The rise of alternative bread leavening technologies in the nineteenth century

This article reveals how nineteenth-century chemists and health reformers tried to eradicate the use of yeast in bread, claiming they had devised healthier and more sanitary ways to raise bread. It describes the alternative technological solutions to baking bread, investigating factors that influenced their development and adaptation in the marketplace. A lack of scientific and cultural consensus surrounding yeast, what it was and what it did, fermented during this period. The conflict over yeast helped create a heterogeneous industrialization of the baking industry, changing processes and ingredients and creating new forms of bakery products. By examining the claims of promoters of rival scientific beliefs and technologies, as well as those of users and social commentators, we can see that technology’s eventual adaptation and impact on society is not predictable at its outset. Exploring the relationship between differing scientific beliefs, cultural understandings and alternative technologies also shows how science and industry cannot be isolated from their social and cultural context. The examination of the nineteenth-century technological development of commonplace commodities such as bread, baking powder and yeast, also reveals and explores a story that has not been told before in the history of science and technology. Why it has not been told is as enlightening as the story itself, revealing as it does our own privileging of what is important in science and history.