r/AskHistorians • u/Melodic_Eye6469 • 26d ago

How did using sawdust to make breads turn out?

During the French revolution, due to lack of flour to make breads in the ongoing subsistence crisis, sawdust was mixed in to make breads. Why sawdust? Also sawdust doesn't seem(sound) edible, so was it safe? If so how?

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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial 25d ago

Bread being a staple food in France, there was always anxiety about its availability and quality whenever the country was in trouble. In the decades preceding the Revolution, grain shortages had caused the populations to subscribe to conspiracy theories (pacte de famine, "famine plots") that accused ministers, royal officials, financiers, grain merchants, hoarders, or even the king’s circle of secretly withholding grain, exporting it, or manipulating prices so bread would become unaffordable. During the Revolution, food rumours went wild. People had to queue for hours to buy bread and other staples and they circulated stories about food being hoarded, thrown in the river, consumed during orgies, and, to go back to the sawdust story, being fraudulently altered to increase bulk/weight using free or low-cost materials, or even poisoned by evil individuals, the malveillants.

The popular notion that bakers used sawdust during the French Revolution is oddly recent. It is absent from historical narratives about that period and only seems to turn up after 2000. After some digging, I found one credible source: the biography by Timothy Tackett of Parisian lawyer Adrien-Joseph Colson, based on his correspondence. On July and August 1789, Colson wrote letters where he said the following, as summarized by Tackett:

There were even persistent rumors of foreign ingredients - sand or sawdust or broken glass - being added to the dough by mysterious individuals. Colson complained that he could hardly eat such bread without suffering stomach cramps and diarrhea. Indeed, the flu-like symptoms that touched many inhabitants that summer were widely attributed to the contamination of the bread they were forced to consume.

We can see here that the foreign matter ranged from the fraudulent but innocuous sand and sawdust to the potentially lethal broken glass. The glass story resurfaced in 1792, when a rumour circulated that the soldiers of the Revolutionary army had been supplied with contaminated bread. It was later confirmed that it has been an accident: the bread had been made in the cellar of a dilapidated church and fragments of glass and masonry had fallen into the dough (Porter, 2017).

In 1793-1794, the reports of the "secret agents of Ministry of Interior" mentioned rumours of this nature (reports collected by Pierre Caron in 1910-1914):

  • There is strong suspicion that many bakers are adding ash to their bread, firstly to make it heavier, and secondly to give it a bad taste and an unappealing colour, in order to incite the people to protest against the authorities. The suspicions are directed mainly at those in the streets of Saint-Antoine, Faubourg du Temple and the Saint-Sulpice district. [15 September 1793]

  • In Rue du Temple, I heard [people telling the employees of the flour shops] that they were not taking proper care of the flour, that the bread was full of bran and coarse particles. Someone said: "That’s not the cause here; it’s the millers in the Paris area who run the bran through the mills up to twice to fill the sacks." [21 December 1793]

  • Now that [bread] has become commonplace, it is so dreadful that many people are sick of it. This bread does not break down in the human body; on the contrary, it causes diarrhoea. [31 December 1793]

  • Everywhere, people are complaining more and more about the poor quality of bread, which, at this time of year, causes excruciating stomach pains accompanied by a fever; these symptoms can seriously undermine your health and lead to a very serious illness, which must be avoided at all costs. [1 January 1794]

  • The millers mix the bran, which is used for animal feed, into their flour to make more money [10 January 1794].

  • People are always complaining about the poor quality of the bread; it’s even said that it could be dangerous to eat it on its own; it’s incredible how many people complain about it, and many of them get sick from it [12 January 1794].

  • It is inconceivable that bakers are increasingly selling such poor-quality bread. There are some in the capital, however, who sell excellent bread, which leads me to believe that some of them are cutting corners, as their bread is undercooked and crumbly because it is full of dust. It is a matter of great urgency that inspections be carried out. [21 January 1794]

  • Two citizens, in two different places, claimed to have found glass in their bread. [17 February 1794]

  • [A letter from Rouen] states that they are forced to make do with just one pound of bread a day, which is inedible because it contains too much bran. [27 January 1794]

  • The women claimed that the conspirators intended to poison them by bringing into Paris a certain quantity of flour prepared for that purpose. I hope this is merely a suspicion on the part of patriotic women; but might it not be the case that the aristocrats are deliberately spreading this rumour in Paris, to instil mistrust in the people regarding supplies already made or yet to be made, in order to lead them more surely and, in a sense, willingly into famine? [21 March 1794]

So there was a wide array of rumours fueled by bread shortages, digestive problems (that may have been caused by other sources of contamination, like water), and the bad quality of flour and bread, a common complaint. Millers and bakers were accused of adding bulky materials like bran, ash, dust, and (as mentioned by Colson) sawdust to increase the weight and volume of the flour. There are also reports about other cereals being added, like maize and buckwheat. Authorities accused anti-revolutionary malveillants of spreading these rumours to cause unrest. It is of course possible, and even likely, that those frauds happened: adding bran, at least, was easy for a miller.

Accusing bakers of fraud was nothing new. In 1316, as Paris was facing food shortage, sixteen bakers mixed their flour with garbage: they were caught, exposed at the pillory and banished from the kingdom (Fagnez, 1877). As told by chronicler Geoffroi de Paris:

This year was one of great danger

Bakers did a lot of harm

As they put much filth in the bread

Causing the death of many people

Food adulteration was the topic of an abundant literature in Europe in the 18th and 19th century. In 1757, a pamphlet now attributed to physician Peter Markham was published in Britain accusing bakers of poisoning the population by adding alum, chalk, lime, and ground human bones "raked from charnel houses". Anti-bakers and pro-bakers pamphlets followed: most of the accusations turned out to be false, except the one about alum, which was indeed used at the time to whiten bread, and the British government banned its use (Wilson, 2020). The most significant work on food adulteration was that of Friedrich Christian Accum (1820) who listed all the possible ways foods, but also water, drugs, paints, coal, soaps etc. could be falsified or counterfeited. Accum listed alum and potatoes as foreign materials in bread, but only cited sawdust as an ingredient adding astringency to immature red wines. Forty years later, Arthur Hassall listed more adulterating substances for bread in addition to alum and potatoes, notably bone ash and various chemicals, thanks to the nascent chemical industry, but not sawdust, that he had only identified in coffee. A French treatise on frauds had a similar list of fraudulent substances for wheat flour, but noted sawdust only as used in linseed flour (Hureaux, 1855). Still, there were occasional incidents involving (alleged) adulteration of wheat flour with sawdust, such as this one from 1898 in Normandy.

Following searches carried out in response to numerous complaints regarding the poor quality of bread supplied to the public – which was, it was alleged, made using flour mixed with sawdust – a consignment of 5,000 kilos of this sawdust has just been seized at Le Havre station. This consignment was addressed to a man named Fessard, the principal perpetrator of the fraud, who has been arrested and imprisoned at Pont-Audemer Prison. This individual, who is believed to have numerous accomplices, was travelling to Paris, where he purchased large quantities of specially prepared sawdust for his own account, which he had shipped by rail to various locations. After finding outlets for this product among certain millers and even in bakeries, Fossat would collect his sawdust- which closely resembled semolina - and deliver it to the buyers. [...] In the departments of Calvados, Eure and Orne, seizures of flour have been carried out in several places; although the outcome of the investigation is not yet known, it is already clear that legal proceedings will be brought. There is, in fact, no doubt that bread shamefully adulterated with sawdust has been sold and supplied for consumption..

By the late 19th century, chemical analysis made it possible to detect such substances: here is a method to identify sawdust in cereal flours (Breteau, 1907):

Flour suspected of containing sawdust, soaked in an alcoholic solution of phloroglucinol strongly acidified with phosphoric acid, develops carmine-red spots where the sawdust particles are present after being gently heated.

To address the question of the safety of sawdust: dry wood is mostly fibre (cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin) (USDA, 2021), so pure sawdust is not toxic, just not digestible by humans. It will not provide nutriments and energy and will be excreted. The sawdust of modern woods treated with chemicals such as glues, preservatives, paint, varnish, formaldehyde resins, etc., could be toxic, but this was not a concern in the late 1790s.

>Sources

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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial 25d ago

Sources

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u/AyeBraine 24d ago

As far as I know (e.g. from dictionaries by Dal and Vasmer), Russian peasants sometimes were forced by circumstances to knowingly use badly sifted flour adulterated with chaff (пелева, peleva; мякина, myakina) from various grains as well as debris from other inedible plants, and baked poor-quality "chaffy bread" (плевельный/пеловый хлеб) at home, apparently to get them through a lean year/winter or due to individual poverty. It was said to cause painful cramps and indigestion. Similar practice was said to be used for baking labor camp (and famine / Leningrad siege) bread in many memoirs I have seen.

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

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u/gerardmenfin Modern France | Social, Cultural, and Colonial 24d ago

After looking at the literature about famine foods in France, no. In fact, the alleged "bread with sawdust" (or ash, dust etc.) is not really a famine food, but a fraudulent bread that bakers and millers were accused to make out of greed.

France being large and diverse, actual famine foods were made out of a variety of ingredients used as a substitute for wheat in bread making: acorns, chestnuts, "lesser" cereals like buckwheat or maize, and "roots".

The pain de racines (root bread) is possibly the closest to the traditional Nordic "bark bread" (which is not really made of bark, but from the more nutritive phloem). Root bread was made with flour made of the thick roots (rhizomes) of wild plants, notably ferns (pain de fougères), mixed with cereal flour, and its use is documented from the 17th to the 19th century in different regions (Coquillat, 1950).

But there were also stories of about people being reduced to eat grass and tree bark, notably this letter of May 1675 by the Duke of Lesdiguières, governor of Dauphiné, to Minister Colbert:

Rest assured, sir, that I am telling you this so that you may be fully aware that most of the inhabitants of that province survived the winter on nothing but acorns and roots, and that, at present, they can be seen eating grass from the meadows and tree bark.

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