6 - “Not a Complete Food for Man”: The Controversy about White versus Wholemeal Bread in Interwar Britain

Summary

Introduction

In June 1927 the New Health Society (NHS) issued a “Wholemeal Manifesto” that claimed wholemeal flour was “superior in nutritional value and vitamin content” to its white counterpart, which was “not a complete food for man.” The manifesto maintained that the daily requirement of vitamin B could only be “ensured by the use of wholemeal flour” in the working-class diet, which relied heavily on bread. Published in the mass-circulation Daily Mail, which welcomed this “striking and convincing confirmation” of its long-standing campaign for wholemeal bread, the manifesto was signed by “thirteen distinguished medical men and scientists.” The signatories included the NHS president Sir William Arbuthnot Lane and leading members of society, namely, the eugenicist Caleb Williams Saleeby, the radiologist Alfred Jordan, the physician S. Henning Belfrage, and the biochemist Robert Plimmer. Lane attributed “many of the ills of civilization” to “wrong habits of feeding” in a series of articles published in the Daily Mail the previous autumn, in which he highlighted the importance of vitamins to health and advocated wholemeal bread. The Journal of the American Medical Association, which reported on the “bread controversy,” noted that in support of his arguments Lane invoked the “accumulated intelligence of those who have made dietetics a life study—Gowland Hopkins, Plimmer, Hindhede, McCollum, McCarrison and others.”

Using the NHS's “Wholemeal Manifesto” as a jumping-off point, this chapter explores the debate about different types of bread and flour in Britain during the interwar years. Claims about the poor nutritional value of white bread and advocacy of wholemeal can be traced back to the nineteenth century, but the issue received renewed attention in the wake of the discovery of vitamins and the launch of health education pressure groups such as the NHS in the 1920s. The bread controversy focused on chemical properties and nutritional benefits, but these were framed within a wider cultural perspective. There was no general shift in favor of brown bread among nutritionists in interwar Britain, as suggested by Uwe Spiekermann. Rather, this chapter highlights that doctors, nutrition experts, and scientists continued to debate the merits of different types of bread and flour.