Bread Matters (4 page)

As the price of yeast came down and productivity pressures grew, fermentation times shortened. With the invention of the Chorleywood Bread Process, the goal of ‘instant’ dough became attainable. With new machinery, ingenious chemistry and a terrific blast of (ever so slightly modified) yeast, bread needed no fermentation at all.

It was good for business, of course, and the manufacturer’s costs could be contained or reduced. Everyone could now afford the whitest, softest bread they had ever known, though, curiously, consumption kept on falling.

Research has recently revealed that making yeasted breads quickly may not leave time for important changes to take place. For example, fermenting dough for six hours as opposed to 30 minutes removes around 80 per cent of a potentially carcinogenic substance called acrylamide that is found in bread crusts
¹¹
, and long yeast fermentations conserve the highest levels of B vitamins in dough (48 per cent of vitamin B
₁
is lost in rapidly made white bread)
¹²
.

Freshness

Traditional bakers know that the longer you ferment your dough, the better the bread keeps. Time invested in the making is repaid in the eating. Modern bakers and retailers have destroyed this elegant balance. They have stolen time from the production process, a theft they try to disguise in contradictory ways. In the case of standard sliced and wrapped bread, they use additives to keep the crumb soft (or ‘fresh’, as they would say) for a week or more. With the unwrapped bread, on the other hand, time is distorted in a rather different way.

Supermarkets and their industrial bakery suppliers have robbed ‘freshness’ of all meaning. One loaf, unwrapped and apparently ‘freshly’ baked on the premises, has in fact been made and probably baked elsewhere days or weeks before. Another loaf, baked elsewhere, has been laced with undeclared and unspecified enzymes – a kind of baking Botox – so that its soft, cloying texture remains in an unchanging caricature of freshness, day after depressing day.

To reclaim freshness – word and concept – from the self-serving interests that have hijacked it, two things are necessary: to agree a definition of ‘fresh’ that accords with the best evidence of our senses, and to conquer the unnecessary fear of what happens as freshness wanes. In the case of bread, ‘fresh’ can surely mean only one thing – recently baked (for the first and only time). I have some ideas about enjoying bread as it ages in the final chapter of this book.

So modern baking is schizophrenic about time, now wanting to reduce it to nothing, now trying to extend it indefinitely. And it is also in two minds about its raw materials, torn between the desire to remove things that get in the way and the impulse to add things that will make the bread easier (for machine production), bigger, softer, cheaper, longer lasting or more apparently healthy. Baking technologists just can’t leave well alone. There’s always some functional advantage to be pursued, some marginal value to be prised from dumb nature, as if the human race had never quite mastered this business of bread.

We have evolved an industrial breadmaking system that, in a variety of ways we can no longer ignore, produces bread that more and more people cannot and should not eat. Some would say that the pappy texture and bland flavour of Chorleywood Process bread are reason enough to consign it to the compost heap of food history. However, these qualities are ultimately matters of personal preference. The use of additives, on the other hand, especially those whose provenance or purpose is not apparent to the consumer, raises serious questions of accountability and trust. Above all, the baking industry must respond to the growing body of research that is charting the profound unhealthiness of making bread quickly.

From wheat to finished loaf, industrial baking needs to be reconstructed from first principles, of which the most important is a proper respect for time.

CHAPTER TWO DOES IT REALLY MATTER WHAT BREAD WE EAT?

‘I know that “man cannot live on bread alone”. I say, let us get the bread right.’
DAVID SCOTT
,
Selected Poems
(Bloodaxe, 1998)

Mixed messages

The food industry argument goes like this. Thanks to modern agriculture and technology, we all have more than enough to eat these days; everyone can afford a variety of foods from which they derive reasonable nutrition; if this or that food is less than perfect, it doesn’t make any real difference. We should enjoy the unparalleled choices now open to us and stop criticising the food industry.

According to this view, it doesn’t matter if industrial bread is nutritionally depleted because any missing nutrients are available in other foods. The words ‘in the context of a balanced diet…’ are often used to justify questionable products. The large food processing groups and multiple retailers in the UK give public support to healthy eating policies but only in so far as they are not prevented from marketing pretty much any edible substance they choose. Their general strategy is to avoid discussing the particular nutritional profile of any one product. A healthy diet, they insist, results from a combination of food choices, but don’t blame us if legitimate promotion of our brands results in over-consumption of nutritionally depleted products. That’s down to individual choice. The
balanced
bit of the diet, the message seems to be, can be provided by some other sucker.

Notice how the tune changes, however, when food companies are promoting their special (perhaps a bit more profitable) ranges, all promising ‘wellbeing’ from a ‘lifestyle’ involving ‘healthy eating’. Now the particular, ingredient-specific attributes of this or that product are highlighted: its low-fat, low glycaemic index or high-fibre status, perhaps, or the presence of prebiotics, probiotics or obscure additives that ‘have been linked to heart health’.

Whenever I see an advertisement for a new ‘healthy-eating’ addition to a product range, I itch to ask the obvious question: if all the qualities with which you have so generously endowed this new line are as vital for my health as you imply, why are your ordinary ranges not as good?

So what are they recommending: nutritionally enhanced products or a balanced diet?

The ‘whole diet’ approach to nutrition is useful because it takes account of the variety of foods that people actually consume. It recognises that we do not (and, in my view, should not) see foods solely as bundles of nutrients. After all, food performs many functions additional to mere survival – as a source of comfort, celebration, indulgence and sensual pleasure, for example. But whole diets are composed of individual food types and products and in healthy people the good is balanced with the less good. Limitations of information, money or access mean that some people struggle to achieve this balance. For them, it is crucial that basic foods are as wholesome as possible because they cannot or do not consume the range of foods that contain a satisfactory spectrum of nutrients.

According to the government’s 2002-3 National Food Survey, 99 per cent of UK households eat bread. It forms about 9 per cent (by weight) of the average diet. But low-income families eat more than twice as much white bread and 25 per cent less wholemeal than high-income families. For some people, bread amounts to as much as 20 per cent of their diet. It matters that this bread is good. But the cheapest, most basic British bread, the standard white sliced loaf that accounts for about half of the market, is also the least nutritious. It contains smaller quantities of several important minerals and vitamins than plain wholemeal bread. This leads to another problem. Most people in the UK get enough nutrients, though certain population groups are low in iron and magnesium and almost everyone consumes less fibre than recommended. But the
density
of everyday foods is important: the fewer nutrients a food has in it, the more portions we have to eat to get what our bodies need. Poor-quality basic foods are programmed for over-consumption. Is it any wonder that obesity is on the rise?

The industrial bakers give out very mixed messages. They promote all bread as being healthy. When challenged to explain how loaves whose nutrient profiles differ considerably can be equally good, they say that the public demands cheap white bread and that it is absolutely fine in the context of a balanced diet. They then promote their speciality breads on the basis that they provide the very things that are glaringly absent in the standard stuff.

By emphasising the low cost, convenience and neutral taste of its primary offering – the white sliced loaf – the bread industry has pandered to a public that knows what it likes and is resistant to change. Why would anyone change, if they were constantly assured that all bread, whatever its type and content, is ‘good’?

Who decides?

The baking industry argues that it is embracing the ‘health agenda’ with new, more nutritious products and that a wide choice of breads is now available to everyone. But to make real choices, you have to have enough information and you need to know how to evaluate it. The ingredients list is where you look if you want to know exactly what is in a product. Even if you understand all the terms used on a bread label, you may still be in the dark – for instance, if added enzymes were used to make the bread but are not declared on the label, with details of their origin and effect. By not stating in clear and simple language how their product is made, industrial bakers make it difficult for ordinary people to judge whether their bread is good to eat.

The basis of choice is effectively controlled by the industry. And, in the tart estimate of academic nutritionist Professor Marion Nestle, ‘nutrition becomes a factor in corporate thinking only when it can help sell food’
(Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health,
University of California Press, 2003). There is a long history of industry reluctance to make good the deficiencies of white bread. The millers and bakers fought tooth and nail against the scientific consensus in the 1930s that roller milling had removed so many nutrients from flour that many people, especially the poor, were subsisting on considerably less than was physiologically required. Then, as now, they sidestepped the lamentable quality of their basic product and agreed to ‘fortify’ white flour with a small number of minerals and vitamins derived from synthetic sources.

Fortification has now become ‘nutrification’ – an approach to food described by one apologist as ‘the most rapidly applied, the most flexible, and the most socially acceptable intervention method of changing the intake of nutrients without a vast educational effort and without changing the current food patterns of a given population’. Industry, having fought against it, now loves it because it leaves the structure and direction of food processing untouched. Any new nutritional problems can be solved by recourse to its increasingly sophisticated chemistry set and a whole new commercial opportunity has emerged to ‘add value’ by creating ‘functional foods’.

Adding relatively large amounts of synthetic nutrients to basic foodstuffs is scientifically primitive because it must assume that everyone will eat roughly the same amount of fortified food to ensure the right nutrient intake across the whole population. But what if some people already consume a diet naturally rich in nutrients? Are they to be warned off these new foods in case they unwittingly overdose on something?

There is, in fact, a real risk of over-consumption of individual micronutrients. Marion Nestle estimates that industry-initiated additions of iron to the food supply may well be contributing to haemochromatosis (caused by too much iron), which affects at least a million adult Americans. In the case of folic acid, fortification of all flour (as is done in the USA) can lead to a problem, especially with elderly people, in which excessive intake of folate complicates the diagnosis of vitamin B
₁₂
deficiency. Too much added calcium is implicated in prostate cancer
¹
and a recent study links high intake of both iron and calcium with lung cancer
²
.

The mandatory addition of folic acid to flour has so far been rejected in the UK, but the government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition now wants to see it implemented. The millers are happy to oblige, so long as the government picks up the tab. So we are faced with the unedifying spectacle of a milling industry that removes more than half the folate from wheat asking to be paid to put it back again in synthetic form. Nice work if you can get it.

The baking industry is keen on the principle of nutrification because it opens up rich new seams of product development and added value. Breads are now appearing enriched with extra calcium and iron, oestrogen from soya, omega-3 essential fatty acids from linseed and extra fibre from oats, peas or more exotic sources. Such additional ingredients may be of benefit to some consumers but they constitute only a fraction of the nutrients essential to human health, which can be readily obtained from whole grains, fruits and vegetables. And in any case, I cannot help thinking that the baking industry’s historical, and continuing, investment in low-cost white bread makes it an unconvincing advocate of dietary improvement.

As science has confirmed the dietary importance of whole grains, the baking industry has sought ever more ingenious ways to engineer their benefits into breads that have the same bland flavour and ease of production as standard white bread, though with a healthier margin of profit. A charitable observer might regard this as ‘doing good by stealth’, and there can be no denying that any replacement of missing nutrients is good. It is good, particularly, because by focusing on health, however partially, it acknowledges that your choice of bread does matter.