There is nothing at all intrinsically moral or immoral about food. That is something that we humans assign to it – just as we do with other things.

Consider the eternal ‘war’ between white and brown bread. Today, the modern bakeries popping up in European and American cities pride themselves on selling brown bread made of wholegrain flours which, in some cases (such as barbela wheat in Portugal), have revived grains which had become virtually obsolete.

While an elite concerned with nutritional issues currently regards brown bread as the healthy option and white bread as lacking in nutrients, and, therefore, purpose, it has not always been so. In fact, the opposite was once true.

In his book White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, Aaron Bobrow-Strain recounts how industrially made white bread emerged at the start of the 20th century as a symbol of modernity, as opposed to the brown bread of the ‘hot, dusty, “dirty” bakeries run by immigrants’¹ from Eastern and Southern Europe, many of whom were Jewish.

The appearance of the white industrial loaf enriched with vitamins (it had to be enriched because the process of creating white flour removes almost everything) was accompanied by a discourse which, among other things, presented it as ‘patriotic’. Those who adopted a ‘correct’ diet were contributing to a more physically and morally resilient nation. By supplying around a third of Americans’ calorie intake in the 19th and early 20th centuries, bread was central to this objective.

Just as the coronavirus pandemic has moulded behaviour today, in 19th-century America, the fear of cholera outbreaks led to the idealisation of white bread, as it was made in factories with little human input and was therefore seen as safe and hygienic.

To summarise Aaron Bobrow-Strain’s book, it ‘teaches us that when Americans debate what one should eat, they are also wrestling with larger issues of race, class, immigration and gender’.² It also shows how ‘efforts to champion “good food” reflect dreams of a better society’.³

Whiteness was associated with purity – moral purity in particular. As Bobrow- Strain explains, it is no surprise that these concerns coincided with a moment in the early 20th century when eugenics was popular in the USA. Francis Galton – who coined the term in 1883 – defined it as ‘the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations.’

Open war had been declared, and all arguments were deemed legitimate. While advocates for white bread asserted that it was the reason for Americans being taller and more intelligent than European Jews, the supporters of brown bread argued that eating white bread was destroying the race. There were even those who warned that it would disfigure those who ate too much of it, leading to a slogan to reinforce the idea: ‘The whiter your bread, the quicker you’re dead.’

In the early decades of the 20th century, a vegetarian movement emerged in Portugal that in some cases espoused fruitarianism (a diet based on fruit) and whose discourse was also marked by a moral vision of food. From this almost forgotten movement (recently rediscovered by Porto University’s Alimentopia project) came the magazine O Vegetariano – Mensário Naturista Ilustrado [The Vegetarian – Illustrated Naturist Monthly], published by the Sociedade Vegetariana de Portugal [Vegetarian Society of Portugal] for 26 years. It reached 3,800 subscribers and was even sold in Brazil and the Portuguese colonies.

The movement’s central concern was health, but there was also a clear moral aspect. In one of the magazine’s issues, there was a study on vegetarianism quoted by Doctor Francisco Maria Namorado, according to which ‘[through] patient and conscientious examination, it is recognised that in populations where vegetarianism predominates, people’s instincts are less cruel, their physiques more beautiful, and their intellects more lucid.’⁴

In the United Kingdom, the vegetarian movement was also growing, but with an interesting characteristic: a connection between the suffragists and vegetarianism, as described by Louise Quick in an article published in the magazine Eaten. The first Vegetarian Society, founded in the UK in 1847, was ‘predominantly male’ and had a religious-tinged rhetoric, namely the focus on a ‘pure’ life that entailed abdicating from stimulants such as meat.

In the suffragists’ case, other reasons lay behind the choice not to eat meat. According to Quick, the activist and ‘staunch vegetarian’ Lady Constance Lytton drew parallels between ‘the repression of animals and the repression of women – both victims at the hands of the patriarchy’.

This connection is not random. Meat and the process of cooking it on a fire has always been particularly associated with masculinity. In the book Cooked, Michael Pollan mentions the theory developed by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents on the origin of man’s control of fire. According to Freud, men only dominated fire once they had overcome their impulse to urinate on it and extinguish it in a form of homoerotic ‘male competition’.

(...)