The shocking truth about bread

Flour, yeast, water and salt - a traditional loaf needs only four ingredients. So why are calcium propionate, amylase, chlorine dioxide and L-cysteine hydrochloride now crammed into our daily bread? Andrew Whitely, Britain's leading organic baker, reveals how our staple foodstuff was transformed into an industrial triumph, but a nutritional and culinary disaster.

In his book Andrew says "British bread is a nutritional, culinary, social and environmental mess - made from aggressively hybridised wheat that is grown in soils of diminishing natural fertility, sprayed with toxins to counter pests and diseases, milled in a way that robs it of the best part of its nutrients, fortified with just two minerals and two vitamins in a vain attempt to make good the damage, and made into bread using a cocktail of functional additives and a super-fast fermentation (based on greatly increased amounts of yeast), which inhibits assimilation of some of the remaining nutrients while causing digestive discomfort to many consumers."

Andrew Whitley writes with eye-opening clarity about the state of our industrial bread and the evolution over the last 50 years or so from nutrionally balanced and tasty bread to the industrial gloop that we mostly consume today. He highlights particularly the Chorleywood process (coincidentally the nearest town to where I live!) as the bread manufacturers route to increased effeciency and profitablity to the detriment of the British consumer.

Its a shocking idictment and one that convinved the Real Food Festival to get behind the Real Bread Campaign.

As well as a summary of the ills of current baking, the book is also an invaluable guide to baking your own bread and has tempted me into a new world where kneading your own food into life has become an regular and invaluable therapy that just happens to give immense pleasure in its consumption.

As Andrew himself says "One of the reasons breadmaking is so satisfying is that it provides a balance between variation and repetition. The human body seems to need both the stimulation of different tasks and the mental relaxation produced by rhythmic repetition. Hand breadmaking has it all."

Buy it here