CHARLOTTE, N.C. — What is it about white bread?

Remember when you were 8 and you rolled a piece between your fingers, rolled and rolled until it came together in a sticky little ball? If your hands were dirty — and what 8-year-old doesn’t have dirty hands — the ball of bread got dirty, too, a dingy gray, but you ate it anyway.

It was moist and sweet, so starchy it stuck to your teeth and you had to wrestle it away with your tongue, sometimes with your fingers.

Maybe you rolled up even tinier wads of white bread, fit them into the ends of straws and, when the teacher turned her back, blew the spitballs at the ceiling where they stayed, little white polka dots, until they dried and dropped to the floor for the janitor to sweep away.

Ever try doing that with whole wheat? Forget about it.

Nutritionists say we shouldn’t eat white bread. Empty calories. Apparently, not a lot of people in Charlotte, N.C., listen to nutritionists. Thirty years after the whole-grain revolution, after all the research that says whole wheat is better, six of every 10 people here still eat their bread white. It’s a favorite throughout most of America and beyond.

The French eat baguettes; the Italians, ciabatta; the Portuguese, sweet bread. The Greeks call theirs psomi. Only in America is our favorite bread a disparaging term for our culture. Only in America is the white bread as bland as the phrase.

Take a bite. Feel the texture on your tongue, soft and satiny, as sensual as cotton candy. A burst of sweetness, and then — poof! — the flavor is gone.

A kernel of wheat has a tough outer husk called bran and, inside, a white floury endosperm and a tiny germ that would sprout if you planted it. Grind them together and you’ve got whole wheat flour (with all those chunky pieces). To get white bread, you have to separate the flour from the bran and the wheat germ.

Some 10,000 years ago, our ancestors made the first bread, a crude unleavened whole wheat flatbread made from flour and water. Like a tortilla. Around 3000 B.C., Egyptians added yeast to the dough.

Over the next few thousand years, bakers experimented with making finer white breads. After millers crushed the grain, they ground it through sieves, smaller and smaller, to extract the white flour. Because white flour requires more work, in the 18th century white bread sold for as much as 10 times the price of whole wheat and was a delicacy of the well-to-do.

The color of bread indicated a person’s social status. The lighter the bread, the higher the status. Everybody wanted white bread and what it signified, but few could afford it.

Then came the Industrial Revolution and, by the 20th century, even the poor could afford white bread. They didn’t realize the brown bread they now shunned was better for them. White flour loses vitamins and minerals and fiber in the refining process.

When military doctors during World War II discovered health problems in men and women enlisting, the government intervened. It required bakers to enrich white bread to help prevent beriberi (a lack of thiamin), pellagra (a lack of niacin) and anemia (a lack of iron).

What they took out in the refining process, they had to put back in. Remember Wonder Bread’s slogan? “Helps build strong bodies 12 ways.” In 1998, the government also required folic acid to help prevent birth defects.

Even the whole-grain movement of the 1970s didn’t convert most people. Though Americans today eat less white bread than they did in the 1960s, they still eat more white than whole wheat. It usually costs less.

Now the wealthier indulge in whole grain.

Peter Reinhart, a chef at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte and an expert on baking, thinks he knows why we love white bread: We can’t help ourselves. It’s the way we’re hard-wired.

“Our palates crave sweet and salty,” he said. “Whole grain doesn’t taste as good because it has bran and wheat germ and those aren’t flavors our palates crave.

“Basically, we like white bread because it’s sweet.”

He compares white bread to cheap wine. When you add sugar to grapes or to flour to speed up the fermentation process, he says, you get the same thing:

“A quick flavor burst, and then it fades.”