WHITE BREAD SWEET simplicity

Although criticized for lack of substance, the refined loaves remain popular.
By ELIZABETH LELAND
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- What is it about white bread?
Remember when you were 8 and you rolled a piece between your fingers, rolled and rolled until it came together in a sticky little ball? If your hands were dirty -- and what 8-year-old doesn't have dirty hands -- the ball of bread got dirty, too, a dingy gray, but you ate it anyway.
It was moist and sweet, so starchy it stuck to your teeth, and you had to wrestle it away with your tongue, sometimes with your fingers.
Maybe you rolled up even tinier wads of white bread, fit them into the ends of straws and, when the teacher turned her back, blew the spitballs at the ceiling where they stayed, little white polka dots, until they dried and dropped to the floor for the janitor to sweep away.
Ever try doing that with whole wheat? Forget about it.
Ignoring nutritionists
Nutritionists say we shouldn't eat white bread. Empty calories. Apparently, not a lot of people in Charlotte, N.C., listen to nutritionists. Thirty years after the whole-grain revolution, after all the research that says whole wheat is better, six of every 10 people here still eat their bread white. It's a favorite throughout the South, across most of America and beyond.
The French eat baguettes; the Italians, ciabatta; the Portuguese, sweet bread. The Greeks call theirs psomi. Only in America is our favorite bread a disparaging term for our culture. Only in America is the white bread as bland as the phrase.
Take a bite. Feel the texture on your tongue, soft and satiny, as sensual as cotton candy. A burst of sweetness, and then -- poof! -- the flavor is gone.
A kernel of wheat has a tough outer husk called bran and, inside, a white floury endosperm and a tiny germ that would sprout if you planted it. Grind them together, and you've got whole wheat flour. To get white bread, you have to separate the flour from the bran and the wheat germ.
Transformation
Some 10,000 years ago, our ancestors made the first bread, a crude unleavened whole wheat flat bread made from flour and water. Like a tortilla. Around 3000 B.C., Egyptians added yeast to the dough.
Over the next few thousand years, bakers experimented with making finer white breads. After millers crushed the grain, they ground it through sieves, smaller and smaller, to extract the white flour. Because white flour requires more work, in the 18th-century white bread sold for as much as 10 times the price of whole wheat and was a delicacy of the well-to-do.
The color of bread indicated a person's social status. The lighter the bread, the higher the status. Everybody wanted white bread and what it signified, but few could afford it.
Then came the Industrial Revolution and, by the 20th century, even the poor could afford white bread. They didn't realize the brown bread they now shunned was better for them. White flour loses vitamins and minerals and fiber in the refining process.
When military doctors during World War II discovered health problems in men and women enlisting, the government intervened. It required bakers to enrich white bread to help prevent beriberi (a lack of thiamin), pellagra (a lack of niacin) and anemia (a lack of iron).
What they took out in the refining process, they had to put back in. Remember Wonder Bread's slogan? "Helps build strong bodies 12 ways." In 1998, the government also required folic acid to help prevent birth defects.
Even the whole-grain movement of the 1970s didn't convert most people. Although Americans today eat less white bread than they did in the 1960s, they still eat more white than whole wheat. It usually costs less.
Now the wealthier indulge in whole grain.
Chef's perspective
Peter Reinhart, a chef at Johnson & amp; Wales University in Charlotte and an expert on baking, thinks he knows why we love white bread: We can't help ourselves. It's the way we're hard-wired.
"Our palates crave sweet and salty," he said. "Whole grain doesn't taste as good because it has bran and wheat germ, and those aren't flavors our palates crave.
"Basically, we like white bread because it's sweet."
He compares white bread to cheap wine. When you add sugar to grapes or to flour to speed up the fermentation process, he says, you get the same thing:
"A quick flavor burst, and then it fades."
Inexpensive white bread doesn't draw attention to itself and that, Reinhart says, is its purpose.
"I used to demonize white bread and white sugar as symbolic of what's wrong with society," Reinhart said. "But from a strictly functional standpoint, white breads are great for carrying things."
Like garden tomatoes. Slather two slices of white bread with mayonnaise. Lay tomato slices on top of one piece. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Put the other slice of bread on top.
Yum.
Bread man's passion
Sara Lee, known for its desserts but new to the bread business, recently discovered this truth:
People who like their bread white don't want whole wheat.
Michael Davis arrives at a depot in Monroe at 3 a.m. to pick up bread baked the day before in Valdese, where Sara Lee owns a bakery. Michael is a bread man, part of a fraternity of workers who gather before dawn on the bread aisles of grocery stores. They know each other by name and by brand. Michael is the Sara Lee guy. Jerry is Merita. Mike works for Flowers.
"The deal," Michael says, "is that you don't mess with my space, and I don't mess with your space."
When Michael discovers a loaf of someone else's bread on his section of shelf, he restocks it in the right place. A courtesy. A customer probably changed her mind and misplaced the bread. Not so long ago, he said, a competitor cut open or mashed loaves that customers misplaced on his shelves. That man no longer works their route.
Michael takes such pride in the way he shelves bread, he stops back by the big grocery stores on his way home many afternoons. He wants to make sure his bread is still neatly arranged and the ends of the plastic bags are tucked under the loaves so the label shows clearly.
He stops by on his own time, after he's off the clock. His knees are callused from kneeling so much to shelve the bread.
Everything is computerized, so Michael knows how many loaves have been bought, what kind and how many more a store needs.
Michael knows what you eat.