Our daily bread

Do you know how the bread you eat having picked it up from the supermarket is made and what the market distortions that buying it helps to embed? Read this article and you will.

If you've read others of my postings you will have realised that I don't eat meat. I'll now go on to confess some interest in what someone has called 'the politics of food production'; not unnaturally, though in this case my interest goes back to reading Ron Sider's book "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger" at the end of the '70's and in the early '80's working in a wholefood shop [and the fact that it was 'wholefood' not 'healthfood' was a signal of some ideological commitment in itself]. anyway, with that background perhaps it is not strange that the article referenced above should have attracted my attention.

Certainly one of the things that reading it does is make me a bit more determined to get the bread-maker out again and re-find the recipes. A few things in the article surprised me: that the milling for much shop-bought bread [including the baked on site stuff by the look of it] is such that any nutrients are destroyed and the process of cracking open all the starch may be responsible for gluten allergies rising.

"It's the fermentation time that makes wheat digestible. When we made bread that had been given 36 to 48 hours to ferment, it did not cause a reaction in people who suffer from gluten allergies. We know we also have many more yeast-related illnesses today than in the past. We have factories turning wheat into its constituent parts - pure starch, pure powdered gluten, [p]ure gluten is like chewing gum: they add it to give the flour enough strength to survive the factory process."

Another interesting fact is that "Year on year since the introduction of the Chorleywood process, bread consumption has declined. At the end of it, the bread just isn't nice any more." Certainly explains why me and my family really go for the freshly baked stuff when I make it whereas the other stuff is, well, ... not really sought after [thought the kids like the taste of white better than wholemeal -can't get my head round that].

The issues here really that the cheap factory produced bread isn't particularly good for us. The stuff that is good for us is premium priced. A proactive approach to national health says that this kind of issue needs to be addressed. The problem is how to do so without seeming to deprive people of cheap bread ...