Since the nineteenth century, when millers began extracting the germ from wheat to make grinding more efficient and bleaching flour white to make it prettier, bread has been the flashpoint for food fights among the gastronomically self-righteous. No brand is more symbolic than Wonder, the whitest of them all. Early proponents of this commercial loaf decried all the time home cooks wasted baking their own bread, which probably turned out coarse and heavy—too much like peasant fodder for people eager to elevate their tables to middle-class respectability. A 1934 booklet called Vitality Demands Energy (published by General Mills) took up the cause of white bread by crediting it with nothing less than America’s survival. “An abundant supply of bread has meant a well nourished, satisfied people, the bulwark against revolt,” it said, reminding readers what had happened in countries (Russia?) where the bread was black: “Weakened nations have succumbed.”
But as far back as 1871, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher condemned white bread as soulless, writing, “What had been the staff of life for countless ages [has] become a weak crutch.” Anti–white bread people never lost their skepticism about mass-produced bread, an attitude that won new converts as health food evolved from fringe faddism to a socially acceptable lifestyle choice. Modern-day philosophical descendants of Beecher believe that virtually all white food (white rice, mashed potatoes, white sugar, white asparagus, even milk) is suspicious if not outright toxic. Conversely, dark food (brown rice, honey, bran) is honest and good. Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, worrying about the debasement of the American palate, concluded their 1981 screed Eating in America by saying “the poor will continue to buy the inflated white loaf,” but that “some young households will get around the problem by baking their own bread, with a few of them grinding their own wheat and grains in little kitchen mills.”
Even Wonder Bread has bowed to popular wisdom, now offering not only “Classic White,” but also “Smartwhite” (less sodium), “Light White” (more fiber, fewer calories), and “Wonder Made with Whole Grain,” not to mention a line of actual Whole Wheat Wonders. One amazing historical fact to consider is that the original Wonder Bread, introduced in 1920, was sold unsliced. Can you imagine what an unsliced loaf of Wonder Bread must have felt like? Perhaps like a balloon? Probably so, because the name “Wonder” came about when a bakery executive was watching a balloon race, and the balloons reminded him of the bread. Because they also filled him with wonder, he put the two thoughts together and realized he had a name for the company’s new product. The package was almost the same as it is today, covered by pictures of balloons, which gave Wonder the nickname by which old-time housewives still know it, “Balloon Bread.”
In 1930, Wonder became the first national brand to be sold in already-sliced loaves—a move that increased bread consumption in general and made Wonder number one. During World War II, the government determined that bread-slicing was a waste of national effort, leading to the still-heard expression “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”