Authors: Andrew Whitley
Bread Matters (6 page)
To my way of thinking, there is a deep sympathy 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.’
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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 ‘com
pan
ion’ (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.
The aim of these measures is simple: to make all bread (white, wholemeal and in between) as good as it can be. If the milling and baking industries adopted them, they would no longer need to hide behind obscure labelling, devious marketing and defensive public relations.
For the consumer not prepared to wait for this happy day, there are two options: seek out an artisan baker or bake your own bread.
A world away from Chorleywood, in villages and industrial estates, farm shops, delis and food halls, selling at farmers’ markets or on the internet, a new breed of artisan bakers is using skill not scale, time not trickery, to reach an increasing number of customers attracted by the openness and integrity of real baking. Here are no additives, enzymes and high-speed doughs – just good ingredients, often organic and local, transformed with patience and effort into loaves full of life.
Although the number of new artisan bakeries has grown significantly in the past ten years, they still account for only a tiny percentage of British bread. But I sense a growing interest in ‘slow’ bread, both from consumers and from the steadily increasing numbers of people who want to learn real baking. Even as the supermarkets’ in-store ‘bakeries’ (many of which simply reheat bread made elsewhere) struggle to retain staff, my ‘Baking for a Living’ courses are over-subscribed, often by people drawn to bread and fermentation from comfortable but unfulfilling professional careers. Home bakers, whether they use traditional methods or bread machines, like to decide for themselves what goes into their bread and how it is made. If you are one of them, or would like to be, what follows will tell you all you need to know to do it well.
‘Making bread strikes a mysteriously prehistoric chord somewhere inside us…alongside the mental satisfaction, you discover new and different gastronomic pleasures that enrich you and those around you.’
LIONEL POILÂNE,
Guide de l’amateur de pain
(Editions Robert Laffont, 1981)
Time to choose
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.
There are some signs of a renaissance of small-scale artisan baking. However, the whole ‘craft’ bakery sector accounts for only 6 per cent of UK bread so, unless something changes, most people will have to put up with bread from the industrial plant bakers or the supermarket in-store bakeries for a long time to come, perhaps for ever.
The concentration of commercial power into ever bigger corporate units is often presented as being necessary to keep prices down and enlarge consumer choice. And on the face of it, the consumer has never been offered so many choices before. Scores of brands and hundreds of ranges compete for shelf space and seem to cater for every conceivable preference. But are these real choices?
The world’s seeds and plant breeding programmes are dominated by a handful of global corporations, as is the trade in key food commodities. Four supermarket chains account for the majority of retail sales in the UK. Yes, these companies compete against one another. But they do so from within a single monolithic view of how the world should feed itself. Standardisation in the name of ‘efficiency’ and cost reduction has led to increasing dependence on just a few varieties of key crops and methods of processing. Over 80 per cent of British bread is made by the ultra-fast, additive-dependent Chorleywood Bread Process. Much of the rest, particularly in the supermarkets’ in-store bakeries, uses a similar range of chemical and enzyme additives in the process known as activated dough development. For most consumers, ‘choice’ between breads is meaningless because they are all made in essentially the same way.
Meanwhile, advertising keeps alive the illusion of choice. It emphasises minor differences between brands or varieties and keeps very quiet indeed about what really goes into, or is left out of, our daily bread.
Not surprisingly, disappointment with the bland character of overprocessed food is fuelling a growing outrage at the food industry’s lack of transparency and cynical exploitation of farmers, process workers and consumers. People are realising that the undoubted convenience of processed food comes at the expense of any sense of control over our most basic nourishment. If the food industry won’t tell us what is really in our food, how can we make sensible choices, let alone feel that we are doing the right thing for the health of ourselves and our families?
It is time to take matters into our own hands. One way of fighting back is to refuse to buy foods produced in ways we find unacceptable. Making bread at home enables us to take control of a significant part of our diet by choosing exactly what goes into it. But if this control is to be real, we must first define what wholesome, nutritious and digestible bread really is. Simply to imitate commercial loaves is to accept the industrial food agenda.
My aim is to show that making good bread is not difficult.
