White Shelf Stable Cheap
Germ contains oil.
Oil can turn rancid. Removing the germ helped flour keep longer in storage and transport.1
That mattered in a continent of railroads, cities, elevators, and distant grain markets. Flour could be produced at scale, branded, shipped, and sold as a reliable commodity.2
White flour also carried social meaning. It looked clean. It signaled refinement. It seemed modern.
The industrial victory was therefore practical and symbolic. A whiter loaf fit the old sacred prestige of bread while adding the new prestige of purity, convenience, and progress.
If bread had been only a neutral food, the change might have been easier to question. But bread already had centuries of scriptural, liturgical, and domestic authority behind it.
The roller mill did not create that authority. It inherited it and placed a changed object inside it.
Related sections: Bran Germ Endosperm; The Transfer Problem.
Footnotes
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William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 97-147, on grain elevators, grading, futures, and commodity abstraction. Secondary source. ↩
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See The Northwestern Miller 1, no. 1 (1873) and subsequent Minneapolis trade coverage of milling capacity, flour grades, and market reports. Primary trade-periodical source. ↩