May 06, 2004

• 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. "They're coming to get you, Barbara..." When Good Bread Goes Bad.
• [ this is good ]
• I've been hoping for years that someone would write a book about supermarket food, and how it gets from the producer to the consumer. Felicity Lawrence's book is exactly what I've been looking for, and I've pre-ordered a copy from Amazon. The extract on pre-packaged salad was a real eye-opener for me. In fairness, however, I have to say that the quality of British supermarket bread has improved greatly in the last twenty years. True, bog-standard white sliced is still as disgusting as ever; but it is much easier to buy decent wholemeal or wholewheat bread, as long as you are willing to pay extra for it. And there has been a change in consumer attitudes, as well. The traditional assumption that white bread was better than brown bread (an idea that goes back to the nineteenth century, when white bread was more expensive) was still alive and well in the 1970s, and the demand for wholemeal bread was regarded as rather cranky and eccentric. Now, the health benefits of wholemeal flour are much more widely understood. (This being Britain, of course it's expressed in class terms. White sliced bread has a working-class brand image, wholemeal bread has an aspirational middle-class brand image, and is packaged and priced accordingly.) ("For centuries the working man envied the white bread of the privileged. Now he may very soon grow to envy them their brown wholewheat bread." Elizabeth David, in 1977.) And lo, so it came to pass, even as the Blessed Elizabeth had prophesied. The real issue (as Felicity Lawrence acknowledges at the end of this article) is not the quality of supermarket bread, but the way that it's priced below cost, with the aim of driving small independent bakeries out of business.
• ...not just flour, yeast and water anymore.... But woz it ever really just those ingredients?
• While I was buying OJ the other day, my wife commented on how awful OJ with Calcium tastes. We talked about how they probably used some other food source -- like shellfish shells -- and blended it into the juice. It turns out we were wrong -- a call to Tropicana reveals the calcium comes from limestone (whether this is more or less palatable is up in the air) -- but it got us wondering how much of what we eat is really what we expect -- even things as simple as produce get processed in unexpected ways. I find myself now wondering regularly what's removed or added as part of "processing", and what the company does with what gets removed. I suspect that there's a "rind-to-core" philosophy for just about every food manufacturer, where everything that can be extracted from, e.g. orange juice is extracted, up to the point where it would legally no longer be considered orange juice.
• mmmmmm, breeeeeeaaaaaadddddd.....
• I've been baking my own for some time now. It's so ridiculously easy, really! And enjoyable, and fantastic tasting! A thick end slice just out of the oven with a slathering of butter......*salivates*
• Thanks for the links everyone. I may never eat again after reading this post and the tapeworm thread.