The Transfer Problem
Western culture transferred old trust in bread onto a newly industrial flour system.
The words stayed familiar: bread, loaf, staff of life, daily bread. The material pathway changed: steel rollers, rail networks, commodity grades, commercial yeast, and factory-scale production.1
This does not mean every industrial loaf was poison. It means the symbolic inheritance made scrutiny harder.
People could still say bread was basic, humble, and providential. Those words had been trained by scripture and prayer. Yet the bread on the table now came from a new chain of extraction and distribution.
Roller milling overlapped with other changes: commercial yeast, sugar, shortening, factory baking, wrappers, advertising, and urban retail. The chapter isolates flour, but the modern loaf was made by a system.2
That is the bridge to the next chapter.
White Flour and the First Metabolic Wave will ask what can be said about health without pretending that one technology explains a century of disease.
The claim must remain careful: industrial flour is a major suspect in the story, not the only suspect.
Related sections: White Shelf Stable Cheap; Defining The Wave.