Bread rising

Campaign backs 'real' baking, exposes factory failings

Good bread needs to be at the centre of our tables again, says organic baker, teacher and campaigner Andrew Whitley. So get ready for a nationwide Real Bread Campaign, due to launch later this year.

Whitley, who founded the pioneering Village Bakery in the 1970s and now runs breadmaking and baking courses from his home in the Lake District, is working on the campaign with UK food and farming charity Sustain. It aims to inform people about where to buy real bread, put them in contact with the country’s best organic wheat farmers and millers, and encourage them to share recipes and even sourdough starter cultures. (These can be made from water and flour and are used instead of yeast in certain breads. People use the same ones for years; in fact Whitley still uses one that he brought back from a Russian bakery 18 years ago.)

Top of Whitley’s list of concerns about factory-made bread is the speed at which it is made, leading to many ‘unnatural’ shortcuts – the worst of which, he says, is what he calls “the big secret of modern baking: enzymes”. Derived from various sources – animal, vegetable, fungal, microbial – these are added to bread to make it lighter, softer and, above all, to give it that all-important longer shelf-life. “We are eating things that in the entire history of Homo sapiens we have never eaten,” says Whitley. “At best this is an experiment, but it’s not an honest experiment…”, especially since the labelling on bread packets is “misleading and inadequate”. Enzymes, for example, do not need to be labelled at all since they are treated simply as processing aids.  – Giovanna Dunmall

24 June 2008

Giovanna Dunmall