The Dark and Seedy Origins of Wonder Bread

One of the reasons white sliced bread became so ubiquitous was because of the expense of meeting rising food quality and safety standards- only large corporations could afford to scale up the process at the time, and white bread just seemed so clean and modern compared to the darker breads from one's own kitchen or a local bakery. The upshot was that all the nutrition was taken out of flour to make the bread white, and eventually those nutrients had to be re-added in processed form.

In the generation before mine, white sliced bread was a luxury. One family I knew only let the father eat store-bought bread (which they called "light bread"), while the rest of the family had fresh baked biscuits or cornbread, which now seems totally backwards for a patriarchy. When I was a kid, white bread was an everyday thing, although not Wonder bread because it was relatively expensive. Now even the thought of eating tasteless, gummy, white sliced bread makes me queasy.

If you want to shorten this video's viewing time, the first two minutes are the history of bread itself, then we get into white bread. -via Boing Boing

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My family never had wonder bread. It was always whole grain and eventually my dad started making his own bread which was as heavy as a brick. One year when I went off to a 4H camp in the summer the camp only served wonder bread with it's meals. The lake had blue gills and sun fish and I found that the best bait for catching these fish was by making compressed little balls of wonder bread on a hook. I caught a fish every time I did this. Threw the fish back, too.

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My 75 year old mother refuses to buy my 78 year old father anything but whole grain or wheat bread. And my dad loves thick-slice bologna from the local German butcher. There’s nothing sadder than eating a thick slice of bologna with an equally thick slice of American “cheese” product on that kind of bread. So, I buy him the most processed white bread I can find just for that purposes.