“It [bread consumption in Japan] only started coming back in around the 1840s, when the military started adding bread to the soldiers’ rations during the second Opium War. Egawa Hidetatsu, who was in charge of coastal defenses around Tokyo Bay during the time, enlisted a military science researcher to create a hard, long-lasting bread as an additional field ration that would be both convenient to transport and easy to grab on the go in the field. Under the military’s influence, ordinary people slowly but surely started adding bread to their ration.” —— An Abridged History of Japanese Bread (and 10 Varieties to Try) Jul 27, 2022 https://yummybazaar.com/blogs/blog/history-of-japanese-bread#:~:text=It%20only%20started%20coming%20back,adding%20bread%20to%20their%20ratio.

Bread is one of the quintessential meals one can take on the run. Porridges all require that one stop what one is doing, light a fire, put a pot on the fire, add water, and then add the grain. And then, one must wait, Only now, what, an hour after starting, can the feeding begin. Besides doing the dishes not being most people’s favorite activity, the pot has to be cleaned along with whatever serving dishes and other utensils, if any, that might have been employed in making it and the cooking equipment must be carried with you.

What I like so much about the citation, above, concerning the shift towards the adoption of bread by the Japanese military in the 1840s is that it offers a clean demonstration of one of bread’s greatest strengths. It can be produced from centralized locations. And it keeps. One baking can supply a staple food that will last days, weeks, months, or years, depending on formulation, storage conditions, and the climate. Egawa Hidetatsu brought passion to his introduction of bread to the military. He developed breads at this estate. Recognized as  パン祖, the Father of Bread he is honored every year on Pan Day  パン祖 . Pan パン  entered Japan via the first introduction of bread into Japan in the 17th century by Portuguese missionaries.

“Pan Day” (パンの日), and he is revered by the Japanese baking industry as パン祖 (the “father of bread”).

The British Navy stored bread baked for the French soldiers inhumanely housed in hulks off its Southern English Coast during the Napoleonic wars so they would become ropy, converting them from a food to a torture. [citation]

As war became industrialized, armies faced unprecedented challenges to feeding millions of men on the move. Napoleon’s armies experimented with mobile milling and baking systems. It was the American Civil War (1861-1865) that saw military innovations that directly affected civilian baking. The Union Army developed a centralized bakery in the basement of the United States Capitol building. This provided proof of concept for the primary baking system now utilized in most of the world: large centralized production facilities that ship bread (sometimes dough or par backed loaves) over a wide geographical range. In same cases, this can be hundreds, even thousands of miles.

Industrial scale bakeries developed rapidly in the second half the 19th century, especially in the United States. The leader in this area was the Ward Baking Company. For Americans, their claim to fame is the 1930s Wonder Bread, the pillow-soft pre-sliced blinding white bread that enjoyed decades of mass popularity. The Ward company were innovators in bringing modern industrial systems to bread making which included a focus on sanitation and biochemistry. While European bakeries were also integrating industrial systems into their baking enterprises, the big American industrial bakeries set the standard for standardization, and mass production up to the Second World War.

The Ward Baking Company supported a baking institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 1909 thus fully integrating baking into the world of appleid science — bringing baking fully into the 20th century industrial systems. They worked with the US Army during World War I where they helped the army to develop baking systems for the War. These mostly had to do with sanitation, standardizing recipes, and biochemistry. This will have furthered the widespread adoption of the concept that baking can be addressed through science and that materials science can be brought to bare on solving what had seemed to have been the inherent unpredictability of bread baking.

It was the War that enabled Ward, working with the US Army, to put it all together. The first sentence to the instruction to Ward’s book, Bread Facts (1920), “The American baking industry found itself during the war.”

In their words, “Chemistry and physics, bacteriology and the other sciences as they apply to the growing of cereals, to the transportation and storage of grain against spoilage, to milling, to baking and to the accessory materials — yeast and yeast foods, milk and malt extracts, sugars, fats and salt— were put to work in these fields as never before.” (p.5)

What this enabled them to perfect, along with the US Army was control the bread formula — a skill that underpins industrial baking worldwide: “A formula made out for one shop does not work in another, unless the variable factors have been stabilized towards one standard of ingred­ients and method.” (p.10)

In World War II the big advance in baking furthered by the war were the British Baker Perkins Mobile Field Bakeries. These bakeries were highly automated. They included conveyor belts, automatic mixers, shapers, and proofers. The systems were not as automated as industrial bakeries today, but they further demonstrated how a shift from artisan-style production to mechanized and scalable systems would work.

They were labor efficient and pointed the way to the industrial bakeries of the industrialized post-War years. The US Army’s big contribution to bread technology during World War II was the development of dried yeast, later refined into the instant yeast we have today that can be mixed dry into the flour.

The Germans did not focus on bakery technology to the extent of the Americans and the British in either war. Instead, in the Second World War they focused on nutrition and the production of nutrition-rich black breads. German culture as a whole purposefully embraced rye bread traditions in the 19th century. With much of Germany far enough North to firmly place it into rye country, celebrating rye was a way of celebrating German culture. As rye was explicitly rejected by the bread cultures of France and Great Britain, its most important geopolitical competitors, finding value in what others rejected made its own cultural statement.

One of the war memories of the Italian father of a friend of mine was seeing the German troops eating black bread and the Americans white bread during the final days of World War II. The Americans and captured his village. The troopes sitting across the street from each other, eating. For this Italian child, it was astonishing that the American soldiers were eating white bread. While only a child he intuitively understood what both the symbolism and the technical achievement that white bread out of field bakeries an ocean away from the soldier’s home actual meant.

On the other hand, for the Germans, the black bread will not have have stood for privation, though by the end of the war privation was an issue, but rather pride in finding value on their geography and unique cultural history. Marco’s father saw white bread as best, but the German soldiers, as is true of German soldiers today, will, along with the general German population, enjoy rye and mixed grain breads that we can see, based on volume of breads produced, are effectively rejected by other countries.

The German baking industry continued an interest in rye post-War, an interest that continues to this day, and that to this day differentiates Germany’s baking environment from that of most other culinary traditions.

The future, naturally, remans unknown. Advances in 3D food printing, including with bread and pasta products suggest that 3D printing factories are a possible, even likely future for at least some bread production. We can all hope that this is developed in the context of peace and international cooperation. Factories of 3D printing would providing the ability to tailor recipes to match the nutritional needs of individuals, e.g. diabetics get a different formulation, would lend themselves to fully robotic production, recipe innovation, the creation of new breads with bespoke tastes and textures, along with possibilities that will reveal themselves when the technologies mature.

If the 19th and early 20th centuries offers insights into the future, then, it is that if a large scale war were to take place, the armies involved may once again team up with industry to find a new way forward for this, one of the oldest human crafts.

The British and American baking industries have continued to improve industrial efficiency to produce bread for growing markets. Civilian innovation in baking has probably shifted to Asia.

Hidetatsu, Father of Japanese Bread;https://0743sh0927sh.seesaa.net/article/201611article_5.html

World War I, Ward Baking Company: Bread Facts, Ward Baking Company, Research Products Department, Ward Baking Company, 1920 https://archive.org/details/breadfacts00ward/page/n7/mode/2up

World War II English mobile bakeries: BAKER PERKINS Mobile Bakeries: http://www.bphs.net/VirtualBook/BPatWar/11.html