Baking powder is a chemical leavening shortcut as revolutionary as the discovery of yeast fermentation that created leavened bread in the Fertile Crescent approximately six thousand years ago. Chemical additives in food are routine in the twenty-first century, but they were new in the nineteenth. Baking powder was one of the first products that broke down the dam for the chemical flood in foods. Feeding a particularly American need for speed, baking powder created new fast foods such as baking powder biscuits, cookies, and quick breads. Baking powder made cakes, pancakes, waffles, doughnuts, crullers, and muffins easier to prepare, cheaper, and shortened their cooking time radically. Much of America’s global culinary hegemony is related to baking powder through multinational businesses such as McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Denny’s, The International House of Pancakes, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Starbucks.<br/>The Baking Powder Wars are the Hundred Years’ War of business. This Hobbesian struggle for Darwinian survival of the fittest was a series of wars: scientific, advertising, trade, legislative, judicial. They were fought among companies with the same chemical formula, among companies with different formulas, between government agencies, in the legislature of almost every state and territory in the United States, in the United States Congress, within federal agencies, and between federal agencies and baking powder businesses. There were wars among female consumers loyal to different brands, in cookbooks, and among women in the new field of home economics. The Baking Powder Wars reached to the United States Supreme Court, to the White House, and into kitchens worldwide. Baking powder even caused the downfall of the top chemist in the United States at the time, Harvey Washington Wiley.

Baking powder wars: A history of chemical leavening

254th National Meeting (2017)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.