AND the house of Israel called its name Manna: and it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it like wafers made with honey."

Bread, the food that symbolizes our bodily, intellectual and spiritual lives, must do one thing. It must sustain us. This has been true forever. In the Paleolithic age, we ground plant roots with stones and made coarse cakes. Ancient Egyptians baked theirs in ovens and ate so many loaves that Greeks called them "artophagoi," or "bread eaters." In the Middle Ages, we used sturdy slices of barley-wheat bread as edible plates, which we would lick clean and crack with tough teeth, or feed to our cats and dogs.

Until the invention of the iron roll mill in the 19th century, bread, if available, did its job. Wheat was milled by stone wheels, its nutritious germ and starchy endosperm ground together into dark, nutty flour. The iron roller, though, squeezed the germ off, leaving behind only its pale, starchy ghost.

Today, not only does our bread not sustain us, it can barely feed us safely. Animals and humans fed exclusively on white bread quickly sicken. Studies repeatedly advise against its consumption. A divinely inspired writer long ago imagined this stuff, but without providing a good name: "And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ... you shall eat, and not be satisfied."

How we ended up with bread that is not bread is the ostensible subject of "White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf," by Aaron Bobrow-Strain, an associate professor of politics at Whitman College in Washington. I say "ostensible" because he writes: "This isn't really a book about the history of bread. It's a book about what happens when dreams of good society and fears of social decay get tangled up in campaigns for 'good food.' "

Dietary mainstay

That's clogged and academic, but Bobrow-Strain wants to tell a cautionary tale - and clogged and academic is often how those sound. "What happens" is evident: We end up without our dietary mainstay and without a good word for what we have. "So what can we learn from this history?" he asks. "Or, more urgently, how can reflecting on what now seem like strange and outdated efforts to change America through its bread inform the way we think about food today?"

That depends. "White Bread" is smart, though disorganized, in showing how the industrial loaf was repeatedly adapted as a hasty nostrum for the philosophic or bodily ailment of the day.

At the turn of the 20th century, urbanization outpaced civic infrastructure. Most bread was baked at home, but in dank city bakeries, bakers worked around the clock in squalor, making loaves for a growing labor class. Months after the 1906 release of Upton Sinclair's book "The Jungle," Chicago's lead health inspector proclaimed sanitary conditions in its bakeries to be like those in "the worst of the packing houses."

A frightened public fixated - with encouragement from city officials and shrewd advertisers - not on labor law or social services, but on cleaner bread. It would be produced by machines, with tired, diseased hands kept away. The hygienic Ward Bakery, the country's largest, opened in Brooklyn in 1910. And instead of social reform, we got bread that did not rely on society.

The association between baking and germs became fixed in our minds. Public alarm over disease turned into alarm over the safety of bread's distribution. Ordinances were passed requiring that all bread be wrapped. Plastic-wrapped loaves were impossible to really see or smell, so we did what we could, and squeezed. And so softness became a proxy for freshness. On the industrialization marched: the softer loaves were too squooshy to slice neatly at home, and mechanical slicing was born.

Enriched white bread was invented as an antidote to its own poison. Recovering from the Depression and getting more calories from industrial white bread than from any other food, Americans suffered vitamin deficiencies and malnutrition. Britain mandated its flour be milled with its germ still included; the country's loaves were tougher, but healthy. America's nutritional and business establishments chose to synthetically enrich loaves with thiamin, niacin and iron.

There are lessons to learn: Squalid bakeries and malnutrition are indicative, evidence of larger problems. So is bread too soft to slice. So are fruit and vegetables, less nutritious today than they used to be, and our meat, milk and eggs, regularly incriminated in pathogenic outbreaks.

Stories of irresponsibility

But Bobrow-Strain neglects to point out industrial bread's contemporary counterparts: governmental and business interests that collude, in whatever spirit, to manufacture both problem and solutions. Instead, he tosses up a red herring: "Fluffy white industrial bread may be about as far from the ideals of slow, local, organic and health food reformers as you can get today. But, in many ways, we owe its very existence to a string of just as well-meaning efforts to improve the way America ate."

And there, his opportunity to say something scurries away.

The story of white bread may contain rare instances of well-meaning but misguided efforts. It contains many more stories of irresponsibly deployed technology, corporate greed and public welfare placed in the hands of distant stakeholders.

The Ward Bakery, which eventually became the company that made Wonder bread, adopted discoveries in microbiology and grain chemistry at the expense of quality. It engineered corporate social-work double-talk, claiming to contribute to its communities while keeping costs down through labor abuse. Like other industrial giants of the period, Bobrow-Strain writes, it "pioneered the economic model of mergers and oligopoly that would define the industry for the rest of the century."

The ignored parallels to what is happening to our food today are glaring and pitiable. They are everywhere: regulations devised to protect consumers have instead contributed to the consolidation of the meat industry, leaving what happens to animals - and their meat - in the hands of few.

Pretending that anything in our diets is a problem to which solutions can be sold is in the interest of companies that plan to profit from them. Diet soda and 100-calorie bags of chips are examples. In light of this, Bobrow-Strain's continuous, shrill bleating about farmers market folk - their "rampant elitism" and "narrow visions of what counts as 'good food'" - is bizarre.

In "White Bread" all beliefs about bread stem from a dream. The word is used so frequently it loses meaning. We have "dreams of 'good bread'," but these are dreams of bad bread. The dreams Bobrow-Strain concocts are symptoms of our having twisted a version of the American dream that would have kept bread safe into a nightmare in which haves and have-nots are divided by the greatest margin ever: Our poorest eat bread that makes them sick, and our richest eat no bread at all.