The proliferation of dietary fads in the past decade is overwhelming: vegetarianism, veganism, locavorism, organic eating, keto, and intermittent fasting among many others. Perhaps no other time in human history have we thought so much about what we eat and why we are eating it. Built into these trendy diets are nutritional, ethical, aesthetic, and even environmental considerations. In a confluence of these considerations, ‘nutritional yeast’ has risen (pun intended) as a dietary substitute and allegedly flavorful ingredient.
Yeast, the microorganism that leavens our bread and defecates out booze, contains all 9 essential amino acids making it a complete protein. Regimes that avoid traditional proteins like meat can use yeast to substitute these nutritional necessities without bending the ethical boundaries of the diet. Yeast, after all, are not animals but single cell eukaryotes that are considered fungi. To eat them, still, they must first be killed through heat pasteurization, otherwise they can propagate inside the body and cause issues ranging in severity from burps to severe allergic reactions. If you’re looking for a complete protein, or just wanting to try yeast, a bag of nutritional yeast might run you $8 dollars at your nearest Whole Foods.
The twenty-teens are not the first time that yeast has received attention and acclaim from those on the cutting edge of human diets. The first time that yeast entered the culinary realm, we were only just beginning to understand what it was. Humans had unknowingly, or at least ignorantly, used yeast to brew beer, make cheese, and ferment vegetables and meats for thousands of years, but it was not until scientists like Van Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur that we realized yeast was an organism itself. These discoveries would come to fruition during a point of great inflection in food supply chains, World War I.
During the war, the burgeoning international trade of the late 19th and early 20th century dissipated to the point that many nations had to look internally for their basic needs. Yeast, an all important ingredient in the bread and beer that western civilization relies on, was a focal point of this supply chain disruption. The story of yeast in World War I was everywhere a story of culinary ingenuity and homegrown innovation.
Before 1860, British excise laws (the kind that control specific privileges and prove particularly lucrative) prevented the manufacture of yeast from distilling. If a baker wanted to buy her yeast locally, she had to go to a brewer. The issue was that brewers yeast imparted a bitter flavor on baked bread and had to be fermented twice as the yeast was not especially vivacious (Wier, Note 8). British bakers took their business elsewhere and bought foreign, more specifically, they bought German.
Once British distillers were allowed to manufacture and sell yeast, the domestic industry took off and performed quite competitively against German and French competitors. At the turn of the century, however, political tensions grew and “increasing imports from France, Belgium, Holland and Germany had created a situation where any disruption to supplies ‘in the event of foreign complications’ would have very serious results for the supply of bread.”(Weir 54) Yeast had become an issue of national security.
To foster an independent yeast industry at home, the British levied tariffs on the importation of foreign yeast. This trend peaked during the war when the government restricted imports from Axis powers and later prohibited them from 1917-1919 (Weir 61). Simultaneously, the government lifted restrictions which allotted time periods for brewing and distillation. Distillers could produce yeast more frequently to provide for the slack in supply. This resulted in an additional 21,000 tons of yeast produced by the largest company, DCL (Weir 55). British distillers consolidated their efforts to provide yeast, and after the war only 3 conglomerated firms remained. By the early 20s, only 1 firm, DCL, was producing yeast from distillers mash in the UK (Weir 55). None of these changes to the notoriously stubborn excise laws of Britain would have been possible if yeast were not a vital food stuff. In fact, in 1917 during the General Strike that resulted in food shortage, the British navy commissioned frigates to transport yeast (Weir, Note 5).
The war not only interrupted supply chains internal to the British Isles, but also between holdings of the empire. This disruption restricted the flow of goods from Britain to Australia. Deprived of things to schmear on their bread, Australians delighted (and still delight) in the invention of vegemite, a spread derived from excess brewer’s yeast, by Dr. Cyril P Callister (Food Magazine) The forced isolation of the Great War highlighted how important yeast was to British life. Laws changed more rapidly than before, distillers reaped unheard of profits, and Australians invented an entirely new food from beer waste.
Germany has long been a prodigious producer of beer. Beer has always been the greatest producer of yeast. This yeast can be used to bake bread and ferment new beer mashes, but there is necessarily waste. During the Great War, Germany was producing 70 million kilograms of surplus yeast annually and Austria-Hungary produced 37 million kilos. All together only 10 million kilograms were being fed back into the bread making process. (Scientific American) The people not only drank more beer than they ate bread, but the beer-making process produced far more yeast than was consumed by bread-making.
By the nineteen-teens, German scientists had recognized the massive yeast waste that their beer and distilling industries were producing. German efficiency called for a solution and a 1910 study showed that pasteurized yeast was suitable as a dried food for livestock. An author writing during the war tells us, “As a result of such investigations the yeast from beer is now dried for feed in twenty-three drying factories in Germany and five in Austria.”
Unlike Britain, where yeast supply chains were cut off from the Continent, Germany still had a surplus of yeast during the war. The war still caused a meat shortage. for Germans Having already proved the nutritional value of yeast to livestock, Germans turned towards their surplus of yeast protein as a potential substitute for meat in human diet. One study delved into this idea, “For four weeks 12 men belonging to the institute received daily at noon 20 grammes of the foodyeast prepared in various dishes, which they ate with hearty appetite and good results. They were in excellent health, gained in weight, and felt fresh and full of energy during the entire experimental period.”
Science had progressed enough to measure the nutritional value of yeast, and the Germans knew it was a decent supplement in times of scarce meat. While the trend of eating beer waste may not have continued beyond the war, the cheap source of protein was used as food in hospitals, charitable institutions, and for soldiers wounded at war (Scientific American).
The most pronounced shortage in the States was neither meat nor yeast. Flour, instead, became scarce as the military needed large amounts of dry goods for rations to deployed soldiers. White bread, the bread and butter of the American diet, had to be phased out because it used more flour than heartier alternatives. ‘War breads’ were cut with substitutes like oats, corn, or buckwheat and were considered patriotic as civilians supported the troops with their domestic sacrifices (NPR).
The nineteen-teens also saw a cultural shift from baking bread in the home to buying bread already made in groceries. These changes in bread consumption resulted in a sharp fall in the domestic demand for yeast (Saturday Evening Post). Fleischmann’s, one of the larger yeast brands, tried to compensate for the loss in sales from active dry yeast and promoted yeast cakes for direct consumption. Many of these advertisements cited the expertise of doctors hailing, interestingly, from Central and Northern Europe, where the Germans were already doing a similar thing (Saturday Evening Post). The advertisements told shoppers that yeast and yeastcakes were salubrious “for ‘run down’ condition,’ ‘pimples and boils,’ and ‘constipation’ (Salt Lake Telegram (Salt Lake City, Utah)September 26, 1920). An era of yeast as health food was launched and Fleischmann’s became a virtual monopoly in yeast.
One story that circulated the country’s newspapers in 1921 imagines a conversation between a grocer and a home-brewer, “Well, people don’t get it just for hooch, you know, sir. Don’t you read the papers? Everybody’s eating it for their health.” “Oh, you’re kidding. Yeast for health. That’s good. I’ll drink to yours when my brew is ready.” Yeast was never divorced from its importance in the production of alcohol, but for a couple of decades Americans would also eat the stuff straight—for their health. Fleischmann’s had sparked a health trend and reaped a windfall that would eventually found The New Yorker magazine.
Catherine Price. “The Healing Power of Compressed Yeast.” Science History Institute, 18 Apr. 2019, www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-healing-power-of-compressed-yeast.
“Dried Beer Yeast as an Article of Food .” Scientific American , 15 May 1915, p. 311.
Hester, Jessica Leigh. “Save The Fleet, Eat Less Wheat: The Patriotic History Of Ditching Bread.” NPR, NPR, 23 Feb. 2016, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/23/466956650/save-the-fleet-eat-less-wheat-the-patriotic-history-of-ditching-bread.
“How to Take Yeast.” Salt Lake Telegram, 26 Sept. 1920.
“Icons .” Food Magazine , Apr. 2007, p. 35.
“Let Them Eat Yeast.” Saturday Evening Post, 1 July 2018, p. 91.
National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Oaklander, Mandy. “Should I Eat Nutritional Yeast?” Time.com, 11 Sept. 2015.
“War Bread Recipes Are All Made.” The Duluth News Tribune , 1917 Sept. 1917.
Weir, Ron. “Science, Marketing and Foreign Competition in the Yeast Trade,1860–1918.” Business History, vol. 33, no. 4, 1991, pp. 43–67., doi:10.1080/00076799100000128.
Willis Lam, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
“Yeast Proves Big Help to Digestion.” Trenton Evening Times, 22 Sept. 1921.
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