Bread Matters: The sorry state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own. Andrew Whitley
between organic agriculture and slow breadmaking. In both, the natural world is not an enemy, to be bludgeoned into submission by an arsenal of chemical weaponry. It is, rather, one element in a web of life that sustains us all. The prudent farmer seeks to understand natural processes and to work with them, appreciating that the world we inhabit tends in the long run to reward perseverance and restraint and to punish exploitation and shortcuts. In organic agriculture the transmission of nutrients – of life – depends on the creation and maintenance of the right conditions in which millions of tiny unseen agents (bacteria, fungi and protozoa) can work most effectively. It is a project requiring patience, observation, humility and some compromise between productivity and permanence. By comparison, the chemical model of fertility has all the subtlety of an intravenous injection: a small number of active ingredients, chosen for their immediate effectiveness, are delivered by the most direct route to the heart of the organism. The equivalent in baking is to rely on additives rather than time to produce the changes in dough that make it fit to eat.
The scientific and agricultural establishments have tried hard to play down any evidence of the superior quality of organic food. Such evidence is not plentiful, largely because not many people are gathering it: less than 2 per cent of the UK’s agricultural research and development budget in 2000 was allocated to organics. But a review of all the available and valid research conducted by the Soil Association in 2001 did conclude that ‘eating organically grown food is likely to improve one’s intake of minerals, vitamin C and antioxidant secondary nutrients while reducing exposure to potentially harmful pesticide residues, nitrates, GMOs and artificial additives used in food processing.’17 Earlier I cited evidence that a combination of organic growing and stone milling significantly increases the available minerals in bread flour and that modern plant breeding has produced varieties that are poorer in certain nutrients than their forebears.
The work of gathering such evidence is painstaking and important. But it does seem to me that for an individual to put off any action on the source of his or her food ingredients until some sort of ‘conclusive’ proof is available is, in fact, deeply irrational. If the notion that healthy soil gives rise to healthy plants (and therefore animals and people) is so threatening to today’s orthodoxy, try turning it on its head: would you expect the kind of depleted, unhealthy soil more typical of intensive agriculture to produce healthy food? If not, then it is simply good sense to seek to produce the healthiest soil possible and to choose food that has grown in it.
For me, it is a matter not of mysticism but of observation that wholeness (which is the precursor, through its ancient variant wholth, of our word health) is the outcome of a process in which many elements interact in complicated and changing patterns. It demonstrably consists of more than the sum of its constituent parts and is diminished by separation, rupture or reduction. Health is not a static condition, but one that requires us to engage intelligently with our surroundings, enlarging our understanding by patient observation and experiment. Collaboration, coexistence, sufficiency – these are the watchwords; not exploitation, domination, maximisation.
The kind of breadmaking that I advocate is in harmony with this ‘organic’ approach – not just in the provenance of the raw materials but in expecting the healthiest outcome from processes in which we temper technological enthusiasm with a little humility.
Take, eat…
There is another reason why it matters what bread we eat. Our choice of bread is symbolic, in the sense that it reflects something more profound than the mere desire to be filled.
I am intrigued by the transformation that is central to leavened bread. The process by which dough changes in response to kneading, expands slowly through yeast fermentation and then is fixed in a new form in the oven has a mysterious quality even to those who know the science. The mystery lies not in the fact that we cannot predict the outcome when we assemble the necessary ingredients, although some variability is always likely in nonindustrial baking. What is, I contend, endlessly mysterious is the fact of the transformation itself. Perhaps when we participate in that transformation, when the result is, reliably, bread, we cannot help feeling a humility born in part of a sense that we are not the only agent in the process.
It is not hard, therefore, to see why bread has acquired symbolic significance. Bread is life, in the sense that without food the body dies. But bread also represents life because it is the result of an indefinitely renewable cycle involving the birth, reproduction and death of the organisms within it (yeasts, bacteria, etc).
Much of the symbolism around bread involves sharing. From the derivation of our word ‘companion’ (someone with whom we share bread) to the words in the Christian Eucharist, the material simplicity of bread as food is constantly suggestive of its involvement in friendship, hope and transformation.
What can we do?
So it does matter what bread we eat. But how do we get hold of the good stuff? And what is the good stuff?
To ‘get the bread right’, in David Scott’s phrase, requires baking methods using flours with plenty of their original goodness left in and fermentation over periods long enough to make as many nutrients as possible available to the consumer. And the bread must taste great, too.
Clearly the origin of the raw materials comes into it, but the most important questions to ask when choosing bread are:
Has the dough been fermented for long enough?
Have any additives been used?
How much yeast has been used?
Does it contain any added enzymes?
The answers to these questions (if you can get them out of the manufacturer) will largely determine whether the bread is industrial or artisan, made quickly with chemicals or slowly with skill. Unfortunately, appearances can be deceptive and labels opaque, so some detective work may be required. But some simple tests can be applied. For example, if a loaf looks big and airy but tastes insipid and seems curiously unsatisfying, it has probably been engineered more for volume than for integrity; or, if the texture of a loaf does not gradually change as the days pass, if it seems to stay uniformly soft for several days, it has almost certainly got ‘crumb-softening’ enzymes in it.
People are already asking these questions and voting with their feet. If British bread is ever to rise above the status of culinary doormat, we need honesty about ingredients (all of them), clarity about nutrition, and a desire to educate public taste about the relationship between time, flavour and health. To restore trust in bread and reverse its long-term sales decline, the industrial bakers need to clean up their act. Below are some modest suggestions for how to do this, based on the growing body of evidence that the way most modern bread is produced is a nutritional and digestive shambles.
1. All bread additives and enzymes should be labelled in sufficient detail for consumers to be able to tell what they are and where they have come from.
2. No new bakery enzymes should be approved until research establishes whether any of the enzymes currently in use has the same kind of toxic potential as was recently identified in transglutaminase.
3. Much more research should be conducted to compare the digestibility and nutrient availability of fast-made and long-fermented breads.
4. Roller-mills should use all the constituents of the wheat grain in their reconstituted wholemeal flour or should indicate clearly what has been removed and why.
5. Roller-milling procedures should be adapted to produce white and other low extraction-rate flours with at least as high a nutrient profile as stone-milled flours with the same extraction rate.
6. Baseline standards of important micronutrients should be established for wheat (and other cereal) breeding programmes, with the aim of gradually restoring (and in time exceeding) levels found in older varieties. Breeding (and farming) methods should also aim to produce grain with as little of the harmful gliadin protein as possible.
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