, called Ultragrain, makes for a softer, whiter whole-grain bread, but at a price. It is metabolized almost as fast as white flour, obviating one of the most important health advantages of whole grains: that our bodies absorb and metabolize them slowly, and so avoid the insulin spikes that typically accompany refined carbohydrates. A common measure of the speed by which a food raises glucose levels in the blood (and therefore insulin, an important risk factor for many chronic diseases) is the glycemic index. The glycemic index of a whole-grain Wonder Bread (around 71) is essentially the same as that of Cla.s.sic Wonder-bread (73). (By comparison, the glycemic index of whole-grain bread made with stone-ground flour is only 52.) So perhaps we really have gotten too smart for our own good.

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