OneAndOneIs2

Take some grapes. Pulp them in a machine and force them through filters to remove everything that isn't juice. Warm it up, chuck in enough yeast to make it a kind of thin slurry. Add a bunch of enzymes to break down the sugars.

An hour later, filter it again to remove all the yeast. Add some alcohol and red food dye.

It's red and it's alcoholic.

Have you just made a fine wine?

No?

But it had the same ingredients as wine! It had a (brief) period of fermentation by yeast! The enzymes and additives only did what the yeast would have done ANYWAY! It's just a quicker, more efficient way of turning grape juice into wine!

Right?

No.

It's obvious to just about anyone that just because you started with the same raw ingredients, you didn't end up with the same end product. Wine is not just grape juice with less sugar and more alcohol. Even somebody (like me) who doesn't drink wine is aware of this.

So why is it that we consider that modern breadmaking produces a loaf no different from a traditional loaf?

Traditional bread took days to make, with both lactobacilli and yeast taking hour after hour to slowly process the raw ingredients and turn the wet flour into a spongy, crusty bread. Modern bread can go from start to finish in two hours. The bubbles in the dough don't come from fermentation, they come from chemical reactions and high-speed mixing.

Yeast is still added, but it's hard to know why. Enzymes and all manner of additives are added, because yeast is too slow to do what's needed in the tiny amount of time it's given to work with.

The flour, which once would have been slowly stone-ground and thus lost the bare minimum of nutritional value, is now put through high-speed milling that rips out massive amounts of Good Stuff.

Because white bread is more popular than brown, the flour is bleached, wiping out yet more of the potential goodness and adding yet more nastiness that wouldn't have been present in a traditional loaf of bread.

Most importantly of all, though, the micro-organisms that used to have days to process the flour and break down many of its contents no longer get any chance. Yeast does a lot more than just produce the gas that makes dough rise. Did you even know that lactobacilli played an important role in traditional breads? Most people don't. Certainly modern breadmakers don't bother with it.

Bread was the "staff of life" for many cultures throughout human history. We're very well adapted to digesting the stuff. In the modern world, suddenly we're having huge problems with it - coeliac disease and gluten intolerance are massively on the increase.

Funnily enough, studies have been done, and many bakers report their own anecdotal evidence, that all these people who can't handle bread actually do just fine when given traditionally-made, slow-fermented loaves such as sourdough.

We don't have a problem with people being unable to digest bread. We have a problem with people being unable to obtain real bread. What we actually get from the shops is bread in the same way that the alcoholic grape juice above was wine.

Why is so little publicity given to this?

Modern food production has one emphasis, and one only: Making food quicker and cheaper. Taste? Nutritional value? Health value?

Not a concern. There's no money in it.

Modern food is a technological triumph, it really is. And it's cheaper, more abundant and more varied than at any other time in human history.

The only problem is, making appetizing crap is so profitable that it's becoming more and more difficult to find stuff that's worth eating.

I've got a science degree and a cast-iron stomach and I still have difficulties sometimes. God only knows how the average man on the street is supposed to work out what he should eat to stay healthy.

Especially with so many morons writing diet books these days.. but that's a rant for another time.