On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread: Rationalizing Technologies and the Canadian State, 1912-1935

John F. Varty

The Canadian Historical Review, Volume 85, Number 4, December 2004, pp. 721-753 (Article) Published by University of Toronto Press DOI: 10.1353/can.2005.0054

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JOHN F. VARTY

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread: Rationalizing Technologies and the Canadian State, 19121935

When, in the 1850s, luminaries at the Chicago Board of Trade devised a system of rationalized categories grades for expressing grain quality, they created a technology that was, while abstract, as transformative as any other in turning North Americas Great Plains into the worlds bread basket.1 Then, as now, grades engendered the tacit assumption that nature could and should be rationalized to suit human needs. In this respect, of course, wheat grades were hardly unique at the time of their advent. Indeed, such rationalized schemes have been integral to the broader project of Western modernity, which, among other things, entails the reification of categories of things which stay together.2 The formation of putatively objective bodies of knowledge about things which stay together helps inscribe meaning in the ever-changing social, political, and cultural-epistemological experience of modernity.3 The debates and discussions described in this paper may be understood as constituting a moment in the Canadian struggle to inscribe meaning vis vis these specific dimensions of modern experience. The economic implications of wheat grading were hardly more discreet, however. By altering the time horizon of the wheats movement from the Great Plains to eastern US and European markets, grades helped establish and stabilize institutionalized commodity hedging, known
1 William Cronon, Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 97147. 2 This is Alain Desrosires phrasing, cited in Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 18401875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 18. 3 While the concept of modernity is not developed at length in this paper, the broader research project of which it is a part has been influenced substantially by modernity theorists, in particular Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), and Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), and Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); and Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). These individuals hardly present a unified theoretical front; however, I have tried to integrate their useful insights on, respectively, modernitys totalizing quest for order, shifting conceptions of time and space under capitalist production, and the re-embedding of meaning across ever-greater distances.

722 The Canadian Historical Review commonly as futures trading. Moreover, by ensuring a sufficient degree of uniformity in terms of quality, grades permitted movement of wheat, via pricing and market mechanisms, in greater quantities than had ever been known. Despite its obvious affiliation with quality, then, the abstract grade in contrast to the sack of wheat, emerged as the archetype of technological progress and abundance in modern agricultural production. Probably the most compelling evidence for the importance of wheat grading (besides that offered by Cronon himself) is provided by sociologist Harriett Friedmann whose work, an innovative extension of Immanuel Wallersteins world-system theory, explores the advent of an international food system.4 Much of Friedmanns work demonstrates that, quite apart from whether (and why) prairie wheat farmers adopted business methods,5 and even aside from the precise timing of farm-site mechanization, they were well ensconced in a modern industrial milieu essentially from the beginning. Grades symbolized this connection earlier, if less overtly, than any other technology. Yet for all the importance granted, quite justifiably, to the establishment of wheat grades, little effort has been made to extend consideration of this important technology into later stages of its development, that is, into the twentieth century: What became of grades, specifically, and as a notional whole, in the worlds largest exporter, Canada, of the human species most widely consumed carbohydrate staple?6 Broadly, this question frames the central methodological and empirical concern of the following essay. Prompted in part by a vast literature on science and technology studies, and inspired by the efforts of environmental historians, the basic premise may be cast as follows: If, as Cronon surely wants us to appreciate, the technology of grading reflected certain human impulses expressed within a specific historical context reflecting, for instance, a desire to rationalize and commodify nature then we must appreciate that it continued to reflect human impulses and operate within historical contexts. Human attempts at instrumental-rational control of nature, while frequently and unsettlingly successful, are never com4 A decent overview of Friedmanns work may be found in her article What on Earth Is the Modern World-System? Foodgetting and Territory in the Modern Era and Beyond, Journal of World-Systems Research 1, no. 2 (2000): 480515. 5 For an exploration of the farmer-as-businessman theme, see Ian MacPherson and John Herd Thompson, The Business of Agriculture: Prairie Farmers and the Adoption of Business Methods, 18801950, in The Prairie West: Historical Readings, ed. R. Douglas Francis et al. (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1992), 47596. 6 Most widely consumed here refers to the fact that wheat is the most widely traded grain.

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 723 plete. Likewise, the technologies developed in pursuit of that goal: technologies are rarely fully formed, seldom complete, and never simply made.7 Focusing on Canadas protein-grading debate, this paper traces the advent of new priorities in wheat-quality assessment during the first three decades of the twentieth century on new state structures, conceptual tools, and technologies developed in response. Increasingly, wheat grading boiled down to bread. Exporting nations competed to rationalize their golden streams8 anew, which is to say, at a new level of magnification, and with unprecedented emphasis on uniform shipments calibrated to bread production abroad. As we will see, organizing things which stay together on so vast a scale is an extremely complex sociotechnical operation. It is extremely complex historically and ecologically, too, and that is why the narrative here is only partially consonant with explanatory models placing primary emphasis on, for instance, the statecapital nexus.9 Grades do not inhere in nature they are to be studied in relational terms only, in relation, that is, to the needs they propose to address by drawing boundaries around fluid natural categories. Grades embody a host of historically contingent social, ecological, political, and cultural relations. Thus, the evolution of rationalized schemes, such as wheat grades, in Canadas twentieth-century wheat economy cannot be understood without also interrogating the uses to which contemporaries (particularly state officials) imagined the graded wheat would be put. This, in turn, requires at least some investigation of culturally mediated images of bread consumption, and, furthermore, of proto-modernization theories through which wheats putative affinity to social and technological progress was both understood and articulated. This is no tidy story of cultural determination, however. Some time before ideas about wheat consumption, and bread, found expression in
7 A basic divide here is that between historical-contextual studies of technology and social-scientific theories of, mutually, social and technological development. For an excellent and up-to-date overview see Philip Brey, Theorizing Modernity and Technology, in Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas Misa et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). See also Sheila Jasanoff et al., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (London: Sage, 1995). 8 Golden stream is Cronons metaphor. See Natures Metropolis, 109. 9 For all the complexity and critical insight Harriett Friedmann brings to her work on food systems, the local-historical and local-environmental dimensions of large-scale patterns in the state-capital system deserve attention. See Philip McMichael, ed., Food and Agrarian Orders in the World-Economy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995) for an elaboration of this theme.

724 The Canadian Historical Review any discussions we would care to call official, the Canadian states approach to rationalizing wheat quality was under the intense scrutiny of certain wheat producers. Summarily, through their parliamentary representatives Prairie wheat producers identified a slippage between two paradigms of quality interpretation: one (the one used in Canada) based on the cultivated knowledge and ineffable judgement of the states grading officials, and the other (scientific), based on ostensibly objective measurement and quantification of wheats chemical constituents. Private grain-trade interests, producers claimed, availed themselves of this slippage and the ensuing opportunities for accumulation it presented. Significantly, producer identification of this issue was contingent on observations of the Prairies changing geography of wheat production. Finally, while protest may have been class based, it was couched in a language most likely to find a sympathetic audience beyond wheat producer interests. Historiography of Prairie wheat has been substantially environmental in certain respects,10 though rarely in ways that problematize complex connections between the massive and the mundane between specific techniques of modern statecraft and, say, the crumb structure and volume of bread. Adoption of a more creative approach to such interactions permits a fresh reading of grades as a technology of rationalization, on one hand, while it helps to overturn certain prevailing assumptions about western Canadian history one of them having to do with aridity
10 Paul Voiseys work stands out for its attempts to integrate human and non-human interactions in the development of Vulcan, AB. See Paul Voisey, Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). In an earlier paper covering the same region, Voisey makes explicit reference to protein content: A Mix-up Over Mixed Farming: The Curious History of the Agricultural Diversification Movement in a Single Crop Area of Southern Alberta, in Building Beyond the Homestead, ed. David Jones et al. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1985). David Joness contributions, Well all be buried down here: The Prairie Dryland Disaster 19171926 (Calgary: Alberta Records Publication Board, 1986) and Empire of Dust: Settling and Abandoning the Prairie Dry Belt (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1986) are clearly concerned with the Wests most infamous environmental issue, as is Barry Potyondis more recent volume, In Pallisers Triangle: Living in the Grasslands, 18501930 (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 1995). Both, however, retain the image of dry areas of the West as marginal, breached episodically through either producer greed or ill-advised state policy. A similar view is taken by Gerald Friesen in The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), who, despite his awareness of varying soil zones, refers to the encroachment into dry regions as a great error in Canadian domestic policy. In A History of the Canadian Economy (Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1991), Doug Owran and Kenneth Norrie speak of the feasible margins of wheat growth as though dry farming techniques and Marquis wheat solved every technical problem relating to wheat production.

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 725 as ecological disaster on the other.11 By considering the ecology of Prairie settlement and the geography of wheat production, interrogating the messages and language of producer protest, and exploring the Canadian states ultimately frustrated efforts at grafting yet another rationalized map on the Prairies, we can appreciate, with more subtlety than ever, the convergence of human and non-human forces in historical inquiry.
THE ECOLOGY OF SETTLEMENT: WHEAT

Risking oversimplification somewhat, one can assert that the bulk of Canadas first wheat-boom wheat roughly, that produced in the first decade of the twentieth century grew on a relatively homogenous swath of soil, under correspondingly homogenous climatic conditions soil being a barometer at least of long-term patterns in climate. Vernon Fowke put the case most vividly, noting the whole [wheat-growing] area may be thought of as a series of irregular concentric arcs, or triangles, resting on the international boundary each arc representing different soil and climatic conditions.12 The arc of dark brown and black chernozemic (figure 1) soils produced Canadas early export wheat, famous for its excellent bread-making qualities. 13 The golden stream of export wheat that flowed from these soils was segregated, graded, and shipped according to grade definitions set out, as of 1912, in the federal Canada Grain Act (CGA).14 The CGA came under ultimate authority of the Department of Trade and Commerce, but was administered directly by the newly established Board of Grain Commissioners (BGC) predecessor of todays Canadian Grain Commission. The

11 The term ecological disaster is adopted from John Herd Thompson, Forging the Prairie West (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), 126; its significance will be discussed in my concluding section. 12 Vernon Fowke, The National Policy and the Wheat Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 701. 13 The soil map I have elected to use here is, as a matter of technical necessity, not as fine-scaled as could be; broad strokes suit the purpose being served here. For a map depicting soil zones in minute detail, and one that illustrates my point more clearly, see Canada, Department of Agriculture Research Branch, The Soils of Canada (Ottawa: 1977). 14 For the Canada Grain Act see George V, 1912. For two sources on grading disputes in the pre-1912 period see Louis Aubrey Wood, A History of Farmers Movements in Canada: The Origin and Development of Agrarian Protest, 18721924 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1924, 1975) and D.J. Hall, The Manitoba Grain Act: An Agrarian Magna Charta? Prairie Forum, 4, no. 1 (1979), 105120.

726 The Canadian Historical Review

FIGURE 1: Soil zones of Western Canada Source: Canadian Soil Information System, Soil Landscapes of Canada v2.2 Component Mapping. http://sis.agr.gc.ca/cansis/nsdb/slc/webmap.html

CGAs task of segregating hundreds of millions of bushels of wheat, grown on tens of millions of acres, according to preset categories of quality, so as to forge uniform, consistent and reliable packages, was not an easy one.15 After all, grades of wheat are not like sizes in boots,

15 These were the words of a later chief chemist of the Grain Research Laboratory (GRL), Dr G.N. Irvine, The History and Evolution of the Western Canadian Wheat Grading and Handling System (Ottawa: Canadian Grain Commission, 1983), 61.

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 727 one astute Canadian observed, adding, nature ... does not know anything about grades.16 This was no comment on human hubris, however; it meant that natures ignorance of grades would have to be overcome by human ingenuity. Acknowledging the difficulty of this monumental task, the BGC requested, and received, budgetary approval for a scientific laboratory to assist in the matter of grading. Through establishment of the Grain Research Laboratory (GRL) at Winnipeg, and the appointment of its first chief chemist, Dr F.J. Birchard, Trade Minister Sir George Eulas Foster hoped to give scientific reinforcement to the judgment of hand and eye.17 Grading criteria for Canadas most widely grown wheat species, triticum aestevum,18 or bread wheat, were expressed in a vocabulary consistent with the cultivated knowledge of experienced grain men subjecting wheat to a visual examination of its external characteristics a venerated, quasi-mythic tradition. Graders, rating wheat according to its bushel weight (the one objective category), soundness, and percentage of vitreous kernels, placed the grain into one of the top four statutory grades of bread wheat named in the Act: No. 1 Hard, No. 1 Northern, No. 2 Northern, and No. 3 Northern. These categories represented tolerance ranges: taking the bushel weight criterion as an example, to qualify for a No. 2 Northern designation wheat could be no less than fifty eight pounds per bushel, but could be as high as sixty pounds per bushel. Significantly, although Canadas enviable reputation in the world wheat trade already relied on the very high protein levels of its wheat, the CGAs statutory grades took no quantitative account of wheats protein content not, at least, in a measurable and quantifiable way, as an official grading criterion. The percentage of vitreous kernels criterion was acknowledged as a rough and ready way of indicating protein content, although, as officials would discover, it was frequently imprecise. In any case, given the timing of the CGAs enactment (1912), its
16 Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence and the Report in the Matter of an Order of Reference Respecting the Grading and Inspection of Wheat and the Feasibility of Utilizing the Protein Content as a Basic Factor in the Grading of Wheat (hereafter Minutes), Appendix 7, Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization, House of Commons Session, 1928, 153. 17 Sir George Eulas Foster to Robert Magill, 15 Feb. 1916, file T14177, vol. 29, RG 80, Library and Archives Canada (LAC). 18 The other wheat, triticum durum, or macaroni wheat, was not commercially significant in Canada until after 1930. For help with wheat plant physiology as well as the geographic range of the genus, see F.G.H. Lupton et al., eds., Wheat Breeding: Its Scientific Basis (London: Chapman and Hall, 1987).

728 The Canadian Historical Review failure to account precisely for protein content was neither surprising nor particularly problematic because of the relatively homogenous conditions under which wheat was initially grown. Gradually at first and then, after 1914, not so gradually, this changed. Catalyzed initially by high wartime wheat prices and, after the war, by government-sponsored soldier resettlement, along with an influx of settlers, appreciable amounts of wheat grew outside the relatively homogenous area described above. Initially, for at least two years, settlement expanded in a southerly and southwesterly direction, into the brown chernozemic soils associated with the Pallisers semi-arid Triangle. However, a more significant development in wheat acreage expansion during the period was movement in a northerly direction. Indeed, wheat acreage pressed toward the northern margins of black chernozemic zones, breaching areas featuring gray luvisolic soils. By 1921, for instance, wheat acreage in Saskatchewans census districts 14, 15, and 16 (figure 2), those straddling black chernozemic and gray luvisolic zones, was nearly one million acres. True, wheat acreage in brown and dark brown chernozemic zones remained greater in comparative terms, but a threshold was in the process of being crossed. Robert Englands 1935 observation that Prairie is no longer an accurate adjective for Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta was relevant even as early as 1921.19 This new pattern of settlement portended two related difficulties, both of which have received little attention in literature on Prairie expansion. The first difficulty relates to overall wheat production. By the end of the 1920s, a well-known disequilibrium came to characterize wheats supplydemand position in world markets.20 Dramatic acreage expansion around the globe, encouraged by aggressive settlement promotion and underwritten by a high degree of capital mobility, goes a long way toward explaining this circumstance.21 There was, however, a certain
19 Robert England, Land Settlement in Northern Areas of Western Canada (192535), Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 1, no. 4 (Nov. 1935), 57887. 20 For a general statement on wheats supply position relative to other primary products, see William Ashworth, A Short History of the International Economy Since 1850, 4th ed. (London: Longman, 1987), 2402. 21 Acreage in the Canadian West expanded from 9,335,400 acres in 191415 to 13,619,400 in 191718. On the strength of astronomical wartime wheat prices, and partly as a result of state-planned soldier settlement in the Prairies after the First World War, this trend of acreage expansion continued throughout the 1920s. Total wheat acreage in the Prairie provinces reached 24,197,100 in 1929. Expansion was hardly unique to Canada. Similar if slightly less dramatic trends were experienced in each of the worlds major exporting nations. Total acreage sown in wheat in Argentina rose from 16.25 million acres in 19223 to 21.28 million acres in 19301; in Australia, sown acreage climbed from 9.76 to 18.16 million acres throughout the

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 729 xxxxxxx

2: Census Divisions of Saskatchewan Source: Statistics Canada, Reference Maps http://geodepot.statcan.ca/Diss/Maps/ReferenceMaps/n_cd_e.cfm

FIGURE

nuance in Canadas contribution to the worlds problem of over-supply. This supplydemand disequilibrium was hastened in an exponential, and not merely linear, way because of the nature of northern wheat growth in Canada. That is, the northerly expansion described above was, in effect, a transition to moister soils. Where soil moisture prevails in greater quantities, especially during germination and early stages of growth, the wheat plant produces more tillers (stems) and therefore more seeds, with the result that per-acre yields in areas north of the Prairies semi-arid southern zones are proportionately higher than those within (see figure 3).22
same period, while US acreage jumped from 67.16 to 71.14 million acres between 19223 and 19289. Wheat Advisory Committee, Secretariats Report on World Wheat Consumption, Appendix 1, file 45-2-3, vol. 3076, RG 17, LAC. 22 Calculations from statistics for 1920 reveal a collective average for districts 2, 3, 6, and 7 of 10.7 bu/acre; for districts 14, 15, 16, and 17, the average is 14.6 bu/acre. Canada, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1921, 4545.

730 The Canadian Historical Review

FIGURE 3: Wheat yield per acre (twelve-year average, 19271938) Source: John Ansel Anderson et al., Variations in the Protein Content of Western Canadian Wheat, 19271938, Board of Grain Commissioners Bulletin No. 4, June 1943 (Ottawa: Kings Printer), 26

Interestingly, a secondary outcome of the Prairies higher wheat yields was lower protein content. There is an inverse relationship between the yield of a wheat plant and the protein content of its seeds.23 Wheat grown in northerly latitudes such as Saskatchewans census districts 14, 15, 16, and 17 yielded higher, but had lower protein content per seed.24 Thus, as of 1921, larger and larger quantities of low-protein wheat from these northern districts funnelled into shipments of wheat from Canadas celebrated, high-protein prairies. This created entirely novel problems. Not least, under Canadas system of grading by visual inspection, northern wheat was not always graded as substantially (sometimes not at all) different from its southern counterpart. It was entirely possible for wheat grown north of Saskatoon to satisfy all grade criteria and receive a grade equivalent to, say, that of wheat grown south of Regina. This did not
23 Wet-climate soils commonly lose nitrogen through nitrate leaching and/or bacterial decomposition. Even when appreciable quantities of nitrogen do persist in these higher-moisture soils, the nutrient does not make its way to seeds in as great a measure, proportionately speaking because the wheat plant produces more tillers, and therefore more seeds, distributing the soils total available nitrogen content across a far greater number of seeds. See Joy Tivy, Agricultural Ecology (Harlow, UK: Longman Scientific & Technical; New York: Wiley, 1990). 24 These are, of course, long-term patterns; both yield and protein levels oscillate, sometimes wildly, around what Donald Worster referred to in a slightly different but related context as a meaningless mean. Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 70.

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 731 always happen, but it could, and frequently did, often meaning one thing: Different shipments of the exact same grade could have quite different protein levels.
POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE INVISIBLE: PROTEIN

Categorical evidence of this changing state of affairs was, in fact, scant, since no official record of protein content was kept before 1927. There were, nevertheless, emerging circumstantial indicators that the Wests changing geography of wheat production might alter political and social relations of the region vis vis wheat grading. As once-soaring wheatprice indices began to plummet, especially after August 1920, farmers cast about for answers to their declining fortunes and expressed concerns through their parliamentary representatives.25 Those producers who favoured extension of the Wheat Boards authority beyond its temporary, wartime-relief function, blamed the problem on the wheat trades openness to the vagaries of international markets, but this was a rather amorphous foe and did not arouse many interventionist sympathies.26 An immediate and readily definable menace could be identified within the structure of the grain trade itself. In February 1921, Unionist MP from Manitoba Richard Coe Henders heaped scorn on many facets of the grain trade in Canada, noting how iniquity abounds in the trade.27 Henders spoke passionately to the already well-known issue of mixing at private elevator terminals a practice by which elevator operators, through skilful blending, increased their stocks of high-grade wheat. What is more, this took place well within the statutes of the CGA; since the acts statutory grade definitions established quality ranges, elevator operators could, and did, mix to the lower threshold of each grade.28
25 Prices declined steadily after 1920. Wheat prices on the Winnipeg cash market descended from a high of slightly over $2.45 in August 1920 and reached a low of just over $0.93 in December 1923. Price data are taken from C.F. Wilson, A Century of Canadian Grain: Government Policy to 1951 (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1978), 170. 26 Fowkes National Policy is still the best monograph on this period of agrarian struggle as it related directly to state policy. Fowke is famously associated with the argument that wheat-growing operations do not benefit from the economy of largescale production. 27 Henders asserted that large industrial companies, long criticized for excessive profits, were but little tin gods compared with some of our grain companies. Canada, House of Commons Debates (24 February 1921), p. 278 (Hon. Richard Coe Henders, MP). 28 The process was quite simple for heavily capitalized grain dealers with sufficient storage space. The dealer could purchase wheat of, say, No. 2 grade, on which basis

732 The Canadian Historical Review Far more profitable still was the practice of outright protein poaching, also referred to as skimming. Keenly aware of the Wests new geography of wheat production, elevator operators cast discriminating eyes on different incoming carloads of wheat bearing the same grade. As never before, it was possible for different carloads of, for example, No. 2 wheat, to come from growing regions as different as Saskatchewans open prairie and Albertas parkland. Despite bearing the same grade, in most years they almost certainly contained different levels of protein. When an elevator owner identified a given carload of wheat as being particularly high in protein content, he could set it aside. Upon finding a buyer willing to pay a premium price for high-protein wheat, the elevator operator could count on realizing a significant profit, none of which he was obligated to pass on to the producer of that wheat. Canadian milling companies deployed equally profitable strategies of spatial and territorial rationalization. Milling firms had begun producing elaborate protein maps of the Wests growing districts, and it was becoming an open secret that their buying elevators were situated in high-protein areas accordingly.29 An incredulous John Millar, Progressive MP for QuAppelle, SK, brought this poaching activity to the attention of the House of Commons in June 1924.30 Referring to the relatively new port of Vancouver, he noted that in some cases premium payments of five cents per bushel had been made on high-protein wheat.31 Henry Herbert Stevens, Conservative member representing Vancouver City, and former minister of trade in Arthur Meighens cabinet, corroborated Millars story. He said, One shipper told me that on one large shipment of 13,000 or 14,000 tons he cleared $25,000 as a premium.32 For years thereafter, it would be Millar who argued most forcefully that the CGAs subjective grading criteria and, by extension, farmers were susceptible to exploitation for financial gain by opportunistic grain dealers located at Canadas terminal shipping points.
he paid the producer. In cases where the wheat was near the top of the quality range for No. 2 wheat, he would mix it into his stocks of No. 1 wheat, thereby increasing his saleable stock of No. 1 wheat without having to pay the producer. Harald Patton provided evidence of this phenomenon in Grain Growers Co-operation in Western Canada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 135. Minutes, Appendix 7, Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization, House of Commons Session, 1928. The reference to milling firms protein maps can be found on p. 140, and an allusion to the open secret of elevator placement in high-protein areas can be found on pp. 911. Millar was no stranger to grading-related controversy. He acted as the senior commissioner on the 1906 Royal Commission on the Grain Trade of Canada. Canada, House of Commons Debates (11 June 1924), p. 3077 (Hon. John Millar, MP). Ibid. (10 July 1924), p. 4310 (Hon. Henry Herbert Stevens, MP).

29

30 31 32

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 733 Clearly, western wheat producers did not suffer equally at the hands of profit-seeking elevator operators. Certain farmers, depending on their geographic location, felt this missed opportunity more acutely.33 John Millar, himself a southern Saskatchewan farmer, objected to protein poaching on the grounds that southern wheat producers were not receiving appropriate recompense for producing Canadas highest-protein wheat. As if to avoid the charge of regional particularism, Millar made sure to point out how the situation had a deleterious and misleading effect on the reputation of the Wests superior wheat as a whole.34 With each railcar load of high-protein wheat routed out of export shipments, and sold separately at a profit, the protein content of those remaining export wheat shipments was reduced. One clear solution, as far as Millar was concerned, was a grading scheme capable of quantifying wheats important constituents, namely protein, so as to eliminate unfair profiteering and, as we shall see, political interference in the grain trade. In May 1923, responding to political pressure over these and other issues, the Liberal government convened the first of two royal commissions headed by Justice W.F.A. Turgeon to investigate the grain trade. Among the commissions very broad terms of reference, the grading and weighing of grain, the operations of terminal and country elevators, and mixing were all named for consideration.35 Critics of the grading system had called for, and won, at least a small concession from the federal minister of trade and commerce. But it was a small concession indeed, for even as Trade Minister Thomas Andrew Low called for a royal commission looking into grain-trade iniquity, he proceeded, secretively, to close the GRL the laboratory opened a decade earlier by Trade Minister Foster in the interest of having scientific verification of grading procedure. The precise reason for the closing of this Lab is not easy to ascertain, although the propensity of chief chemist Birchards for making unauthorized public statements about Canadas grading procedure and an apparently deep and abiding dislike between him and the minister are two plausible explanations.36
33 With a little archival probing, one could produce a paper that might be appropriately titled, Agrarian Protest: A Biochemical History, tracing divisions within Prairie protest movements one, for example, that brings the politico-philosophical bases of Progressive party divisions described so well by W.L. Morton into environmental focus. See Morton, The Progressive Party in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950). 34 Canada, House of Commons Debates (11 June 1924), p. 3077 (Hon. John Millar, MP). 35 Canada, Report of the Royal Grain Inquiry Commission (Ottawa: Kings Printer, 1925). 36 Some years later, Birchards main lab assistant during the early twenties, T.R. Aitken, wrote that the reasons for closing the lab were chiefly political and personal.

734 The Canadian Historical Review In any case, the labs closing did not go unnoticed, and certainly not uncontested, by Progressive MPs who harvested a bumper crop of political hay over its demise. Through vigorous debate the Progressive opposition emphasized sciences irreproachable authority and its clear superiority over the largely subjective measures of the CGA. The member for Humboldt, SK, Charles Wallace Stewart, asserted There is very great dissatisfaction with the grading of our grain under the present regulations. Those grades are based on the physical condition and appearance of the grain, and they are not always accurate. Furthermore, the charges have been made, and certain experiments have seemed to establish those charges, that the inspectors are sometimes prejudiced against the locality from which the grain comes.37 Having raised the double spectre of error and prejudice, Progressive members pressed further on the particular status of Dr Birchard, and of the GRL in general. Millar chided Low by pointing out that the work of Dr Birchard is more important than is generally understood. He went on, I would urge the Minister that this Department [the GRL] be maintained but that it be developed and put in closer touch with the Chief Inspector.38 Millars colleague, John Livingston Brown, asked more pointedly, What is the intention of the minister with regard to the work being done by Dr. Birchard in Winnipeg? We were very sorry to know that it has been suspended.39 Finally, adding his voice to the disapproving chorus over suspension of the GRLs activities, Battle River MP Henry Elvins Spencer warned, The whole thing has a nasty taste. I do not like the look of it at all.40 Most damning of all was evidence from farmers themselves. Charles Stewart reported that a farmer in his constituency had taken two samples, which he (the farmer) believed to be of different quality, to the inspector at Winnipeg, and both were given a grade of No. 3. Northern. The farmer then took the very same samples to a grain firm in Minneapolis where he was told that one of the two was clearly worth a premium because of its high protein content. To verify his findings the man had the same sample tested again at Winnipeg, and once again they were
He went on to say that relations between the Minister (Hon. T.A. Low) and the Chief Chemist ... were not always harmonious. T.R. Aitken to Dr J.B. Marshall, 22 Jan. 1948, pt. 1, file 123, vol. 338, RG 77, LAC. Canada, House of Commons Debates (10 July 1924), p. 43056 (Hon. Charles Wallace Stewart, MP). Ibid. (19 May 1924), p. 2294 (Hon. John Millar, MP). Canada, House of Commons Debates (19 May, 1924), pg. 2293 (Hon. John Livingston Brown, MP). Ibid. (27 Feb. 1925), p. 637 (Hon. Henry Elvins Spencer, MP).

37 38 39 40

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 735 assigned the same grade as each other.41 Such evidence added to both farmers and Progressives surmise that the Government was deliberately suppressing Dr Birchards scientific findings, possibly in collusion with interested members of the grain trade.42 Meanwhile, resolutions from producer groups in the West poured into the ministers office. The executive of the Farmers Union of Canada urged thorough consideration and investigation into the grading system with a view of replacing the present unscientific methods with those capable of giving to the producer the true value of his products.43 A similar resolution was presented to Parliament on behalf of the United Farmers of Alberta by W.T. Lucas, MP for Victoria, AB, requesting that the Dominion Government be asked to give Dr Birchard the fullest opportunity for carrying on such research work and that full publicity be given to his report.44 When the Turgeon Commission submitted its report in 1925, the case for government-sponsored, scientific research as a guarantor of both fairness and efficiency in the grain trade received a boost, albeit a highly qualified one. On one hand, the commission concluded that the practice of mixing was ultimately not harmful to the overall operation of the trade. Grain dealers defended their mixing activities at commission hearings by arguing that such practices provided a valuable service to Canada by finding a way to dispose of low-quality wheat through blending with that of higher quality. There was some truth to this claim; however, it could not possibly have assuaged farmers, particularly those whose No. 2 wheat continued fetching No. 1 prices for profiteering grain dealers.45 The commissions report did, however, urge the maintenance of an efficient and adequately equipped laboratory for grain research work and
41 Ibid., p. 39. 42 Oliver Gould, representing Assiniboia, SK, claimed that he had witnessed Dr Birchards testimony before the royal commission wherein Birchard described the process of tampering with grades based on protein content: I was surprised, Gould exclaimed, and went on to note that no argument could refute it since Dr. Birchard established it ... from scientific tests. But the Grain Act is not based upon that. Canada, House of Commons Debates (27 Feb. 1925), p. 621 (Hon. Oliver Gould, MP). 43 Farmers Union of Canada to Thomas Andrew Low, 13 Apr. 1925, file T-1435, vol. 43, RG 80, LAC. 44 W.T. Lucas to Thomas Andrew Low, 18 Mar. 1925, file T-1435, vol. 43, RG 80, LAC. 45 Robert Magill, once chief commissioner of the BGC and now secretary of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, even ridiculed farmers over their criticism of mixing. He challenged farmers to go out and get their own elevators if they considered mixing such a profitable enterprise. Quoted in an unidentified press clipping, Gazette, 17 June 1925, file T-1436, vol. 43, RG 80, LAC.

736 The Canadian Historical Review for the purpose of assisting the Chief Inspector and the Grain Standards Board in determining the grades and the milling value of grain.46 Emboldened by the commissions general endorsement of science, opposition MPs with Millar once again leading the charge kept pressure on the government over the specific question of protein grading. And, more anecdotal evidence of Canadas wheat producers missing out on protein premiums seemed to appear all the time. Millar cited premium prices on the American side of 15 or 16 cents per bushel.47 In February 1928, he moved in the House that the statutory grades of Canadian wheat be amended in such a manner as to provide for including protein as a grading factor.48 The call for scientific measurement of an invisible constituent protein as a guarantor of transparence in state-controlled grading legislation and as a mediator of private interest and public administration betrays what Ted Porter has elegantly referred to as trust in numbers. For Porter, the pursuit and uptake of quantification technologies has been a strategy for overcoming distance (read, a technology of distrust) in conditions of modernity. Mere use of the rule-bound language of mathematics, and, a fortiori, of quantification, confirms established scientific knowledge through putative exclusion of subjective judgement. This applies equally to socio-political affairs: In science, as in political and administrative affairs, objectivity names a set of strategies for dealing with distrust.49 Just how well numbers and quantification are able to circumvent self-interest is, of course, another question. As Porter points out, the public rhetoric of scientific expertise studiously ignores the unattainability of full mechanical objectivity.50
46 Canada, Report of the Royal Grain Inquiry Commission (Ottawa: Kings Printer, 1925), 5960. In fact, Dr Birchard had not gone far: Low appears to have hedged his political bets by keeping the labs facilities available, if not open. See file T-14-177, RG 80, LAC. 47 Canada, House of Commons Debates (22 Jan. 1926), p. 377 (Hon. John Millar, MP). 48 Ibid. (15 Feb. 1928), p. 494. 49 Ted Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press), ix. 50 Ibid., 7. On a broader scale, the growing appeal of technocratic governance throughout the 1920s was, politically speaking, an ambivalent phenomenon. For many on the Right, the crisis of democracy, brought into clear relief during the First World War, looked soluble only through technology. Viewed from the Left, capitalisms widely discussed predatory tendencies could be addressed only through technological administration. What these opposing camps shared, Bauman insists, was a uniquely modern obsession with suppressing ambivalence: Modernity and Ambivalence, 347. For very evocative Canadian examples of science and technology viewed from the agrarian Left, one should revisit William Irvine, Co-operative Government

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 737 In the case of wheat grading, the choice between two systems of knowledge one based on cultivated experience and seasoned judgment, and one based on explicit, measurable, and quantifiable criteria was not simply about precision and fairness. As contemporaries saw it (and as will be discussed more below), protein made wheat the worlds most modern grain, and Canada the producer of the worlds most modern wheat. Thus, to impugn the grading system on the grounds of its inability to measure protein was to go well beyond the charge of mistreatment of producers; it was to raise the spectre of a wheat industry lacking the requisite science to keep pace with an increasingly modern world. As Millars colleague Thomas Sales had once remarked, Here is Canada the largest exporter of wheat in the world, and all we are doing in grain research is being done in a little bit of a one-horse place somewhere down a back lane.51 While Millar did not abandon his plea for justice on behalf of farmers, it was his exhortation that the government provide scientific facilities for the purpose of keeping abreast of international advancements in cereal science especially those in use by milling and baking companies that was particularly effective. In this respect he built on anxiety-inducing comparisons between Canadas unscientific system of wheat grading and evolving practices elsewhere. And, more importantly, he helped open a chapter in Canadian statecraft in which new priorities and novel strategies were brought to the administration of Canadas wheat industry. In January 1928, the Liberal government referred the entire matter of protein grading to three distinct bodies: the National Research Council, the Board of Grain Commissioners, and most critically, to Parliaments Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization.
ON UNIFORMITY: GOOD BREAD

When predicated on inequitable treatment of certain producers, the Millar-led charge for a scientific grading scheme aroused moderate concern at best. His evocative language (as well as that of his colleagues) for a Canadian grading system bereft of scientific accuracy, however, incited something closer to hysteria. The concomitant processes of settlement and wheat-acreage extension, both straddling critical environmental lines, could no longer be denied; both had exposed the economic and socio-political implications of rationalizing grades according to the
(Ottawa: Mutual Press, 1929), and E.A. Partridge, A War on Poverty: The One War That Can End War (Winnipeg: Wallingford Press, 1925). 51 Canada, House of Commons Debates (27 Feb. 1925), p. 618 (Hon. Thomas Sales, MP).

738 The Canadian Historical Review grains external characteristics, as opposed to its important chemical constituent protein. The real problem, as hearings of the standing committee, which opened in February 1928, seemed to reveal, was a critical loss of uniformity. The importance of maintaining uniformity brooked no contradiction whatsoever, and suggested the value of protein grading well beyond producer class interests. Even those otherwise opposed to protein grading specifically could not argue against the significance of achieving uniformity in export shipments. When L.H. Newman, the Dominion cerealist and opponent of protein grading, was asked, Do you think it highly desirable that our grading system should be made as uniform as is humanly possible? Newman replied, I certainly do.52 Anecdotal evidence of faltering uniformity made its way from British grain dealers to Canadian officials. In the winter of 1928, concurrent with standing committee hearings, respected agricultural writer Cora Hind of the Winnipeg Free Press led a Canadian agricultural delegation on a tour of British farms and related facilities. In her weekly dispatches to the Winnipeg Free Press, Hind reported expressions of dissatisfaction audible in the old countrys grain circles.53 British complaints also arrived in carefully worded letters. F.W.G. Urquhart, secretary of the Liverpool Corn Exchange, wrote to the Board of Grain Commissioners with some very serious imputations of Canadian wheat: There is no doubt whatever that, during the last two years 192627 and 192728 ... there has been a very serious deterioration in the quality and condition of Canadian wheat shipments. Then, speaking specifically to the issue of uniformity, Urquhart reminded, regularity of standard from year to year is essential. In a letter of the same date to Mackenzie King, Urquhart used stronger language still, pointing out that while complaints of Canadian wheat were once few and far between, they had been increasing, and that the trades confidence in the Canadian Certificate Final was badly shaken.54 The uniformity imperative poses a question: Why protein? Why were officials intent on codifying protein as opposed to, say, vitamin B, or starch as the specific constituent guaranteeing such uniformity? Protein
52 Minutes, Appendix 6, Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization, House of Commons Session, 1929, 83. 53 Hindss dispatch from 15 March was cited widely in committee hearings. 54 The Certificate Final was the government document that accompanied Canadian shipments, attesting to the grade designations reliability. The letters cited in this passage are included as appendices in Minutes, Appendix 7, Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization, House of Commons Session, 1928, 1802.

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 739 grading had nothing to do with nutrition.55 What protein selection was about is a rather complex matter. As noted, wheat from Prairie Canada, at least from certain regions within the West, was renowned as a highprotein product. Few of the worlds wheats not Australian; not Argentinean; not, for the most part, Danubian; and only small amounts of American could compare with the high protein values of the Canadian product.56 Marketing Canadas wheat to better effect was considered in the national interest as a whole, and it therefore seemed utterly absurd to many that the very factor making Canadas wheat so well known, and so valuable, was not even codified in the grading system and this in an increasingly competitive international market. If I were any one of you Canadians, an American marketing specialist urged, I should certainly try and open that door [of protein grading].57 Selling more wheat was certainly a prime impetus, and any means by which sales could be increased were at least considered. But protein grading promised more than a marketing coup in the vulgar sense of merchandising. In fact, uniformity of shipments was understood as the supply-side logic of two powerful narratives in modern-era wheat consumption. First, as a steady stream of wheat experts before the standing committee implied, sometimes unwittingly, the necessary end-product of wheat was bread, and that bread has an optimal form of being. Wheat protein, known as gluten, produced a loaf of bread that was voluminous, fluffy, and well piled.58 As yeast converts sugar into carbon dioxide gas, thus causing bread dough to rise, how far that dough rises depends on the proteins combined properties of elasticity and strength. Speaking at one point of the value of protein in wheat, Dr Birchard failed to notice his own taken-for-granted sense of what constitutes bread. Birchard noted the most characteristic property of wheat flour is due to the presence of gluten, since without this substance it would not
55 The entire period over which this issue raged was nutrition cited as an impetus for including protein in Canadas grading standards interesting if only because proteins muscle-producing value had become well appreciated in the context of the First World War. See Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). The first major concerns over nutritional enrichment of bread in Canada began in the very early years of the Second World War, under the Canadian Council of Nutrition. 56 This was axiomatic in wheat circles. Indeed, British cereal scientist D.W. Kent-Jones rated Canadian wheat as the best for protein in his industry-leading text, Modern Cereal Chemistry (Liverpool: Northern Publishing, 1927). 57 Minutes, Appendix 6, Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization, House of Commons Session, 1929, 4413. 58 Minutes, Appendix 7, Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization, House of Commons Session, 1928, 2.

740 The Canadian Historical Review be possible to make a loaf of bread at all.59 A member of the committee ventured a question, seeking qualification of the comment: To make a bread that will rise? he asked. It was hardly a noticeable exchange, but for all its brevity and apparent banality it revealed a second narrative of wheat consumption with very broad purchase in both popular and scientific circles. Wheat, owing in large part to its ability to produce loaves of bread, was assumed to have been the staple carbohydrate source of advanced Western cultures. Sir William Crookes, president of the British Association, certainly thought so. Approximately three decades earlier, in a much-discussed and frequently quoted paean to wheat consumption, Crookes asserted: We are born wheat-eaters ... other races vastly superior to us in numbers, but differing widely in material and intellectual progress, are eaters of maize, rice, millet, and other grains.60 Crookess observations had a pretence of anthropological rigour, but also reflected currents in social evolutionary theory, particularly when he stressed how the accumulated knowledge of civilized mankind pointed invariably to wheat as a nutritionally superior cereal. Wheat-consuming societies, Crookess logic ran, reflected a greater acquired capacity for recognizing nutritional value in certain foods and would, therefore, conquer in the struggle for social survival. Quoting and expanding Crookess words years later, the Wheat Advisory Committee in London, England, explored two sides of the apparent connection between wheat and cultural progress. On the elective side the committee observed, Wheat is unquestionably the pre-eminent bread grain of civilized races, and then queried, to what is this universal appeal of wheat due? The answer to this not-so-rhetorical question came in two parts. The first dealt with colour, and explained that with the march of progress from primitive to modern conditions there is increasing demand for a bread that is white. The second part of the answer dealt with the structure of bread, a theme even more germane to Canadian hopes: Wheaten bread is more palatable to most people than breads made from other grains. This circumstance is due primarily to the unique character of the wheat flour protein, known as gluten, which on the addition of water exhibits the property of becoming viscid ... The proteins of barley, rice and oatmeal fail to become viscid with water and are therefore unsuitable for bread-making.61
59 Ibid., 14. 60 Sir William Crookes, Report of the British Association, as cited in Report of the Wheat Advisory Committee, file 45-2-3, vol. 3076, RG 17, LAC. 61 Ibid.

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 741 However, the link between advanced cultures and bread from highprotein wheat was more than gustatory and aesthetic, more than merely elective. To observe any given society as wheat-consuming was to describe a whole set of up-to-date technical, political, scientific, cultural, economic, and philosophical practices that would invariably prevail in that society. It was, moreover, a matter of racial significance to speak of that consistent wheat-grower, the Anglo-Saxon.62 In short, wheat-eaters were regarded as inheritors of the Mesopotamian Neolithic, descended in a seamless progression from pre-history through Christian, and then, Greco-Roman advances toward Enlightenment rationality, liberal democracy, and industrial-capital production.63 Some of the clearest statements on these themes emerged after 1929 as wheat-exporting nations, faced with soaring world production and plunging rates of effective demand, assessed future prospects for integrating non-wheateating regions into wheat-based economies.64 Prospects for this were grim in the short term, but a long-term transition to wheat consumption could be expected so long as certain conditions were met. Whereas wheat had, since the dawn of history, been the staple foodstuff of the most advanced civilizations, it would take abandonment of primitive customs and urbanization of populations, as well as raised standards of living following improvement in economic conditions to encourage wheat

62 William C. Edgar, The Story of a Grain of Wheat (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1904), 13. 63 While most historians are probably familiar with the social-historical themes of white and brown bread consumption, it would be difficult to overstate how extensively the idea of wheat (and wheaten bread) consumption as culturally superior was posited in more general terms. William Edgars book, cited above; Harry Snyder, Bread: A Collection of Popular Essays on Wheat, Flour and Bread (New York: Macmillan, 1930); C.O. Swanson, Wheat Flour and Diet (New York: Macmillan, 1928); J.R. Irons, Breadcraft (Watford, UK: Hudson & Stacey, 1934) are all brimming with dual narratives of wheat consumption and cultural advancement and, notably, were shelved in the GRL library. The perceived divergence between rice-eaters and wheat-eaters is remarkably durable throughout the period and well beyond. Wilfred Malenbaum, for instance, writes, Wheat may with some justification be referred to as the only true bread grain, a fact recognized by most consumers of cereals (except rice-eaters), in The World Wheat Economy, 18851939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 67. 64 See England, Land Settlement in Northern Areas of Western Canada (192535), for a sense of global wheat acreage expansion. Effective demand was hampered by a wave of protective policies across Europe Mussolinis Battle of Wheat being an especially visible one. For a full elaboration of international wheat policy see Paul de Hevsey, World Wheat Planning and Economic Planning in General (London: Oxford University Press, 1940).

742 The Canadian Historical Review consumption in erstwhile traditional societies65 (this applied almost uniformly to rice eaters). These narratives energized standing committee debates. Significantly, the logic worked in both directions. If wheat consumption could be expected through a general increase in a societys standards of living, it followed that any society already consuming wheat already enjoyed advanced production, that is, wheat handling was mechanized and industrialized. The earliest testimony to confirm this mechanization trope came from the American baking industry via William Schnaidt, marketing specialist from North Dakota. Schnaidt identified high speed, powered machinery as singularly responsible for high protein demands, noting that American bakers have installed machinery that operates at considerable speed, and they tell me it is necessary to have a strong gluten, or strong flour to stand up under this high-speed working machinery.66 None of this mattered very much if uniformity could not be achieved. Mechanization of both milling and baking practices necessitated, it was argued, uniform wheat parcels. With mechanization came a continuous dough-making process, meaning that dough lots were no longer handled as individual packages. The continuous process essentially removed any chance for the baker to make lot-specific choices about the flour to employ: the baker has not the ability, or the opportunity that the housewife has with her dough. The baker cannot experiment much because he works with large batches and one batch spoiled means quite a loss to him. By contrast, if the housewife spoils a batch of bread, why there is not much loss. We look pleasant and eat it anyway.67 In other words, not only was the ability to grade by protein levels considered desirable as a means of satisfying certain bread tastes, it was perceived as an inevitable development in provisioning raw materials for a mechanized mode of bread production. Here, Canadian officials applied

65 These phrases are all taken from the Report of the Wheat Advisory Committee, file 45-2-3, vol. 3076, RG 17, LAC; the first two appear on p. 16, while the third and fourth appear on pages 16 and 17 respectively. 66 Minutes, Appendix 6, Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization, House of Commons Session, 1929, 421. This trope was confirmed time and again over the next decade or so: Joseph Heilman Shollenberger made the case for mechanization in Wheat Requirements in Europe (Especially Pertaining to Quality and Type, and to Milling and Baking Practices (Washington: US Government Print Office, 1936). 67 Minutes, Appendix 6, Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonization, House of Commons Session, 1929, 421.

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 743 F.W. Taylors vision of scientific management in reverse.68 Whereas Taylor argued for the separation of work tasks into distinct component motions, here was a struggle to plug already separated tasks into a process newly perceived as whole, consonant, and seamless. Of course, there was nothing novel about the idea that Canadian wheat became British bread. What made this discussion new was its articulation of an emergent chemical analogy, which altered the debates terms considerably: If grain inspectors, however expert, subjecting wheat to visual examination could not detect subtle differences in the grains chemical (protein) properties, machines certainly could do so. There was no fooling a dough-mixing machine. With a grading system positioned (literally, in fact, but also figuratively) between a changing Prairie West and a new paradigm of mechanical production, Canadian officials began to sense that systems inability to make these separate component parts of a larger productive whole legible to the other. An interim (though it became permanent) strategy in pursuit of this objective was to map the Prairies protein zones. As of 1927, Dr Birchard (reinstated as chief chemist of the GRL) was instructed to sample export wheat cargoes, ascertain their mean protein content, and plot his findings on maps of the Prairies. Birchard set about confirming his findings, which were published as brightly coloured hatchings on blank maps, by applying the eras leading scientific safeguard in wheat assessment, the bread-wheat baking test. In combination, these techniques (protein maps and baking tests) facilitated a clearer state vision of the production spaces being rationalized, and both, subsequently, produced empirical evidence that Canadas grading criteria were not calibrated to mechanized bread production, at least as it was understood from standing committee evidence.69 His results were most telling, as figure 4 indicates. The top two loaves of bread in this photo were baked from different shipments of No. 1 Northern wheat, and the bottom two from different shipments of No. 2 Northern wheat. Birchards results demonstrated in dramatic form that different parcels of wheat bearing the same grade designation could produce bread of markedly different volume (a linear expression of quality in Canadians minds). Furthermore, presumably inferior grades could outperform their superiors insofar as baking was concerned again, measured in terms of the loaves volume.
68 F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper, 1911). 69 Here I have invoked James Scotts important and daring explorations of various state simplifications, to which I owe a considerable intellectual debt: James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

744 The Canadian Historical Review

FIGURE 4: Bread loaves from No. 1 and No. 2 Manitoba Wheat. The top two loaves were baked from No. 1, the bottom 2 from No. 2 Source: The Country Guide, June 1951

The necessity of a newly rationalized vision for the West, and even, perhaps, of a fully integrated protein-grading system, thus received the empirical support it needed. While the finer points of grading by protein content remained somewhat moot, Birchards findings brooked little discernable dissent over the ultimate importance and value of quantifying Canadian wheats quality; they left little doubt about the need for such a strategy in the modern wheat economy. The case for protein grading seemed airtight. Yet however natural and inevitable the move to chemical quantification may have seemed, the scheme had several fatal flaws. Among them, British buyers were unwilling to pay the premium prices that Canadians hoped protein grading would accrue. For all their expressed dissatisfaction with Canadian grain shipments, British grain buyers worded their complaints carefully, aware that wheat shipments bearing an official stamp of premium quality would also bear a premium price. This unwillingness to

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 745 pay was based on a number of factors, some of which seemed to catch Canadian officials off guard. Two years of promising testimony from US and domestic witnesses about the likely benefits of protein grading made it difficult to accept the delayed report from Great Britain of the National Research Councils representative, Dr Robert Newton.70 Overall, Newton found, British millers and bakers were not as enamoured with the Taylorist vision in which Canadas high-protein wheat and British bread production were integrated in one seamless process. Nor were British buyers as distrustful of cultivated knowledge and skill.71 Furthermore, although it was true the British baking industry was becoming more mechanized, those British bakers who had mechanized their processes adopted slower electrical mixers, which simulate the gentle kneading action of the human hand and therefore did not require flour of such high protein.72 At the same time, British bakers began to adopt highsided bread pans in their bread production. These pans supported bread dough throughout the rising and baking stages, rendering strong wheat far less important, perhaps even redundant. The assumption that mechanization would require high-protein wheat was simply wrong. For the time being at least, the development of baking technology in Britain actually diminished the need for strong wheat. Finally, as if all this werent troubling enough, there was no consensus in the British Isles on the properties of a perfect loaf of bread. Newtons report proved that loaf volume was for the most part a North American obsession, not shared by British experts: Loaf volume is not accorded by European milling chemists nearly as much importance as is usually attributed to it in America, he affirmed.73 These paradoxical developments are even more interesting viewed in an environmental context. In 1928, as Newton conducted his investigation in Britain, disaster struck the Canadian Prairies: it rained ... and rained. On the whole, Canadian farmers harvested a high-yielding bumper crop, one of their worst ever.74 It was unfathomable irony and
70 Robert Newton, Report on Inquiry in Europe Regarding the Feasibility of Using Protein Content as a Factor in Grading and Marketing Canadian Wheat (Ottawa: Kings Printer, 1930), 11. 71 The director of research for British Flour Millers was disgusted at the implication that milling could be reduced to a set of adjustable formulae: blending is not merely a means of adjusting length of fermentation, fermentation tolerance, dough toughness and stability ... it is not always possible to place them [various wheats] in their proper positions in a fixed scale of characters. Ibid., 8. 72 Ibid., 11. 73 Ibid., 6. 74 Spring wheat yields for the Prairie provinces as a whole were 23.5 bushels per acre in the fall of 1928. This was higher than any other year, except 1919, since the 1908

746 The Canadian Historical Review an unqualified disaster: The very year in which the Canadian Parliament convened its standing committee to maximize wheat sales by emphasizing its high-protein product, protein content dropped, precipitously. Further, Canadas short supply of high-protein wheat that year forced a wider-than-normal price spread between high and medium protein wheats on the Liverpool market. Unwilling to pay such unusually high prices for strong wheat, British millers turned to, and experimented with, cheaper wheats from Argentina, Australia, and the Danube Basin. The door was slowly opening to the worlds weaker wheats, and it was slowly closing on Canadas one-time advantage. In fact, that years bumper crop prompted UK bakers to make procedural changes in their baking practices, which allowed for more permanent use of weaker wheat. Robert Newton reported that, during his visit, Scottish authorities promoted competitions among bakers to develop and perfect the short process, an abbreviated fermentation, in which strong Canadian wheat performed very poorly. Any move to a shorter process meant Canadas strong wheat was even less desirable. Canadians hoped to deter British bakers from adopting this trend at all reasonable cost, but they resisted to no avail. Even changes in British labour laws, resulting in an eight-hour workday,75 fuelled the move to adapt a new (short) fermentation process. British bakers appear to have welcomed these changes: Shorter fermentation times helped them adapt to labour laws with ease, and, perhaps more importantly, made it possible for them to use weaker, therefore cheaper, wheat than that produced in Canada. Insofar as its official implementation was concerned, then, protein grading was stillborn. Understating the case, Robert Newton urged that the times were particularly inauspicious for launching a scheme of marketing this wheat [Canadian wheat] by protein content. But those brightly coloured protein patches mapped so carefully by Birchard, to say nothing of the baking tests confirming their accuracy, reflected a much deeper impulse for rationalization and standardization. Even if high protein values were not necessarily required under mechanized conditions, surely British buyers would always need to know that export
crop year. Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Handbook of Agricultural Statistics: Part I Field Crops (Ottawa: Queens Printer, 1959), 14. Protein levels, meanwhile, for No. 1 Northern wheat in 1927 and 1928 were 12 and 12.8 per cent respectively significantly below the ten-year mean of 14.4 per cent. John Ansel Anderson et al., Variations in the Protein Content of Western Canadian Wheat, 19271938, Bulletin 4 (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1943). 75 See Rodney Lowe, Adjusting to Democracy: The Role of the Ministry of Labour in British Politics, 19161939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 747 cargoes contained consistent, uniform protein values. The investigations into protein grading left the prevailing impression that an inability to ensure uniformity according to the changing needs of flour and bread production was tantamount to self-destruction in the export wheat business.76 Pursuant to this new vision of Canadian wheat and its consumption abroad, another, cognate strategy emerged. New powers were granted to an existing committee, the Western Grain Standards Committee, which, by amendment to the Canada Grain Act, met twice annually to set final grade standards within the acts tolerance ranges (narrowing the acceptable range for each grade during each and every season). Furthermore, in an effort to bring the Grain Research Laboratory and its work into closer, more immediate contact with regulatory decision-making under the CGA, the committee was not to take any final decisions on wheat samples until the chief chemist of the Board or his assistant has reported on their milling and baking value.77 Thenceforth, a committee met twice annually (figure 5) to consider the volume, crumb structure, and overall external appearance of loaves from the current years crop before setting upper and lower grade limits.
CONCLUSION

Historian James OConnor suggests, Everything depends on everything else should be as much a truism in history as it is in ecology.78 The case of prairie wheat, protein, and good bread bears this out in a way that makes
76 A three-nation race among the United States, Canada, and Australia reached a feverish pitch in the early 1930s. Australia convened two separate but related royal commissions: one on bulk handling and one on wheat, flour and bread industries. Western Australia, Royal Commission on the Bulk Handling of Wheat, Report of the Western Australia Royal Commission on the Bulk Handling of Wheat, 1935; Australia, Royal Commission on the Wheat, Flour and Bread Industries, Royal Commission on the Wheat, Flour and Bread Industries, Second Report, 1934. The USDA assessed the US competitive position in US Bureau of Agricultural Economics, The Milling and Baking Qualities of World Wheats, USDA technical bulletin no. 197, 1929. From the USDA report, it would seem that Argentina was losing ground, unable to segregate wheat of different classes, let alone that of different varieties and protein levels. Argentina investigated this problem a few years later: Argentine Republic, Comision nacional de granos y elevadores, Industrial Qualities of Argentine Wheat Compared with Canadian and United States Wheats, 1937. 77 An Act to Amend the Canada Grain Act, 1920, George V, chap. 9, 26. This was a highly symbolic move, linking for the first time a scientific laboratory with the BGCs grading procedure, and codifying that relationship in law. 78 James OConnor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New York: Guilford Press, 1998), 65.

748 The Canadian Historical Review

FIGURE 5: The Western Grain Standards Committee. Note the bread loaves displayed for committee members careful inspection Source: Photos of the Grain Research Laboratory, item 334, box 3, LAC (Winnipeg)

more than a convenient metaphor out of ecologys web. In this case the web of historical activity and that of ecology are equally and mutually significant. Thus, in assessing what we learn from this contrapuntal reading of good bread and environment we can feel comfortable in extending our gaze beyond the particulars of the protein-grading debate itself. For one thing, use of the term wheat economy homogenizes discussion on a biochemical phenomenon that was anything but homogenous, even after grades were assigned. This is hardly a nitpicking point. It mattered that the vast majority of Canadas wheat was of one class (as opposed to several grown in the United States) and was, at least initially, uniquely

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 749 high in protein content. This subtle but critical difference influenced the terms of political debate and invited different cultural visions of bread consumption. It also demanded constant attention to grading technology and presented different opportunities for capital accumulation. Critics of grading technologies, or lack thereof, in the 1920s called for scientific measurement and quantitative expression of wheat quality a scheme that all but assured producers complete reliance on expertise and technology to which they had little direct access. While such a call both reflected and anticipated broader impulses for standardization and quantification, it is not to be understood as a putatively universal, much less pre-critical, appeal to value of numbers per se. Indeed, this particular demand for reprieve from this particular form of capital domination (socio-ecological projects, to adopt David Harveys term79) is explicable only through an understanding of an atmospheric gas (nitrogen) hovering over every acre of the Prairies, but available for plant growth to different degrees across the region. Here the call for explicitly set, measurable, and quantifiable grading criteria made sense to certain farmers. Thanks to a modicum of shared conceptual terrain, it also made sense to state officials who initiated proceedings to investigate the plausibility of grading wheat by its protein content. Pressure for fairer treatment of farmers was a factor, certainly, in the Liberals willingness to send the issue to committee, but the move was anything but perfunctory. The real impetus lay in the specific language of scientific measurement and quantification used by people like John Millar. An understanding of the social, technological, and cultural practices of bread-eating people, and the perceived inevitability of mechanical processes, bore heavily on these debates. Although such apprehensions were ultimately misleading vis vis the British wheat market, this did not dissuade Canadian state officials from a continued emphasis on and preference for strong wheat. More broadly, the protein-grading debate certainly reveals something about the role of drought, or at least aridity, in the Canadian states administration of the wheat economy. After the 1920s, drought was no longer a disastrous occurrence in the eye of the Canadian state. In fact, the year 1928, with its abundant rainfall nourishing improbably lush wheat fields even into the Pallisers Triangle, was, contextually speaking, one of the great disasters for farmers and the Canadian state alike. Thenceforth, farmers bumper crops were also their worst crops in that high yields threatened to bring price-suppressing surpluses, and also because they were low in protein content. These were two sides of the
79 David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 201.

750 The Canadian Historical Review same environmental coin, which made them doubly undesirable. It was conceivable, under the circumstances, to speak, as one official did in 1935, of the beneficience of drought80 extraordinary language, a core message of which was inscribed in an array of newly deployed strategies and techniques such as the protein map. Taking recourse to the environment permits a fuller understanding of the cultural and political dimensions of protein grading, which, in turn, clears the way for a for a fuller, contextualized reading of what constituted an ecological disaster in the past.81 Underscoring this point, a 1943 GRL report summarizing the first twelve years of protein mapping addressed Palliser and Hinds infamous maps of the Prairie West. The reports author noted that those men had been correct in their assessment of the Wests climatic zones, incorrect (exactly opposite, actually) in their inferences about the zones meaning.82 Contrary to what both had said about the arid regions potential for agriculture, in other words, those zones were in fact ideal for wheat production. This was not the first time that Palliser and Hinds strong (negative) feelings about the arid south and its potential for agriculture had been redressed; but it was, surely, the first time that anyone could conceive of those explorers conclusions as anathema to a good wheat80 Dr T.W. Grindley, chief of the Agricultural Branch, Dominion Bureau of Statistics (address on the Wheat Board Act before the American Agricultural Outlook Conference, 28 Oct.2 Dec. 1935), file C, vol. 41, RG 33, LAC. 81 As mentioned above, this is a reference from Thompson, Forging the Prairie West. Paraphrasing, Thompson argues that the Wests main problem in the 1930s was not ecological disaster but price deflation. He is correct, of course, to the extent that plummeting wheat prices were implicated in emptying farmers bank accounts. On the other hand, the dust that covered them, caked the insides of their lungs, and drifted over their fences, outbuildings, and, most critically, their gardens, must surely have seemed like an ecological disaster. More to the point, there is no intelligent justification for separating the two phenomena (economic downturn and flying dust), not since Donald Worster, not since Dust Bowl. Even if Thompsons provocative point is granted, however, it misses an important conclusion afforded by a more contextually detailed study of culture and environment that the true ecological disaster from the states point of view happened in 1928. I am not suggesting for a moment that bumper crops and desertification may be viewed as consonant ecological categories in any Platonic sense. However, from the viewpoint of environmental history it would be extremely anachronistic to speak unproblematically of drought as a bad thing, and bumper crops as good things worse still to chart farmers economic, social, and political fortunes through them. In other words, many contemporaries would have viewed 1928 as a disastrous year a point that we need to appreciate. 82 J. Ansel Anderson and William J. Eva, Variations in the Protein Content of Western Canadian Wheat, 19271938, Bulletin no. 4 (Ottawa: Kings Printer, 1943), 28.

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 751 growing region. Borrowing Benedict Andersons memorable idea of map-as-logo,83 it is clear that these intensely rationalized and highly public declarations about where the Prairies best wheat grew symbolized Canadas new commitment to identifying, separating, and emphasizing its high-protein wheat to suit the perceived cultural needs of a modern wheat market. If the tidy, Euclidean lines of the Prairies famous land survey announced a liberal-capitalist region wedded to international commodity markets,84 protein maps spoke to the cultural specificity of the very commodities that region would produce, and defined the territorial coordinates of their production. Protein maps pinpointed the geographic locus and ecological context of several related ideas: wheat-eating as grain consumption par excellence; an idealized bread aesthetic; and a persistent belief in the inevitability of mechanization in wheat-eating societies. No less significant are the combined social and agronomic values implicit in these new techniques of statecraft. In declaring the south as the growing region of Canadas best wheat, the state, in effect, institutionalized its preference for producers in the south over those in the north. There may have been nothing inherently personal in this, although the notion of selfish farmers in the northern parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan, with their ... inferior types of wheat, riding to market on the backs of the poor devils in the south certainly suggested a degree of prejudice within administrative circles.85 Thenceforth, federal wheatgrading policy became demonstrably concerned, above all else, with protecting high-protein wheat from its low-protein counterpart in the north. This marked the beginning of an enduring paradox, since northern expansion and development were far from over by the 1930s. Such expansion put would-be wheat producers in the north in constant conflict with the Department of Trade and Commerces expressed preference for southern wheat. Thereafter, such farmers were encouraged either to adopt mixed-farming practices, or accept this official bias against their
83 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 175. 84 See Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Natures Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) for a brief discussion of this in the American context. For a reference to the survey and its role in a liberal nation state, see Ian McKay, The Liberal Order Paradigm: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History, Canadian Historical Review, 81, 4 (December 2000), 617645. 85 John McFarland, general manager of the pool elevators selling agency, who carried on a private and strictly confidential correspondence with R.B. Hanson, Bennetts minister of trade and commerce. File T-1455, vol. 9, RG 80, LAC.

752 The Canadian Historical Review wheat. Conversely, the agronomic sensibilities embodied in the federal Department of Agricultures efforts (through programs such as the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act of 1935) to remove certain semi-arid lands from wheat cultivation encountered resistance in the commercial priorities of the Department of Trade and Commerce, whose authority prevailed in matters of grain grading (figure 6). There was, in other words, a great deal more involved in farmers decisions to flirt with semi-arid regions of the West than Kenneth Norries very helpful but inevitably incomplete economics of risk bearing perspective can ever hope to elucidate on its own.86 None of this simply happened as of 19278. Nor is protein zonation merely an example of cultural-vision-cum-rationalized-scheme for nature. The ideal loaf of bread was defined, we might say, negatively over a long period of time and against a changing geography of wheat production in the Prairies. Moreover, the entire issue came to the surface through producer-class agitation for fairer treatment under the CGA. This agitaxxxxxxxxx

FIGURE 6: Protein content of Western wheat (twelve-year average, 19271938) Source: John Ansel Anderson et al., Variations in the Protein Content of Western Canadian Wheat, 19271938, Board of Grain Commissioners Bulletin No. 4, June 1943 (Ottawa: Kings Printer), 17

86 See Kenneth Norrie, Dry Farming and the Economics of Risk Bearing: The Canadian Prairies, 18701930, Agricultural History 51, no. 1 (January 1977). Also, this complicates the textbook narrative of a state coming to its senses, initiating retraction from those areas most affected by drought. It is not difficult to see how Department of Agriculture initiatives such as the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act and the Prairie Farm Assistance Act could conflict with Department of Trade and Commerce policies favouring dry-region wheat.

On Protein, Prairie Wheat, and Good Bread 753 tion had nothing much to do with bread, except circumstantially. As farmers and their parliamentary representatives inveighed against an unfair, unscientific grading system, they exposed a system that, it was feared, was out of step with the modern grain-growing region it presumed to rationalize, and the cultural peculiarities of the market it proposed to serve. Even as the scheme faltered on exaggerated market imperatives, logistical glitches, and an uncannily timed bumper crop, state officials were convinced that a modern wheat economy demanded new ways of expressing and demonstrating the qualities of Canadian wheat. By studying this process and appreciating the intricacies of humans interacting with the non-human world, we learn that in the Canadian context, bumper crops were unwelcome, drought could be good, and a timehonoured historiographical trope a harvest of bread87 simplifies a process that was anything but simple.

87 Grant MacEwan invokes this trope most explicitly in his Harvest of Bread (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1969).